Srecko Kosovel: Life and Poetry
Srecko Kosovel (1904–1926) has frequently been called the Slovenian Rimbaud. The two are very different poets, but the comparison is understandable. There is their youth, for example: Kosovel died at twenty-two, and while Rimbaud (1854–1893) in fact reached thirty-nine, he gave up the writing of poetry somewhere between twenty and twenty-two. And there is their productivity: if the volume of work Rimbaud produced between the ages of sixteen and twenty is impressive, the volume of Kosovel’s work is astonishing. People speak of his having left almost a thousand poems, and while at least half of these are of dubious status — drafts, rather than poems, or pieces too fragmentary to be called poems at all — at least four hundred of them have been published as achienved poems in the eighty years since his death, and to these we should add numerous articles and other pieces, and a large quantity of letters.
There is, too, the delayed recognition and publication of the work. Rimbaud published only a handful of poems before abandoning the art, and although he did prepare one publication, his landmark A Season in Hell (Un Saison en Enfer), he could not afford the printer’s bill and left almost the entire edition in the printer’s hands. Kosovel, in his turn, published less than forty poems during his lifetime, and while he did put together a collection, The Golden Boat (Zlati Coln), in the hopes of publication, this was rejected by the intended publisher and did not appear until 1954 — arguably did not even appear then, since the selection of poems which appeared under that title was not in fact Kosovel’s own.
There is also war, and the horror of war, and the impact upon their writing and their creative psyche of their early exposure to these things. Rimbaud’s native village, Charleville, was near the battlefront in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 — or, rather, the battlefront came very near to it, a matter of a few kilometres — and his floreat coincided with the Siege of Paris. Tomaj, the village in the Karst in which Kosovel spent most of his childhood, was little more than twenty kilometres, as the crow flew, from the Isonzo (the Soca River), one of the worst battlefields of the First World War. Each poet, that is to say — Rimbaud in his middle teens, and Kosovel just as his teens began — would have seen troops marching through their village to the nearby battlefront, and the dead, dying and wounded being carried away. At one point Charleville was actually bombarded, and if Tomaj escaped bombardment, Dutovlje, the village next to it, was not so lucky. If Kosovel was not raped by soldiers, as it is thought Rimbaud had been, he had certainly, before his parents sent him and his sister to Ljubljana, seen corpses. And in each case this war is at once the result and the origin of wider social upheaval, so that each poet can be seen to be the site and register of considerable political and intellectual conflict, a conflict that stimulates their reshaping of the very art that it compels. Each, in their own way, is an artistic avant-guardist, the origin, within their own tradition, of a new way of writing, at an age at which most other poets have not even begun to flower.
Yet temperamentally they are not so close. One cannot imagine that Srecko Kosovel every drank very much absinthe (indeed the Slovenian poem, as he sees it, is dying from its ‘heavy inebriation’), and while he without doubt sees himself, and can be seen — in his sense of nationhood, and of the Slovenian nation in particular — as something of a visionary, this does not reach, as it does in Rimbaud (albeit in broad brush-strokes), into the structure of thought itself: there is in Kosovel no theory or praise of excess, no ‘systematic deregulation of the senses’. He is, one suspects, more disciplined, more earnest, more keen to achieve his vision than is Rimbaud — works harder, and arguably within a narrower imaginative range. There is no tour de force like Le bateau ivre in Kosovel; the images do not pour out upon one another with the same kind of surreal intensity, and the satire, when it comes (and it does come, fluently), has its own edge, different from the vituperation and the scatological that one finds so often in Rimbaud. The striking images, like the satirical barbs, are there, but they appear in contexts that enable and encourage us to look at them closely, rather than (to caricaturise Rimbaud [one could also speak of ‘explosive tumult’]) jostle one another like a conga line across a stage.
