Dušan Šarotar is a Slovenian writer, poet, screenwriter and photographer. The central themes of his works are the fate of the Jewish community and the Holocaust in Murska Sobota and Prekmurje, including the novel "Zvezdana karta", which he will present at the Bookstan festival.
Interviewed by: Matej Vrebac
The occasion of your arrival in Sarajevo is the ninth edition of the Bookstan International Literature Festival. You stayed in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina on a literary residency, but it is also one of the places where you set the action of your novel Panorama . What memories bind you to this city and how do you perceive it? What kind of symbolic capital does Sarajevo carry or could carry in today's image of Europe?
I remember the warm, clear morning light that flooded the city, as if it had just emerged from a sleepy haze. There was something unreal, magical, just as there is something imaginary in memory, an explosive and at the same time fascinating mixture of the real and the imaginary, because memory is never a complete and complete whole, that's why I say I remember, I narrate, in order to repeat the past and not forget it. I understand writing primarily as the art of storytelling, imagination, and ultimately as the expression of the human soul. I believe that time does not actually exist, only the eternal and unchanging inner space remains, from which my language grows, with which I design the world around me. Silence is my first language.
So, if I go back to the beginning, on that beautiful morning ten years ago, which I will never forget, I was at the Sarajevo bus station, where my four-month journey through Europe, from Ireland, through Belgium to Sarajevo, ended, but here the journey actually just began. I remember that the poet Ferida Duraković was waiting for me and escorted me to the apartment in Josipa Vancaša Street. There, in creative solitude, I slowly wrote the first chapters of the novel Panorama , a poetic report, a diary, a story about invisible Europe, about emigrants, exiles, resettlers, about loneliness, loss of language and, finally, about the search for happiness, about foreignness and about love in times of solitude. I saw Sarajevo as a metaphor, now it is more quickly and clearly presented as a prophecy.
In conversation with Jagna Pogačnik, you will present the Bosnian edition of the novel "Zvezdana karte" at the festival. The novel has already resonated in the region, won an award, and the Bosnian readership will have the opportunity to read it in the translation by Ahmed Burić. Have you been in contact with the translator? Is the novel waiting for translations into other languages, and what has been its general reception so far?
I am very much looking forward to this book, it is my first translation into Bosnian. The brilliant translation is the work of my good friend Ahmed Burić, a poet who has a lavish gift of linguistic design, but also a deep and poignant personal experience of living on the borders of languages, cultures and feelings. And that's how I feel when I think about The Star Map , it's a story about a lost home and a search for an imaginary poetic homeland. The Star Map was warmly received by local readers, for which I received the Župančič Award, the highest recognition of the city of Ljubljana, and was nominated for several other awards. However, as we know, all poets are homeless. Coincidentally, the novel will be published simultaneously in the Croatian translation by Anita Peti-Stantić in the Zagreb publishing house Fraktura, and a Spanish translation is being prepared, which will be published in Mexico in the fall, and the novel is also being translated into Ukrainian and Swedish. I follow with great interest the reactions of readers and critics to my translated books. Poetry is a way of the deepest and most intense correspondence between distant and unknown languages. Just one song can shake the world to its foundations, even though it cannot be seen with human eyes. Everything important and permanent is invisible.
Your writing, through its wistful, melancholic sensibility, reminds me a lot of the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani, who dedicated a good part of his work to the town of Ferrari from before World War II and the large Jewish community that disappeared from it. In "The Star Map", you write about Prekmurje, Murska Sobota and Šalovci, about a young Jewish family from 1932 to 1944, when they disappeared in deportation to Auschwitz, like most of the Jews of Prekmurje due to the Holocaust. It seems to me that Bassani and you are equally saving the memory of a community from oblivion. Isn't writing, for you, saving it from oblivion and the necessity to bear witness to what history as a science cannot tell ?
Thank you. Of course, I fully agree with your position that the story begins where history ends, which of course does not mean that everything is made up, that nothing is true. In my stories, everything is somehow real, all the characters are real, their names and fates are historically attested, places, houses, time are real, although I write about ancient and past times, and even more than that: dreams, longing, pain are also real, as well as love, because I write in a way of empathy. I love my characters. And there is that fine line that no one has yet drawn, between history and literature, between reality and imagination, visible and invisible, radically speaking, between soul and body. It cannot be separated, nor can it be combined completely and without remainder, a poem about man and his stay in time and space will always seem different from a historical discussion on the same topic. But poetry should not be misused for a historical lie, and certainly not the other way around. All that's left is a memory. I have the feeling that history has exhausted itself, and with it the story as a prestigious form of literature, a world without will and representation, a picture of the world without melancholy, as a pure autofiction narrative, ended with the advent of artificial intelligence, although many do not know it yet. Digital neural networks, language models of artificial intelligence, social networks and the Internet in general already know more about us than we do. The age of poetry is coming, which may be the last refuge of the human soul , everything else will be history. Or, in other words, poetry is a dialogue with the dead. Literature is a form of grieving, healing metaphysical wounds. The song is a lament for the past but also for the future.
