The poet Tomaž Šalamun did not like to speak about his five days in Yugoslav prison.
When he was twenty-three years old, Šalamun wrote a poem calling his countrymen“ideologues with whorish ideologies,” “trained intellectuals with sweaty hands,” and “rectors with muzzles.” None of that got him in trouble.
What got him in trouble was the dead cat mentioned in the middle of the piece. The Interior Minister, whose last name literally meant “cat,” took it personally. “He felt that he was attacked personally, and he put me in jail,”1 Šalamun later recalled, which caused an international uproar. Freed, Šalamun did the unexpected, refusing to reprint the poem in any of his books. When asked why, he said, “Others suffered much more than I did.”
But this tale doesn’t end there.
After being released from prison, Šalamun was barred from holding any government job (and in Yugoslavia, most jobs were government jobs). So he walked door-to-door, selling black-market encyclopedias. Once, he knocked on a woman’s door. She said she only read Proust, Kafka, and Šalamun.
“I am Šalamun,” he said.
And critics call his life’s work absurdist.