But Rimbaud is not the only comparison to be made, and to dwell upon it, helpful as it can be, also distorts the picture. Kosovel was born into a rich force-field of creativity. Another way to see him and to explain some of his quality and significance is to look at him in his own time and geographical situation. Slovenian commentators have always done this, and argued Kosovel’s place amongst other Slovenian poets of significance such as France Preseren, Ivan Cankar and, closer to our own moment, Dane Zajc and Tomaz Salamun. This, especially given Kosovel’s own spiritual sense of the Slovenian nation, is perfectly understandable, and there is strong reason to see Kosovel as standing at the centre of this group, but to see him only in this light is to corral him.
Hard as it is to know quite what to make of it, it is worth considering that two of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, in any language — James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Rilke’s Duino elegies — were conceived and substantially written within a few short kilometres of Tomaj. Joyce came to live in Trieste in 1904, the year in which Kosovel was born in a village on the plateau above it, and lived there — a period in Zurich, during the war, aside — until 1920, when, in the face of nascent fascism and the repression of the Slovene ‘minority’ (30% of the population of Trieste itself, 95% in the countryside around it), he felt that the spirit of the city had changed — the artistic freedom gone out of it — and moved to Paris. During his time in Trieste, however, he had written most of the stories of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and almost all of Ulysses.
Rilke similarly. It was in Duino, in late January 1912, at the castle of Countess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, that Rilke — walking the battlements, overlooking the sea, or perhaps in a cliff path below the castle wall (the story varies) in a high wind — first ‘heard’ the opening of the first elegy, and spent the rest of the day in furious composition. Duino (Dvin) is on the Adriatic coast, just a few kilometers to the west of Trieste. It’s not recorded what Joyce was doing that day, nor what the almost eight-year-old Kosovel was doing — we can see them, geographically, as corners of a small isosceles triangle — but the wind was almost certainly the notorious Boria (Burja), infamous from ancient times (Catullus mentions it), which blows directly southward from the Alps, only forty kilometers northward at this point and visible, fog allowing, every day of the year. The Boria, much like the Mistral further to the west, has the reputation for making people irritable beyond measure, to the point where it becomes almost a psychic force. One of Kosovel’s finest poems, the almost-untranslatable ‘Pines’ (‘Bori’) plays significantly upon its name, the pines and the wind that blows through them becoming inextricable, a part, quite literally, of one-another’s definition.
And Joyce and Rilke are hardly the sum of it. The war had brought other writers to and out of the region. It’s a common misconception that Hemingway, for example, fought — or, rather, saw action, since he was an ambuanceman, not a soldier — at the Isonzo/Soca front, whereas in fact he saw it, and was wounded and decorated for his wounds, on the Piave River, a few kilometers futher to the west. By the time he arrived in Italy (1918), the Isonzo front had gone quiet; all the battles of the Isonzo are between 1915 and 1917; but he was close enough to hear enough about it to have Henry, the central character of his famous 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, wounded there, and saw enough of the landscape at close hand to make it part of his creative imagination.
Closer to Kosovel in a different sense is the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, who fought on the Isonzo and wrote some of his most memorable poetry about the experience. The harsh contours of the Karst seem, unobtrusively, to underpin the austere, almost minimalist concentration of his poems, giving them in their turn contours very like those of Kosovel’s strangely mis-named ‘impressionist’ work, in which he is most concerned to describe and capture that landscape.
Voluntarily or otherwise, however, these were all visitors. If they drew from the place, as each of them most certainly did — from the horrors perpetrated there, as well as from what we might speak of as a kind of cold and flinty spiritual force — it was only Kosovel who was born and grew up there and attempted to speak directly of its power.