How do you prepare for writing? I believe that you study the factual and archival material for your novels because some characters from them were really real, like Dr. Lazar Roth, the last rabbi from Murska Sobota.
I wrote the star chart during corona and lockdown. Instead of reading and following the depressing and claustrophobic daily news, I read an old newspaper from the 1930s every day. I had the feeling that there was more reality and actuality than in all the daily news. In the local newspaper from October 1932, I came across news, actually a congratulatory message, about the wedding of a young couple, Franz Schwarz, a merchant from Čakovec and Rozalija Hahn from Bodonac, of course I was surprised and excited, because Franz is my grandfather. At that moment I knew that this tiny and marginal newspaper note was enough for the opening sentence of a novel. Before I start writing, I always go on a trip, or to archives, books, newspapers, to poetry collections or to a real road. I write with the feeling of those who travel on foot. Quietly and slowly.
Dušan Šarotar's great passion is photography. You write in one place: "In the silence of family pictures, safely hidden under blank paper, memories are preserved, a story waiting for its narrator . " Can we say that photographs and literature are intertwined with you for the same purpose, i.e. they are an incentive for writing?
Photography is not only a document of time, proof that something happened, but also a form of memory, melancholy and nostalgia. They say that photography is a record of light. It is very close to the poetic experience of the world, changing the invisible into the visible. To make something we can identify with from what is deep within us. Photography is not only for looking, but also for talking. Describing light. The photo gave people the delusional feeling that nothing would be forgotten. They were convinced that their rare and precious images, made of light and dark developed on photographic paper, would be preserved forever. Now digital images have literally flooded our everyday life, we are drowning in memories, the only question is whether anyone still has time to remember.
Prekmurje is a truly special Slovenian province, and apart from the Prekmurje gibanica, its specificity can also be seen in its unique dialect. Croatian, Međimurje, German and Hungarian are also spoken in Prekmurje. How much has Prekmurje retained today of that image from the past that you write about? What is its status in relation to other Slovenian regions and provinces?
Until the end of the Second World War, Prekmurje was an example of a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional and multilingual community, Prekmurje Slovenes, Hungarians, Croats, Germans, Roma and Jews lived here, everyone spoke their own language at home, in the center of Murska Sobota there were Catholic churches, Protestant churches and a synagogue. The war changed everything, then everything just went downhill. The Jewish community was practically destroyed in the Holocaust. After the war, less than ten surviving Jews returned to the city, and the abandoned synagogue, which housed stables for horses, was demolished in 1954. Among the rare survivors was my grandfather Franz Schwartz, who lost his wife, son, name, faith and property in the Holocaust. All that remained was a hushed up story that no one wrote down for a long time. The Star Map is the story of that, a tiny poem that has been passed down from generation to generation for a long time. I have been living in Ljubljana for a long time, far from Prekmurje, which for me is an increasingly intense and inexhaustible place of memories.
This year's theme of the festival is dedicated to generational resonance in culture and literature, and from Slovenia, Zoran Predin and Andrej Blatnik are joining us. How would you describe your generation, but also those after you who are present in the Slovenian and Yugoslav cultural fields ?
I have the feeling that I don't have my own generation, that is, that I don't really belong to any generation, least of all the literary one. As you mature, you discover that you stand in an invisible line that goes beyond your generation and that winds deep into the past, there are poets, even if they are already dead and forgotten, with whom you form a poetic community. The name of my generation is silence.
What is literary life like in Slovenia? I believe that the more serious approach of the state, which invests much more in the promotion of literature written in its own language, as well as the status of professional writers, contributes to its development, than is the case in our country, where the publishing activity and the position of those who write are completely marginalised.
Compared to neighboring countries, the situation of writers and publishing is still exemplary, although politicians and the public need to be constantly reminded of a reality that is far from ideal. Last year, Slovenia was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which symbolically and realistically is certainly a great success for the recognition of Slovenian literature and publishing in the country and the world. The Ministry of Culture and the Public Book Agency still co-finance the publication of original and translated works and provide financial assistance to creators in the form of scholarships, but even here the trends are turning. The book, as a privileged form of thought, faces great challenges everywhere, I am pessimistic about the future of the book, but at the same time I believe that language is not only a means of communication and trade, but besides meaning, it also contains a deeper meaning that we must not lose. As the poet would say, the book is a hundred thousand years older than the universe.
I believe that you follow the literature published in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and you also translate it yourself. What do you notice about that literature?
With great interest and personal sympathy, I follow literature in all areas of the former common state. I believe that this is a place not only of memories but also of literary excesses, where a name is kept for the soul. Here, poets still write about pain, death and love, as everywhere else in the world. What is good, beautiful and convincing enough for us is also great for the world.