Undecidability in the Poetry of Tomaž Šalamun

Abstract

The paper is dealing with the poetry of Tomaž Šalamun, and it attempts to evaluate his extremely extensive poetical corpus as a whole. Firstly, it offers a short (imperfect) overview of the some of the more important evaluations of Šalamun’s poetry from the viewpoint of Slovenian literary criticism and literary history, and then goes on to analyze his affinity towards religious discourse, which is creatively integrated in his often disjunctive poetical compositions. The main question that arises is the following: are we dealing with some kind of religious experience or desire for it and thus with the poetry that in last analysis utters “metaphysical” sense, or are we dealing simply with the simulation of religious language and thus with the “poetry of surface” in the neo-avant-garde manner? With the help of the Derridean concept of undecidability, the paper demonstrates that Šalamun’s poetry is structured in such a way that it is impossible to opt for one or the other option. At the end, the paper emphasizes that Šalamun’s poetry has importantly exerted influence also on Serbian poetry from 1970s onwards. A short analysis of the poem “Šalamun” by Nenad Jovanović offers an incentive to research this not well studied literary influence of Slovenian literature in Serbia.