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The youngest of five children, Srecko Kosovel — Srecko means ‘lucky’ or ‘fortunate’ in Slovenian (Kosovel would at times call himself ‘Felix’) — was born on March 18, 1904, in Sezana, not in Tomaj, to which smaller town, eight kilometres away (and closer to the Soca) the family moved in 1908 when his father was appointed headmaster of its elementary school. Srecko spent nearly eight years in Tomaj before, at almost twelve, he was sent, with his sister Anica, to Ljubljana for further schooling, a move that must have been difficult for the young children, barely into their teens, but which had the decided advantage of placing them further away from the war. Thereafter, school and university holidays aside, Kosovel was to spend the rest of his life in Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia but then a large provincial town near the southern extremity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Slovenia did not at this point exist as a separate political entity. The Slovenian people, their language and their culture, were a different matter, but political autonomy awaited the end of the war and the redistribution of the Empire of the Habsburgs. Even then it was not a clean or swift process. Slovenia became part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, but this Slovenia did not coincide with the geographical distribution of Slovenian cultural and linguistic hegemony. Kosovel’s region, to the west, was in dispute, Istria and the Karst in particular. This was in part because of the highly desirable seaport of Trieste (Trst), and the lesser ports of Koper (Capodistria) and Piran (Pirano) to the south-east of it on the present-day Slovene coast, but perhaps in larger part to the cultural integrity of Istria — a hybrid integrity, if we can speak of such a thing: Mediterranean, where the rest of Slovenia is Alpine and sub-Alpine, and bearing the imprint of an association, as long as recorded history, with the Italian peninsular and culture, and more specifically with Venice, just across the water (the great trees of the once densely-forested Karst provided the hardwood piers of Venice; the doges used Pirano as a hunting-lodge and source of wine; most of the marble of Venice is Istrian). Following the war, and while treaties were being negotiated, Italy had interim control of Trieste and its surrounds. The 1920 Treaty of Rapallo, between Italy and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, by which the latter was forced to give up Istria and the entire Slovenian and Croatian coastlines, confirmed this, and emergent fascism in Italy gave it a brutal force. In 1920 the Slovenian National House (Slovenski Narodni Dom) in Trieste was burned in an arson attack; teaching in the Slovene language was phased out in schools from 1923; in 1925 the Slovene community bank in Trieste was closed down; by 1927, the year after Kosovel’s death, it was forbidden to speak Slovenian in public.
I have mentioned the Karst, a region that does not coincide with Istria, but which in part overlaps, in part lies behind and above it. The term ‘karst’ refers at once to a particular kind of rock and set of rock formations (‘a type of topography that is formed over limestone, dolomite or gypsum by solution of the rock and is characterized by closed depressions or sinkholes, caves and underground drainage’), and to the Kras region — a range of mountains between Slovenia and Italy — which most distinctively presented this kind of topography. Some fourty-four percent of Slovenia is classified Karst, albeit of several types and regions: the Alpine Karst, the Dinaric Karst, etc.. In the sense that it is the region that gave these other types their name, Kosovel’s Karst is the original, Litorral Karst, a plateau, largely of limestone, three of the most impressive physical features of which are an escarpment of white cliffs that, with some intervals, overlooks and runs the length of the Istrian coast; an extensive network of limestone caves (some of the most impressive in the world); and a rather harsh and infertile landscape above them: it is said that all the water that falls on the Karst goes immediately underground, to feed a huge network of subterranean rivers, lakes and springs, leaving the inhabitants of the land above to struggle with poor and unproductive soil, battered for a third of the year by the Boria as they do so. Rock farmers, some have called them, since stones, boulders and rockfaces are one of the most characteristic features of its fields. Some of the most characteristic products of the region are marked in one way or another by this very harshness: its red wines, grown from the refosk grape, such as the famous Teran, so harsh and astringent (until one acquires the taste for it: it has a high lactic acid content) that Joyce described it as the perfect wine to serve one’s enemies, and its famous prosciutto, said to acquire its particular flavour from the Boria in which it was traditionally dried.
This particular turbulent period in Istrian and Slovenian history, and the place of the Karst as foil to and central character within it, impacted deeply upon Kosovel. One could say that his poetry has one face to this landscape, as a kind of anchor, as he turns the other to the political instability and cultural oppression that surround and wash over it. His father, Anton, a schoolteacher, choirmaster, and ardent Slovenist — in Tomaj he taught in Slovene — was from the Vipava valley, just a little to the north, and his mother Katerina from a town on the Soca River, although, before her marriage, she had been living in Trieste. They were, this is to say, very much a family of the region. When he went to Ljubljana for his high school education, for example, he was sent to the Technical High School rather than the Gymnasium, in part for financial reasons, perhaps — the former was less expensive — but in part also in the expectation that he would study either engineering or forestry, and contribute to the rebuilding and reforestation of the Karst. It has been said that the Treaty of Rapallo was one of the tragedies of his short life.
