Slovene Author in Focus 2024: Dušan Šarotar

Biography

“Perhaps the human model of intelligence has finally been surpassed, but will we at least be left with a soul?”

(Intelligence, Perception, Soul, Vestnik, 2024)

Dušan Šarotar is an author, poet, translator, screenwriter and photographer who was born in 1968 in Murska Sobota. He has written more than 20 books and has received several national and international awards. His works deal with the fate of the Jewish community and the Holocaust in Murska Sobota and the wider Prekmurje region. Memory, language, grief and the human soul lie at the centre of his art, which he approaches with poetic language and characteristic slowness. His prose is imbued with descriptions of nature, the city and a unique atmosphere, which he expresses in an individual poetic language written in long, flowing sentences.

Language Is the Sea Between Our Solitudes

Prepared by Diana Pungeršič

Whispers

‘Never will I be able to convey the eternal silence, the true, windless calm, which lies at the bottom of the dead sea; nor will I be able to conjure forth the annihilating storm in which the world was created. I will always only whisper, like the plain that is neither sea nor land, which grows within me.’ (Občutek za veter, 2004 – A Feeling for the Wind)[1]

With his atmospheric way of writing, open to transcendence, Dušan Šarotar (1968) is one of the most original representatives of contemporary Slovenian literature. In his vast oeuvre, which includes – along with many screenplays for documentary portraits of artists and children’s books – ten books of prose and three collections of poetry, this prose writer, poet, and screenwriter subtly charts an unseen, unheard and unmentioned world, aware that this world speaks even if it is submerged in silence. He belongs among the authors who write the same book all their lives, regardless of their genre label, because all his verbal creation stems from the same poetic feeling,

‘it was poetry and nothing else that drew me into writing, and nothing else keeps me here; all that remains to me is the thought of the poem I still want to write; with every poem there is more of me. If I didn’t write, I would not be the person I am.’ (Ne morje, ne zemlja, 2023 – Neither the Sea nor Land)

Šarotar’s narrative often eludes classic formal definitions. Rather than talk about a plot, a complicated line of events, classic protagonists and their characters or interpersonal relationships, we focus on the suggestive atmosphere, images, milieu, feelings and (ancient) memory. These idiosyncratic storylike meditations reach beyond social contexts, beyond the logic of cause and effect, as well as beyond a linear and flattened perception of time and space. Their perspective always opens up to the beyond, to non-existing landscapes: paradoxically, it is precisely where nothing is left that everything is present. Šarotar’s typical protagonist is a lone figure, an archetypal stranger to the world, a sensual reasoner, an observer gazing into the distance, a witness whose voice wells up from the depths of silence, to report through the silence about the full truth of existence.

‘A person by chance strolling by at this late hour might, in the semidarkness, have seen their tiny silhouettes from the road; the two were like shadows, like ghosts, unreal in their present happiness, or maybe they were just roving souls, hovering beneath the ceiling. The person would have mistaken them for foreigners, for travellers passing through, who had stopped at the hotel on their long and unknown journey; maybe, as he stood for a moment beneath the street lamp on the opposite side of the road, lighting a short cigarette and gazing at the building, he thought, They are wandering; they will wander through the world, but we will never know if they are going home or running away.’ (Zvezdna karta, 16 – Star Chart)

Šarotar ascended the Slovenian literary stage in 1999 with his novel Potapljanje na dah (Freediving), which already manifests all his basic features – a powerful atmosphere, an archetypal narrative design, and a choice metaphorical language, in which all that is unseen and unfathomable opens up at both macro and micro levels. The story of a foreigner who finds himself one day among the locals on a remote South Adriatic island, attempting to understand their mysteries, from death to the struggle for survival, emerges at the very start of his oeuvre as a parable of being and of poetic research into (the sense of) life. With its rich symbolism, the sea as a bottomless abyss is established as one of the central motifs and topics found in practically all of Šarotar’s books, except that over time it transforms ever more often into the Pannonian plain, that is, a forgotten sea, on the bottom of which lies buried memory, the author’s main inspiration.

‘The endless undulation of the land, the rocking of the plain on which I was born. The world that opens to me was left behind by the sea; all that remains is a distant memory written in black oil and coal. This world is propelled and illuminated by the memory hidden deep in the bowels of the earth. To write is to open the sea. To search for the atmosphere in which my inner world comes to life. By painting landscapes, by putting them into words, I summon forth and bring to life the invisible, mysterious part of our world. The sea is less and less; the land and starry sky are opening.’ (Neither Sea nor Land, 67)

The sea coast, the riverside, islands, the primeval forest are likewise the settings of the stories in the collection Mrtvi kot (2003, Blind Spot). However, they are joined by more contemporary settings – the railroad, the train station, the airplane, the airport, urban labyrinths. These serve as a background against which the archetypal memory or dreams radiate man’s inner landscapes and the most difficult metaphysical questions, to which there are no conclusive answers. Regardless of the outside bustle, the existential centre of Šarotar’s characters is always insular, solitary, and their horizon is an infinite, often frightening expanse.

