Sea of Intimacy

The Atlantic and Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic a sea of intimacy.

Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (tr. Michael Henry Heim)

Sea of Intimacy: The Adriatic Real and Imagined is a cultural history with an unusual structure. The book combines archival research with lived experience, linguistic and literary exploration, and place-based writing, treating the Adriatic as a distinctive setting for reflecting on the world of human-human and human-nature interactions.

The book’s essays weave together three primary threads. One is place, the Adriatic itself, with its islands, ports, natural history, and accumulated human histories of empire, trade, art, violence, and cohabitation. Another is intimacy. Borrowed from Predrag Matvejević in the quote above, it names the scale at which those histories are lived: in families across generations and in everyday encounters shaped by close proximity and, often though not always, attentive care. The third is translation, understood broadly: the movement of words from one language to another, of relics and other symbolic forms between centers of power, and of institutions, knowledge, and practices. These threads function as both objects of inquiry and conceptual tools. The book thinks with them, allowing different modes — historical analysis, travel, reflection — to come forward as needed, while the three threads weave more tightly together as the book proceeds.

It begins during a year-long research stay in Istria in 1999, establishing some of my primary concerns through scenes of daily life and sometimes uneasy encounter. Later parts turn to places marked by layered memory — prison islands, ports, the ghetto, cemeteries, pilgrimage sites — where the inheritance of violence and forgetting must be confronted by those living today, and then to definitions of place by means of mixture, liquidity, and extended kinship. The final section brings these strands together through an exploration of translatio, translation in its fullest sense, considering how texts, bodies, and lives are carried across distance and time, and how renewal becomes possible through managed interruption, rather than outright rupture or easy continuity.

Throughout, the Adriatic offers a way of thinking about relation that resists both purity and corruption. Its history is one of managing proximity — of delay, filtering, separation, and return — rather than seamless integration. Sea of Intimacy invites readers to move alongside the sea, across it, and through it, attending to how place, intimacy, and translation intersect in the work of living with others, and to consider what such a history might offer in a world still shaped by borders and divisions of both the political and the mental variety.

With the help of an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Grant, a U.S. Fulbright Scholar Award to Croatia, and assorted support from other sources, I think (on most days, at least) I’ve done most of the research I need for writing. It has taken me to the region many times and introduced me to people, places, and institutions throughout and across what Ligio Zanini, in one of his poems refers to as “this corner of paradise.” The privilege of being able to write on this topic — which I’ve been able to focus on for some time now — has been a constant source of joy and never-ending wonder.

Below are a few small tastes from the blog. For shorter observations, photographs, and updates, visit the Sea of Intimacy Facebook page.

The Book (on making it)

Adriatic Essays

Reading and Watching the Sea

Many of these essays also engage questions of language, translation, and cultural encounter, connecting Sea of Intimacy to the broader concerns explored elsewhere on this site.

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