Certainly one can see how it, and its unfolding consequences, galvanised his aesthetic. Grief, loss, anger, displacement, and the passion they evoke, are some of the strongest forces of poetry. Kosovel’s early poetry — if one can speak of such stages, in so short a writing life — has been termed ‘impressionist’ and is frequently criticised and discounted, in the face of the more demonstrably avant garde later work, as nostalgic or sentimental. But that, I think, is a regional criticism, mounted for regional reasons. Another way of approaching this early work is to see it as imagistic and its concentration about a certain core of diction, emotions and physical features as symbolising and encoding its landscape. To place it in the light of turn-of-the-century Yeats, of Pound’s imagism, and of the T’ang poetry that lies behind the latter, is to bring out colours in Kosovel that a consideration within a more exclusively Slovenian or even central European tradition might not reveal. It introduces, for example (a la Rimbaud again), free verse to its region, just as, later, Kosovel would introduce the prose poem.
In the meantime, however, he has also introduced something else. Kosovel’s ‘Impressionist’ poetry is frequently referred to as such in order to contrast it with his ‘Expressionist’ or ‘Constructivist’ work. While it is clear that there is an energy, a topicality, a satiric force, an almost-painterly sense of collage, and a delight in typography in the purportedly Expressionistic or Constructivist poems that can remind us at one and the same time of Kurt Schwitters or of Marinetti’s futurism (to the sentiments of which, nonetheless, Kosovel was largely opposed), and that this can be a far cry from the calm, sometimes almost sombre, chiaroscuric quality of the early Karst poetry, to separate them too distinctly and automatically is to ignore the extent to which the latter is prefigured in the former, and the former continues in the latter, as if the latter has come to join and envigorate rather than replace it. What, after all, is Constructivism? While there can be no doubt that Kosovel knew something of Russian Constructivism, for example — Naum Gabo’s ‘Realistic Manifesto’, which introduced the term and the theory, was published in 1920 and by 1925 Constructivism had become a significant movement in post-revolutionary Russian aesthetics — he is hardly constrained by it, but reflects an amalgam of avant guard poetic trajectories (Dada, Futurism, Surrealism) which can not comfortably be tied down to any definition other than the poet’s own. Kosovel’s Constructivism, the central product of which is a number of poems entitled ‘Kons’ (‘Kons’, Kons. 5’, ‘Kons: ABC’, etc.), seems in fact, in the months before his death, to have been superceded by a further understanding of what he called ‘extreme’ poetry, in the series he referred to as his Integrals.
This rapid development reflects a mind thirsty for new information, driven by a sense of urgency and evolving purpose. As his repeated attempts to edit, found or appropriate a magazine or journal through which he could promulgate his own and sympathetic ideas — he edited a magazine called Lepa Vida (Beautiful Vida), for example, at the age of eighteen, and in 1925, having projected various other magazines which never quite got off the ground (a constructivist journal to be called Konstrukter, a literary monthly to be called Volja [Will]), took over the Slovene Farmers’ Association magazine for young people, Mladina (Youth), which he then set out to radicalise — Kosovel clearly saw himself as a leader, or potential leader, in the poetry and poetics of his region. More than this, he saw himself as performing, through his poetry and poetics, a role in the encouragement and development of what he saw as a ‘new man’, a new mode of human being — a concept much in the air and the nature of which was much in contention. Appal at Italian fascism and apprehension concerning the imperial ambitions of Serbia in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had rendered him deeply sceptical of political nationalism, and his attempt to synthesise a spiritual concern for the Slovene nation in abstract, a political anti- and inter-nationalism, and a concern for people against state, had drawn him more and more strongly towards socialism, and stimulated more and more strongly the search for an accompanying aesthetic. This led him into Constructivism, and then, in the attempt to move on from this, into what has come to be called his Zenitism, by which is meant his engagement with ideas promulgated by Zenit (Belgrade/Zagreb), then one of the leading avant garde literary journals in Europe, and eventually, having come to the conviction that the kind of formal and stylistic experimentation in which he had been engaged should not take precedence over the greater revolution in human society and the shape of contemporary man, to the more politicised and left-wing poetry of his final phase — a poetry which, as I have been suggesting, does not so much supplant as come to joint the styles and subjects which had characterised his earlier work.