‘He was already on the edge of a dream when his ears were filled with total silence – there was nothing, as if he was floating in space, in perfect balance with everything. This magnificent feeling was, in fact, frightening to him. The moment when all ties to this world relax, the leap into weightlessness, towards deepest darkness, where, on the edges of thought, only the stars are shining. Perfect and consummate motion. His eyes are shut; he feels only the caress of the light shields on the line of the horizon; the planets, the galaxies, his home – all are left far behind. He is sinking, melting, into a horrifying indifference.’ (‘The Return’, Blind Spot, 50)

Last but not least, the protagonist of the short novel Nočitev z zajtrkom (2003, Bed and Breakfast), who is a cancer patient, sets out with his new love for a sea island with a lighthouse, where he at last commits suicide by leaping into the sea (!). What encourages him to undertake this immersion, which is symbolically suggestive of the departure for a different dimension of being, is love. As the strongest existential force, love is the creative principle underlying Šarotar’s overall creativity. ‘Only literature, art, can speak in the manner of love. And if something is written in the manner of love, it is an expression of a person’s soul. To make your language ring, you must have inspiration, be inspired; inspiration is an apostrophe. I do not apostrophise or re-examine the world like a scientist or philosopher: rather, it is the world, the language, that apostrophises me. Only when I am apostrophised can I respond by asking myself about the sense – and I do so in the manner of poetry.’

­­­The author’s preparations for his deepest (literary) immersion, which brought him to his starting theme and to his existential wound, took several years. The holocaust with its fatal impact on millions overtook his grandfather, too – a Jewish merchant from Murska Sobota – and had been previously addressed at least through motif fragments in the poetry collections Krajina v molu (2006, Landscape in a Minor Key) and Hiša mojega sina (2008, The House of My Son). Explicitly and in all its complexity this inconceivable tragedy has been handled in two poetic novels which form the fulcrum of Šarotar’s oeuvre. ‘It is true that it was not spoken about, either at home or in town. But of course we all knew that grandfather had had a family before us which he lost in the holocaust. This is not the story of someone I’d never met, on the contrary, we lived together for a long time, I was seventeen when grandfather died. I could say that writing is my debt and that I am the voice and conscience of my family. But I did not speak up about it before my seventh book as it was only then I realised that it was my story.’

In all its fullness, this story first finds its voice in the novel Biljard v Dobrayu (2007, Billiards at the Hotel Dobray), set at the end of World War II and revolving around the Jewish merchant Franz Schwartz, who has – unlike his wife and son – miraculously survived the concentration camp Auschwitz and is on his way back to his native Murska Sobota on the eve of liberation. The highly charged yet paradoxically tender narrative, which uses chips of the townspeople’s lives to reveal the chilling secret of the deportations and the horror of extermination, kept secret for years, is above all a hommage to Murska Sobota, ‘a town where the wind is constantly seeking souls in which it can again reverberate’. It is a watershed publication, not only in the author’s oeuvre but also in Slovenian literature, being the first literary treatment of the Prekmurje holocaust.

The fate of his grandfather’s first family reappears in Šarotar’s novel Star Chart (2021), where fragments from the pre-war lives of merchant Franc, his wife Roža, and their son Evgen are shown through the eyes of a housemaid with the telling name Žalna – The Mourning One. The main plot is set at Šalovci, where the family lived. Historical (documentary) references are closely intertwined with enviable skills of evocation, which enables us to observe both the collective and individual essences closely, practically from the inside. As a suggestive tale about foreboding disintegration and great annihilation, Star Chart forms together with Billiards at the Hotel Dobray a harrowing diptych about a chapter in our history which has been hushed up for many years. A reduplicated lament about the end (of the family), dominated by intense feelings and ominous atmosphere, when everything seems already to have happened, though the future may be a long time off, confronts us with the ineluctability of fate. At the same time it is a unique compliment to the language of poetry, in which and with which life can be tolerable, and even reshaped into harrowing beauty despite the tragic.

Moreover, the author pays direct homage to the hushed-up Murska Sobota Shoah in the short fiction collection Nostalgija (2010, Nostalgia), notably in two stories: one of them, ‘Haustor’, evokes in its very title a (metaphysical) door and takes us from the present to that same grandfather and his son who we encounter in the central novels discussed above. The other story, ‘Lastovka’ (The Swallow), unveils the fate of another survivor from the Auschwitz camp, a Murska Sobota Jewess called Justa Schön. Like an airplane or a ship, the central motifs of the other two narratives, the swallow carries a symbolic meaning as well – of return, the coming of spring, as well as transcendence – through the arts of flying and diving. These stories, too, reach into the invisible depths of a human being, into the spaces of the soul where our home is, and Šarotar’s writing is thus always a voyage back home, to the source.

