The Master of Insomnia. Boris A. Novak

and the editors were assigned “shadows,” secret policemen meant to scare us off the task at hand.

      So, standing beside me in the foyer of Kazina Palace one day was a bespectacled and black-bearded poet, nodding with understanding of and support for my commitment to both Tribuna’s politics and my own creative ambitions in poetry. Even today I can vividly remember the gentle, soothing tone of his voice and the confident though not self-aggrandizing things he said. He spoke as a man with both experience and faith, as a man who had followed the “moral imperative” within him as well as the starry sky above.

      I trusted this poet, in short, because I felt I understood him—though he was a generation senior to me. I liked his writing and his many lyrical translations and was impressed by his performances at the numerous informal critical groups that made up literary life.

      His name was Boris A. Novak.

      Novak was then chief editor of Nova Revija. Gathered around this monthly magazine were most, if not all, of the best and brightest in the Slovenian intellectual community. Novak’s leadership coincided with the period of a government crackdown on Nova Revija, which had become a serious thorn in the side of the ruling elite. Despite pressure on him exerted through both informal channels and mass media campaigns of character assassination, Novak never abandoned his commitment to the political ideals of an open and democratic society.

      Novak’s attitude was shaped by his immersion in two cultures and two languages, the byproduct of a childhood spent in the then-capital of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, a Serbo-Croat-speaking city. Novak was born in Belgrade in 1953 and attended elementary school there. His adolescent arrival in Slovenia necessitated a rediscovery of his mother tongue. His family’s urbane tolerance and his father’s past as a high-ranking officer in the Partisan anti-fascist movement during the Second World War are all prominent forces that cemented Novak’s commitment to the universal, if utopian, values of solidarity, equality, and brotherhood.

      SHOW OF SOUND AND MEANING

      No less important, however, Novak never abandoned his commitment to the idiosyncratic aesthetics of sound and meaning, which he propelled to ever more beautiful heights. Novak’s first book of poems, Stihožitje (Still Life with Verses), was published in 1977; its untranslatable neologism of a title metaphorically closing the distance between the term still life and the magic of verse. This was followed by sixteen further collections to date, most of which have enjoyed the approbation of literary critics and the general reading public alike. In addition to these collections, Novak has published an enviably large number of children’s books, puppet and radio plays, and works for the stage. Additionally, Novak assisted in staging numerous plays in the most important theaters in the country, and was employed for several years as a literary adviser at the Slovenian National Theatre.

      In his poetry, Novak often explores the aesthetic potential of traditional verse forms, pursuing the mysterious connection between the sounds and meanings of words. Which is to say that he seeks nothing less than poetry’s true source. His poetic language successfully appropriates everyday words, using them in new combinations and coaxing unrealized possibilities out of them. He thus allows us to see how extending the limits of what is said can broaden the limits of the known. It was for an innovative paraphrase of the Arabian Nights—1001 stih (1001 Verses), a book published in 1983—that the author received the premier literary prize in Slovenia: the Prešeren Award.

      BEARING WITNESS

      After a year-long teaching stint at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, Novak returned home to became president of the Slovenian PEN Center. He led this prestigious organization during the period of escalating conflicts between the republics of the former Yugoslavia, and in the shadow of the increasingly totalitarian ambitions of Slobodan Milošević, who strove to dominate the entire federal entity in the name of all Serbs. This desire for domination eventually led to the eruption of the aforementioned TenDay War in the summer of 1991. Then, with a flick of the dragon’s evil tail, war swept into Croatia as well, and, later, with particular cruelty, into the towns and villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

      Novak quickly organized the Slovenian PEN Center as a key distribution point for all the international assistance (collected at national PEN centers around the world) sent to ease the suffering of writers in besieged Sarajevo. Small wonder, then, that Novak responded to the Balkans wars in a poetic idiom: first in his poetry collection Stihija (Cataclysm, 1991), and later, at the height of his creative career, in Mojster nespe∂nosti (The Master of Insomnia, 1995), which is populated with harrowing images of individual despair in the face of violence. Still, the book exudes an aura of fragile hope, without which its readers might be overwhelmed by apathy and moral indifference. Such moral indifference was a staple in the agendas of many Western governments, a legacy of the brutal realpolitik lodged in European minds since the Munich Agreement of 1938: an earlier episode of the West’s failure to rise to a historical challenge. It seems that only poets who speak in their own name and from their own experience are able to respond to such challenges with both aesthetic validity and ethical integrity. Their ethics are revealed or—to be more precise—contained in their poetics.

      The following anecdote should illuminate the chasm that yawned between Slovenia’s defensive attitude and the militaristic policies of Serbian national mythology. During the brief period in the summer of 1991 when columns of Yugoslav Army tanks were attacking Slovenian towns and villages, Boris A. Novak sent a letter to the Serbian PEN Center in the hope that he would receive verbal support for the legitimacy of Slovenian resistance against aggression. The response of his literary colleagues in Belgrade was the first, though certainly not the last, great disappointment for Novak during his tenure at PEN. “This is war,” came the reply. “During war, people die.” An ethical revolt against just this kind of cynicism was what drove Boris A. Novak, despite his own pain, to work tirelessly to help all of those who, in besieged Sarajevo, could not help themselves.

      Novak understands that hope and fear provide both individual and collective access to a narrative by which “the soul of generation after generation seeks the way.” Hence the necessity for a coherent narrative about the past in order to reach an understanding of the community’s present and future. Yet there are two distinct approaches: that of history and that of poetry. Poetry always tells the story of the specific. Thus it is “more true” than history—that is, more accurate that the story of the nonspecific, of the general.