Šalamun’s work was always pushing the boundaries of what is considered poetry. In an introduction to the poem “Whirl” for The New York Times, Matthew Zapruder explains, “[Šalamun’s] poems are not designed to be interpreted but instead to act upon us, in order to open up in us a little dormant space of weirdness where we can hopefully feel more free.” Therefore, the form of Tomaž is Beckman’s beautiful testament to the impressive originality and imagination of his friend and collaborator. This new form’s greatest achievement may well be the way it dramatizes the inability to extricate the translator’s hand from the work they translate, or the biographer from the subject of the biography. When encountering Tomaž, the attentive reader is constantly aware of Beckman’s presence in terms of selecting what portions of these conversations are worthy of the poem and lineating the prose. In this way, the book complicates ideas of authorship, especially in works of translation.
Despite the awareness of an invisible force molding the text, the true thrill of Tomaž is Beckman’s ability to make the reader feel as though we are talking to Šalamun ourselves in the comfort of his living room. Beckman achieves this effect through the inclusion of features that approximate actual speech. Take, for example, this passage where Šalamun discusses his youth as a prodigious piano player: “I was pushed as somebody / who had really / who had really great.” And then the conversation trails off without him finishing the sentence. The feeling of being in someone’s living room is strengthened through the use of images in the text that make the reader feel as if Šaluman is pulling them out of the conversation at crucial moments to make a point or offer a visual representation of a certain character.
Beckman’s refusal to explain the text, to stabilize it, also adds to the conversational quality of the poem. In another section, Šalamun recounts his first romantic failure:
I was verymy sexual upbringingwas very very slowso basically when we dancedand she said at the endshe was sad
I didn’t understand thenso many years to realize
so then I went to Ljubljana to studyand left my sailing boat behind
At this moment, the reader has yet to encounter a sailboat at all. Beckman manages to capture something true to the conversational experience, jumping around in time and topics, by including the boat as if the reader had already been introduced to its existence when in fact we have not. The experience of reading Tomaž has one grasping at straws, trying to keep up with a mind that is moving quickly through the years of his young life. Time is not linear in this book, but rather imitates the temporality of memory in which a speaker circles back to formative moments and jumps ahead to others.
Politics is a constant throughout the poem, giving the reader a sense of Eastern European geopolitical realities in the 1960s and ’70s. There is Šalamun’s father who “was a leftist / but never a Communist.” There is his mother who was “also a kind of Marxist / half Marxist / a great idealist.” There are his own five days spent in jail after the publication of “Duma ’64.” Like everything else in the book, neither Šalamun nor Beckman slows down to explain these complex histories to the reader, which reinforces the sense of a conversation in which one is never entirely included or excluded.
These political realities are also linguistic realities. We are told that Šalamun’s mother grew up in Italy, and about the politics of language within those borders at the time:
one third of Sloveniahappened to be in Italyand in ItalySlovenianwas a prohibitedlanguage
This sense of borders and political strife clearly informs young Šalamun’s relationship to language. We see embedded in the politics of this region the theatrics of language: its malleability and material reality are on display. In the first poem, Šalamun offers us a philosophy of language:
irresponsible are the trees as they growand what has a word to do with itthe sun doesn’t need it to setnor the sky which is blue and nothing else
The poem appears on the very first page of the book, informing the rest of it quite impactfully. It places both authors in a double bind, showing the absurdity of language and its inherent impotence, but also its centrality as our only hope for communication, explanation, and understanding.
Language has a quality of pure happenstance in this collection. The young Šalamun, lost and without purpose, has a friend who becomes a poet, and through his writing “became something / in between human and god.” His own writing came after, and according to him, “really dropped / like stones / from the sky.” The act of composing poetry returned him to a sense of possibility, to the feeling of “something important / as I had / one time / as a child.” Here, Šalamun captures something essential about the feeling of being a young, undisciplined poet:
it was very dramatic you knowbecause I couldn’t startI could only hopeand when it cameit came as astrong earthquake
In Šalamun’s early work, at least through his retelling, there was little work. Rather, he waited for inspiration to channel into a new poem.
The scope of the book continues into his later writing years and time spent at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In a favorite passage of mine, Šalamun recounts meeting John Ashbury and having lunch a couple of times in 1973. Years later, the two are reintroduced, and Ashbury says, “with his angelic eyes . . . I don’t recall / devastated / devastated.” The use of repetition in this short passage perfectly evokes the feeling of being snubbed or forgotten. As a reader, one finishes the book with a strong sense of empathy and familiarity with Šalamun, which is expertly crafted by Beckman’s editing.
It is appreciated that, despite the evident intimacy between Beckman and Šalamun, the former never sanitizes the latter. There is a certain whiff of misogyny to his speech. Women are often considered fleetingly as muses and limited to their romantic possibilities. They frequently fit the sexist trope of wanting to tie down the migratory Šalamun to a sedentary life centered around family, as evidenced when he says he “barely escaped two different women.” Rather than omit or cleanse these passages, Beckman allows Šalamun to speak from beyond the grave in all of his human complexity.
In the note that concludes the text, Beckman writes, “the practice of this poem throughout, like translating, was so much about listening, listening and following. It was a kind of getting closer and the sharing of it now feels something like introducing a friend to another.” The reader does walk away with the sense of having been introduced to Šalamun in a new way, through his language as shaped by Beckman. I felt warmed by the experience, as though I had spent a night with the famous poet in his living room in front of a fire, having the privilege of encountering his young life.
