In a world of measured words: Drago Štambuk’s poetic universe
By Mohammad Memarian
Media researcher
Between ashes, ambiguity
Somewhere between the sterile corridors of a London clinic and the polished marble of embassies across the globe, there exists a man who walks on two different yet parallel strings: the narrow path of human anatomy and the thin thread of verse. Listening closely, one could hear the faint echo of a heartbeat in the cadence of diplomacy as he practices it, as if each negotiation represented a diagnostic of souls rather than governments. Physician, poet, diplomat: Seemingly incompatible layers to his existence which are not so much neatly aligned compartments as overlapping transparencies. Somewhere within these layers, the elemental battles of human nature play out: The body and the spirit, suffering and endurance, the crude flesh and the luminous mind. “Originating in the stomach, liver, perhaps even a kidney, it has to be differentiated in time,” he writes, reminding us that even poetry bears the mark of the physician: A meticulous examination, a concern for precision, a devotion to observing what aches and what endures.
In such a liminal space, the universe seems to breathe through paradox. The poet-doctor-diplomat is simultaneously tender and uncompromising, capable of charting the faintest tremor in a body part while articulating a prognosis of turbulence among nations. Humanity, he insisted once in an interview, “is crucified between sky and earth, with the potential to reach higher spheres of thoughts … [or] debase himself.” From within that tension, his poetry emerges: Idealistic, patient, unflinching, and dark at times. His lines speak of fire, ruins, and ashes: “Tonight, set on fire by fear, I dream of ashes.” Yet, rather than cries of despair, they represent careful incantations (or calls, for that matter) of survival.
In his words, one can find dramatic twists, meant to remind the audience of unexpected turns their lives, whether individually or collectively, might be meant to take, implied, for instance, in the image of a “haggard lynx” creeping to a table “to satiate [its] irresistible hunger” for, wait for it, tameness. Drago Štambuk’s world is one in which one can diagnose a disease, negotiate peace, and whisper a verse to the wind — all in the same breath.
Cartography of pain, love
To read Štambuk’s poetry is to wander uncharted yet familiar swathes of both bodily and psychic pain, where every organ, every pulse, every fissure of human experience, becomes a landscape for reflection. His writing is imbued with the precision of medicine, yet it is carried on the wings of a lyrical sensibility bestowed upon growingly omnipresent scenes of global chaos: “Far sail the ships,” he writes, “taking our beloved away,” leaving behind the torn halves of hearts, which makes our ever-romantic observer wonder, “What to do with their halves, in the distant foreign land?” Foreign, rather than simply strange, is indeed his perspective to the cadre of career diplomats, who might be interested in what a ship carries abroad, but fail to care for what it tears apart, as per dictates of their profession.
And yet he holds the prescription that humanity as a whole has long overlooked, love, a choice which, rather unavoidably, is made with awareness of its perils. “I want to be your love, I want to be your struggle,” he declares, and the words tremble between surrender and assertion. Love becomes a practice in endurance, a vessel for ethical idealism, and a battlefield of its own, but more humane than the common battlefields of our times: A sensibility that seems to be informing his diplomatic worldview.
Loyal to his duty as a diplomat, however, he refuses to abandon the interests of the self, though the interests he has in mind are of a different kind. “If you have two loaves of bread,” he instructs, “give one to a poor man, sell the other and buy jasmine, to feed your soul,” reminding us of the necessity of tending to the unseen interior. Love, struggle, survival, and ethics are the interlacing principles which form the backbone of his literary and diplomatic consciousness, stating that human relationships and international relations should be governed above all by subtlety, empathy, and cultivated moral imagination.
Ruins as registers of hope
In the purportedly silent aftermath of destruction, Štambuk discovers the genesis of hope. Born among the charred remnants of Selca, his formative years were spent among ruins preserved by accident, an inheritance of loss that became a fertile ground for reflection and lyric expansion. “Ruins paradoxically nurture hope,” he said, and this sentiment runs like a hidden vein throughout his poetry. The sea burns; the Adriatic pain intensifies; the earth itself seems to whisper the history of what has been taken, of what survives. Yet the ruins are not only personal — they are civilizational, ethical, and aesthetic. The poet’s gaze extends to Iran, to the towering zenith of Damavand, to the tomb of Avicenna, to the inscriptions of Darius in Hamedan, mapping continuity between civilizations, between ethical principles and artistic endeavors. His interest is even more focused when it comes to what Iranian poets have had to offer, because, for him, each poetic line (in any language) is a flame struck in the darkness. No wonder why he finds Rumi a fascinating character, especially when he heard about his words that, “When asked what love is, let them know it’s about relinquishing one’s volition.”
Yet, even amidst his blend of diplomacy and poetics, a trace of the physician’s sensibility manifests itself in the exactitude with which pain is measured, suffering is acknowledged, and survival is celebrated. But still, it’s his thirsty soul that overshadows everything else in his everyday encounters, making him say, “My hands remain empty in everyday embraces,” as though cataloging an eternal deficit, a sense of missing what used to be there, of which only ruins remain. And yet, ruins, in Štambuk’s poetics, are never purely loss. They are registers of memory, incubators of moral consciousness, and repositories of hope.
Confluence of lines, lives
In his poetics, however, Štambuk rather stubbornly resists imagining the self as an isolated being, a refusal which perhaps bears witness to how tending to the affairs of patients and nations transforms a purely artistic soul. His lines, even during a friendly conversation in a somewhat crowded café, mark a relentless interweaving of self and world, microcosm and macrocosm, body and society, love and politics. At times sounding as though he is in a hurry to impart the wisdom life has bestowed upon him over nearly seventy-five years, his tone bears the imprint of his multiple callings: The careful observation of the physician, the expansive imagination of the poet, and the moral precision of the diplomat. “The way the sea caresses the island, slowly, steadily, so shall we, children of God's providence, come to love ourselves again,” he intones, a line that might serve equally as ethical instruction in diplomacy, prescription in medicine, and lyric aspiration.
However serious his roles require him to be as a doctor or a diplomat, Štambuk finds humor an instrument of ethical pedagogy, poking gentle fun at human weaknesses while retaining the idealism of moral engagement. “People are afraid of thorns, and I have been wounded by flowers,” exemplifies this tension: Vulnerability and defiance intertwined, as though suffering itself were a means of cultivation, not merely endurance.
In the end, Štambuk’s poetry is a laboratory and a playground, a battlefield and a sanctuary. It is a place where the author’s many dimensions meet, converse, and sometimes spar, because, to borrow from Walt Whitman, “He is large, he contains multitudes.” And in that conversation of selves, one notes a persistent effort at seeking a higher ground where humans might endure, flourish, and love, despite ashes, ruins, and the inevitable tyranny of time.
To read Štambuk is to inhabit a world where every pulse matters, every line resonates, and every human interaction is both test and testament. It’s a world crafted with words deliberately measured for impact, which is what a doctor, a diplomat, and a poet have in common.
* Drago Štambuk is a Croatian poet, physician, and diplomat, who currently serves as his country’s ambassador to Iran.