Another forgotten story of the Prekmurje Jews is resuscitated by the bilingual narrative Ostani z mano, duša moja/Ostani z menov, düša moja (2011, Stay with Me, My Soul), dedicated to Julius Schönauer, a Jewish photographer from Šalovci, murdered in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Fragments of his story come to light through the eyes of a young couple, who meet after the war on a transoceanic ship (!), bound for a new life on the other side of the ocean. They are drawn together partly by the very memory of the artist who had to document horrors but stubbornly sought to catch the sky and clouds as well, the souls of the cremated – the same people for whom Šarotar, too, builds a new life in his poem-story.

A certain break in his work is brought about by the essay anthology, Neither the Sea nor Land, in which the writer reflects on his creative path, his attitude to literature and to art. Again, his broad thinking eludes any formal expectations about literature or literary reflection.

‘I would go so far as to say that this book, perhaps even myself as a writer, would not exist were it not for that island where my inner landscape opened to me. /…/ I actually did not understand anything, just as I still don’t even now, because it is not possible to understand it – this landscape is real only in literature. Only here is something caught of that light, fear, solitude, emptiness, madness, love, and death, which we can talk about only because it never truly dies. This world lives, speaks through words that are not of this world; that feeling when, for a moment, we know, or perhaps merely sense, that we exist – it comes from the invisible inner world, the world poets speak to. We are born out of silence.’ (Neither Sea nor Land, 13)

The literary creativity of Dušan Šarotar is always about equilibrium – formal, cognitive, or existential; about walking on the edge, about lingering on the line between here and there, the visible and invisible, silence and sound, the suppressed and the professed. He does not seek acrobatics for its own sake, as a game: rather, it conveys his knowledge of the power of literature and life when the latter becomes fully aware that it is born out of death; it macerates, digests, blurs, shifts the apparent dividing line. One instance of such blurring, and thus of new formal moves, is seen in the gliding Panorama: pripoved o poteku dogodkov (Panorama: A narrative about the course of events), which unites the elements of travelogue, (auto)biography, reportage, and philosophical reflection with lyric metafictional processes. This time the writer as the first-person narrator lends his voice to a motley crew of uprooted people who he encounters on his travels, at writers’ residences in Ireland, Belgium, and Bosnia. The stories of these foreigners, emigrants, immigrants, expatriates, wandering Jews, seekers, nomads help to shape and regulate the narrative flow, creating a spiritual landscape of the contemporary man – more often than not solitary, anxious, fragmented, riven, alienated. The mooring sought by all the protagonists lies in the lost language, and it seems that this primary grammar of existence is renewed for them (and for all of us) precisely by their lyric listener: ‘Art is the art of empathy. Language is the sea between our solitudes; words are at once both distance and nearness, the path to the Other.’ (Neither Sea nor Land, 16)

Dušan Šarotar reinvents himself with every new book, although his fundamental stance remains unmistakable, firmly committed to integration, to the merging and interweaving of everything divided by the surface. If his oeuvre has maintained until recently a firm union of physics and metaphysics, prose and poetry, his most recent poem, Nikomah poroča (2023, Nicomachus Reports), explicitly adds ethics. In this book of poetry we leave the confessional intimate sphere characteristic of the bulk of his oeuvre, moving to a general level. What is foregrounded is no longer the individual, the individual’s (tragic) destiny, but exploration of the phenomenon of evil in all its unsuspected vastness and unfathomability. At the heart of Nicomachus’ journey from Wannsee towards the southern island lies the holocaust, but not as an (exclusively) historical event; rather, it is a principle, an inexplicable phenomenon, a jinxed pattern of a terrible catastrophe. The role of the observer and chronicler is assumed by Aristotle’s son, while his insights are recorded by his fellow traveller – a poet. Thirty lyric fragments finally twine into a poem full of meaningful parables and images, references, and poetic figures speaking to the forgotten impulses (including moral ones) within us. Nicomachus Reports is a synthesis of Šarotar’s literary design in terms of both content and form, an original interweaving of the suggestions in his prose books – the bulk of his oeuvre – and the classic poetry collections published at the early stage of his writing career: A Feeling for the Wind (with Feri Lainšček, 2004), Landscape in a Minor Key (2006), and The House of My Son (2008).

In his unshakeable commitment to poetic truth, Dušan Šarotar builds an idiosyncratic, internally rounded literary oeuvre. Whether his narrative sings or his poem narrates, it always comes into existence in contact with an ancient source, with light, and a new possibility offered by the latter. As a writer-landscape painter he creates books of metaphor, many of them furnished with his own black and white photos, which round off his dialogue with the dead and with silence. From these springs his unique language – a catcher of the image of the times. The narrative born of those barely divined landscapes does not explain the logic of the banal world: rather, it brings closer the wholeness of being, familiarises a mystery beyond reason, and in its quest for transcendence alleviates the pain of life. Thus Šarotar’s writing may even be perceived as a form of mourning and his books as an invitation to us to participate in this transformative process. It is only when we allow death and the dead to come near that our sorrow at separation melts down and a poem sounds from our deep contact with a silent void – medicine for the soul.

Translated by Nada Grošelj

[1] All quotations from Šarotar’s works have been translated into English by Rawley Grau.