Tibor Hrs Pandur

- Slovenia -

(1985, Slovenia) received a bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature in 2011, at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. He is a dramatist, translator and a poet. In 2007, he coauthored and translated the text for the play Don Juan. Kdo? / Don Juan. Who? (Slovensko mladinsko gledališče and Athletes of the Heart). In 2008, his drama debut, Sen 59 (Dream 59) was realized on the stage of the Glej Theater in Ljubljana, for which he received a Young Playwright Award in 2013. He is the cofounder of the Paraliterary organisation I.D.I.O.T. and is the editor-in-chief of the same-named magazine since 2009. In 2010, his poetry debut, Enerđimašina (Energymachine, Center za slovensko književnost) was published. In 2011, it was followed by a translation debut of collected poems by Jim Morrison Očividec (Eyewitness, Center za slovensko književnost). In 2015 and 2016, he was the program director of the literary festival for emerging literary practices Literodrom in Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana. In 2017, his second poetry collection came out, entitled Notranje zadeve (Internal Affairs, Litera).


Pandur never disguised the fact that, as an author, he relates to the great Slovene poet, Tomaž Šalamun. This does not imply that he tried to follow his poetics or aesthetics, but simply that he acknowledged the context in which his own poetry might bare meaning. His first poetry collection, Energymachine, is therefore a blast of modernism, hypermodernism, postmodernism and hyperpostmodernism, which doesn't actually exist, but his work made plausible. The acclaimed literary critic, Mojca Pišek, therefore – while searching for a definition for “energymachine” - wrote that Pandur's collection of poetry is one of those rare books, which are slightly rookish, slightly idealistic, a little gentle, a little reckless, a little fucked up, a little crazy, a little subtle, a little dangerous, a little rudimentary, a little bit of everything. It seems ‘energymachine’ is that moment in Slovene poetry when poets have finally lost their fear of naïveté, the moment, when a poet decides not to bore the reader to death in his or her first poem, the moment, when the poet relaxes and appoints all the isms and posts where they belong, somewhere between mumps and dahlias, the moment, when the meaninglessness is turned into a fragrant and effervescent energy.”

 

Pišek ties Pandur's debut to the Slovene avant-garde, namely Anton Podbevšek's collection Človek z bombami (The Man with Bombs): Pandur's poetry “collects from noble aggression to hypersensitive implosion.”

 

Muanis Sinanović, the Slovene poet and critic, dug even deeper into Pandur's debut: “In the book, the dispersion of the poetic discourse (…) connects to the imaginarium of an apocalyptic world under informational surveillance. On one hand, the book discusses global wars, and on the other, the stuffiness and scheming of the local society.”

 

Pandur's second book, Internal Affairs, continues on this path, whereas it is closer to a subconscious autobiography, or an autobiography of the subconscious. The collection is characterized by a strongly-unified expression – opinions, appeals, accusations merge with an almost hymn-like intensity. The Serbian poet, Bojan Savić Ostojić, therefore concluded: “Just like Nikola Tesla, one of the spiritus movens of the book, Tibor ventures into a dream, hoping that there he will meet a kind of a redemptive formula. But all of his dreams conclude in a utopian manner, that is more of a request, a scream than a final solution.” In Sinanović's view, "Internal Affairs represent both, a combat song as well as an elegy. They are an intensity of friction, poetry, devoted to its historical moment. They merge singular and universal in a way that only poetry can do: They are not a document of their time, but an intervention into it and thereby achieve the most that poetry can achieve.”