Tomaz Salamun's "The Field of Ptuj"
My Excuse
I want to the look at the place described in Tomaž Šalamun’s poem, “The Field of Ptuj,” before thinking through the poem, itself.
Since I’ve already read the poem, one might read this having-readness as a note of insincerity. But my sincerity is uninteresting—-and my reasoning is simple—- the place of the poem serves as background to the actual subject, which is the poet’s ancestor and family history.
But the way in which Ptuj, the place, is described on various websites carries the tone of heroism which Šalamun challenges.
“Ptuj”
Ptuj was located at a strategically important crossing of the Drava River, along a prehistoric trade route between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic. The area is part of the traditional region of Styria and it was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.
The area was settled by settled by Celts during the Iron Age. People first settled at the lively crossroads of merchant roads, where it was safe to cross the Drava River, already at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Like many parts of Europe, recorded history began with Roman colonization.
In the middle of the 5th century the territory was plundered by the Huns, and later gradually occupied by the Slavs. At the end of the 8th century Ptuj became part of the Frankish Empire, and at the end of the 9th century the city came under the power of the Salzburg Archbishopric. The city saw a revival of its trade similar to the Roman era only in the 11th century, when lords of Ptuj took over the rule.
“They were not only successful in the battlefield, but also proved themselves as erudite and critical supporters of art. They reinforced the town militarily, built a new castle on the remnants of the old, and long-distance trade was revived,”
- Marija Hernja Masten, Staro mesto ob Dravi.
The city’s most prominent buildings were erected already in the first half of the 13th century – the fort on the castle hill, the Dominican monastery, the Minorite monastery, and the Church of St. George. Ptuj officially got its city rights in the middle of the 13th century, including the right to build a city wall, which enclosed all city buildings, both monasteries, and the castle.
Tourism began in the second half of the 19th century.
“Citizens of Ptuj invited travelers to come and see the remnants of the city’s glorious past, they praised its mild climate and good wines, and recommended bathing the rapid and clean Drava.”
- Marija Hernja Masten, Staro mesto ob Dravi
The city had a castle and vineyards! It was ripe for bourgeois recuperation visits, later known as vacations.
From the beginning of the 20th century until World War II, the city was famous for the bubbling social life that took place in its bars and cafés. The excellent choice of coffee, wine, and spirits attracted wealthy and more demanding guests to the city’s hotels and cafés.
Hotel Osterberger, now Hotel Mitra, was the most prestigious hotel in Ptuj. Cafés and hotels also hosted concerts and balls, which were an important symbol of the city’s soul and air of refinement.
The Poem
Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun brought his neo-avant-garde brush to a piece of family history with "The Field of Ptuj," a poem first published in his 1980 collection, Masks.
Here is the poem as translated by the late and marvelous Charles Simic:
I am drawn to the poet’s subversion of monuments and stereotypes, a tactic Šalamun uses from the outset, in the gesture of his poetics of dedication. Šalamun dedicates the poem to its interlocutor: a great-grandfather who served as a General in the 19th century, and who would, in many poems, be treated heroically as the pinnacle of masculine accomplishment.
Alas:
You were tired at the very beginning.
The first line completes its declarative with a period. One imagines the poet looking at a portrait and scrutinizing the General’s facial expression as he moves into the next line:
When like a trained monkey you posed
with your saber.
Again, this sense in which Šalamun’s description suggests an iconic photograph: the General posed with his saber (and what a perfect word Simic chooses in his translation, sword comes more easily but saber retains antiquity).
He resembles a trained monkey. “At the ceremony”— the swerve of Šalamun’s line breaks— where he is officially “made a baron.” From a General to a baron after someone says the magic word and the ritual of transubstantiation is completed.
The poet’s mocking tone clings to the sharp images. And how cleverly he avoids the consequence of his gaze by distributing it among the plural pronoun:
We forgive you
for looking ridiculous.
After all, the interlocutor must have been thinking great thoughts, Šalamun tells us, invoking “duty” and “future generations”—two abstractions which satirize the depth of the General’s purview. Deploying a noble-sounding abstraction in order to ridicule a subject is a classic Šalamunian strategy—using the abstract against itself to render an aura of vapid pomposity.
The truth is that General got “bored” in Zadar. And his wife wanted him to return to Vienna.
Slowly, Šalamun begins dropping pins on a map, dots which relate to the title invoking this field of Ptuj. Borrowing the chivalric conventions of his ancestor’s time, the poet names names to gossipy effect:
Did you even notice when Mr. Toplak
carried off your daughter? Your investment
had gone to Ptuj.
Insinuating that the General’s war games meant little when he couldn’t even protect his own daughter from a weak suitor, Šalamun burrows into the language of masculine convention and social status to attack where it wounds the ancestor most.
And, if this is not enough, the poet adds onto the accusations, for it is the General’s disinheritance of his daughter which causes “Barberle” to “turn grey on the mountain road.” Here is the turn:
Dumbfounded she stared at her offspring.
One sentence occupying a single line.
There are three such single-line sentences in the poem: the first line, this turning line, and the final line. An invisible pattern is set by these lines which stand, complete in themselves. Like sign-posts on a road.
Here, Šalamun shifts into the juxtaposition, the secret tension, the division between the elite and the Slavic (one of his themes)—the mother whose children were “raised by barbaric Slavic maids” did not even understand her childrens’ “language.” It is the mother who failed to protect them from the linguistic Slavic taint. It is the mother who allowed their tongues to be polluted. And now she has lost a daughter to the Slavic suitor (see Toplak).
The gorgeous captioning of what follows, the frame which bespeaks rather than speaking, the ominous colon:
raised by barbaric Slavic maids. It’s written:
our mother lay down all white and kept
pressing the buzzer no one heard.
Šalamun swoops into a prophetic voice and stretches into the romantic, fairy-tale diction of “our mother lay down all white” only to leave the reader with a discombobulating buzzer sound, an sonic uncanniness that ruptures the flow and the seriousness of the folk-language.
O, and the perfect return to the image of the saber-bearing General, the Baron whose Baroness lies stupidly with a buzzer:
"That’s not the way you figured it, mon general.
Online, I find: “Archaeologists believe that some 30 thousand people lived in the greater area around Poetovio, which was one of the most important Roman army base camps, at the time.”
The Roman name of Ptuj was Poetovio. There is a poet inside it.
How does the italicization of mon general influence the ordering of the poem?
I'm thinking about how we begin a letter with the diminutive, the assertion of intimacy, the "my" inside "mon"...but Salamun ends the poem with this. Mon general—French, the bourgeois language of correspondence.
Asterisk
In poetry, one encounters the concern about an underdeveloped speaker. I’m not saying that it true of this poem, or in this case, but I see it pop up in craft essays and arguments about poetics.
(One could argue that Salamun’s speaker is quite underdeveloped; keeping his distance through plural pronouns and the razor-sharp focus on the subject of the portrait. The speaker isn’t changed by the poem—-he doesn’t mature, evolve, or discover anything small and precious about himself?)
“Development,” of course, is loaded by contemporary associations, and by the of the narrative arc, borrowed from fiction.
Concerns about 'underdeveloped speakers' are time-bound, which is to say, these concerns are only a problem for the poem which takes the narrow time of personal development as a metric.
Assuming our preference for redemptive narratives, it is still worth asking why we bring this expectation to the room of a poem? Why do we assume the speaker must be changed by it? Isn’t this concern one which ignores the relationship between the poem and the reader? What is the poem for?