It has taken some time for this trajectory to become apparent to Kosovel’s readers. As stated earlier, only forty of his poems were published during his lifetime, and although a first selection of sixty of his poems appeared 1927, a further selection appeared in 1931, and a more extensive collection was published in 1947, it was not until 1967, forty-one years after his death, that the bulk of the Kons and Integrals poems were released. This collection, entitled Integrali ’26 (Integrals), established him at last as a revolutionary modernist and gave him a significant place in Slovenian literary history. It has also led to some interesting confusion. The combination of that fact that most of his constructivist and later ‘extreme’ poetry has had to be transcribed from manuscripts which Kosovel himself never had the opportunity to convey into print, and the sense that he was, at the time that he wrote them, clearly inclined to inclined to experiment with typography and visual effects and displacements on the page, has led to a measure of second guessing on the part of his later interpreters, not all of whom have been able to resist the temptation to interpret ambiguities in his poems visually or to in other ways present him, typographically, in the way they imagine he might have presented himself. While in all likelihood Kosovel might have been delighted at their interpretations, and while it does appear that he left some hints and instructions in this regard, it remains a fact that, in this sense at least, a certain amount of Kosovel’s work seems to have been translated in the very act of presenting it, even in his own language, and that those who would translate him into other languages should bear this in mind. This is perhaps a shy and perhaps even irrelevant point here, since in this first release of poems from this new project I have included few of the typographically experimental pieces, and have in any case been reserved in this regard. Those readers who would like to see a wider range are referred to two excellent Slovenian publications, an English edition of the aforementioned Integrals that appeared as issue 2 of Litterae Slovenicae (Slovenian Literary Magazine) in 1998, translated by Nike Kocijancic Pokorn, Katarina Jerin and Philip Burt, and a later, delux version of a selection of the same translations, with a few new translations added: Man in a Magic Square (Ljubljana: Mobitel, 2004).
The translations which accompany this essay are not my own. The poems have been worked up, in some cases only very slightly, from translations by Bert Pribac, who between 2004 and 2006 completed the monumental task of translating some four hundred of Kosovel’s poems into English, and who has asked me to collaborate in the selection and final polishing of a volume. Teja Pribac — no relative of Bert’s, but a translator herself — has been a rich and rigorous fund of advice. Contemporary literary translation is a minefield. Some of the issues are clear enough — whether, for example, one attempts to bring the poem to the reader by smoothing out its eccentricities and aiming for the most beautiful (and familiar) poem in the target language, or attempts instead to bring the reader to the poem by reproducing as best one can its strangeness and particular character — but the manner in which, in any given locus, one resolves or juggles them is not. In general, on that particular issue, I have taken the latter course — or rather, finding that that is the course that Bert Pribac has taken, have sought to assist it. All virtue in these translations is his; any error is most probably mine.
David Brooks
University of Sydney
A Postscript. On the eve of publication I sent this essay to Bert Pribac for final checking. He asked only that I include two further pieces of information. Firstly, that while living in Tomaj ‘Kosovel went almost regularly to Trieste with his sister and aunts to attend opera and theatre, both in Slovene and Italian environments. If they did not catch the train in Sezana they would sometimes walk and catch the hill tramway from Opicina (very close to Sezana). Kosovel not only breathed the same boria as Joyce, but tasted the same cultural milieu as well’, and, secondly, that ‘Kosovel’s friend, the late professor Peter Martinc, who was studying in Grenoble and Paris at the time Kosovel was studying in Ljubljana, informed Kosovel regularly on the French literary and cultural scene.
© 2007
Salt Publishing Limited 
