Petr Borkovec was born on April 17, 1970, in Louňovice pod Blaníkem. He studied at the Johannes Kepler Gymnasium in Prague and then at Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty (Department of Czech Language and Literature), not yet finishing his degree. In 1992, he became editor of Souvislosti (Connections), a quarterly review of literature and culture, and worked as a proofreader for the daily MF Dnes. Between 1995 and 1997 he worked at Lidové noviny’s publishing house and until 1999 as editor and chief of its arts supplement “Umění and kritika.” From 2000 to 2001 he served as editor of the cultural weekly Literární noviny. At present his time is devoted to translating, primarily 20th-century Russian poetry, and publishing: he collaborated on an anthology of Russian émigré poetry (U řek babylonských, 1996); he co-translated a volume of Vladimir Nabokov’s poetry (Ut pictura poesis, 2002); he has translated the poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich (Težká lyra, 2004), Yuri Odarchenko (Verše do alba, 2005), and Yevgeny Reyn (Bylo, byli, byla, byl …, 2005). Borkovec has also worked with linguist Matyáš Havrda, to recast in verse the dramas of antiquity: Sophocles’s Oedipus the King in 1998 (published as a book in 1999) and Aeschylus’s The Oresteia trilogy in 2002. In 2001 he edited with Vladimír Pucek an anthology of classical Korean poetry. His translations of poets Zinaida Gippius, Georgiya Ivanova, and Joseph Brodsky have appeared in magazines and journals. His own work has appeared in numerous anthologies in addition to the collections that have been published. In 1995, he was awarded the Jiří Orten Prize for his collection Ochoz (Gallery) and in 2001 Germany’s Hubert Burda Prize and the Tyrol’s Nobert C. Kaser Prize for the German translation of Polní práce (Field Work). He also received an award for his translation of The Oresteia. Borkovec lives in Černošice, a small community just south of Prague.
In an interview printed in Host (10/2003), Borkovec characterized himself as a “guild poet.” His interlocutor then asks if he isn’t perhaps more partial to the craft of poetry, its artistry and firmly rooted aesthetics than to the poem’s actual content. Borkovec deftly refutes the charge while in the same breath admitting that what is important for his work is the literary, philosophical, and even religious aspects of the subjective world. An erudite, intellectually sophisticated poet, a poeta doctus, his work at first glance displays the wide reading and deep passion of his literary precursors and paragons, which can be somewhat off-putting in today’s hectic poetry machine that seems to place a higher premium on ostentatious expressiveness than it does on refined aestheticism and serene detachment. Indeed, from his very first collection, Prostírání do tichého (Silent Table Settings, 1990), Borkovec has been a lyric poet who exhibits an almost cool aloofness and distance. His poetry dwells in a circle of inner space imbued with the past, an apartment, a room, the tranquility of an secluded study, or a poet’s studio and that celebrated barrier of books behind which once hid Rilke or Eliot in his renowned London study, about which Jiřina Hauková writes in her memoirs. For Borkovec, the inner world is in constant motion, flux, forever shifting. When he occasionally exits it, he is always armed with the instruments of interiority; they are never tossed aside during his excursions into the outer world. But even this characterization is somewhat archaic and bears little resemblance to the demeanor of contemporary literary warriors. Borkovec speaks even about his childhood in the country, in Louňovice, as a period that was between worlds, an intermediate stage, or as a space that was metaphorically demarcated by door or window frames. Boundaries, thresholds, border existences, regions depopulated and desolate, a land in need of protracted cultivation, at times quite arduous “field work,” a sort of tribal or genetic affinity to that which will eventually be called home, these are the Borkovcian motifs that one finds not only in his lyrical poetry but in his empathy for the intellectual and spiritual values of Antiquity and Christianity. After all, in his native Louňovice there was a vicarage — as if out of the 19th century — that helped to orientate the young poet toward spiritual poetry and to authors with a strong bond to the Christian faith, poets such as Jan Zahradníček, Bohuslav Reynek, Václav Renč, Ivan Slavík, and Vladimír Vokolek. Another trait of Borkovec’s poetry is its stability, its maturity, which was evident even from his very first efforts. Constant as well has been his fidelity to his own carefully considered poetics and to the principle that a poetic text is not the work of chance or fleeting inspiration, but the product of a long-term process of refining and maturation that will yield the desired final effect even though doubts might still linger about the immutability of the “completed” poem. The inner tension between the poem’s completion and incompletion typifies the whole of Borkovec’s oeuvre to date. His first collections, Prostírání do tichého and Poustevna věštírna loutkárna (Hermitage, Oracle, Puppet Theater), not only bore influences of the spiritual poets mentioned above but also traces of Vladimír Holan and Karel Šiktanc. The latter collection includes a cycle of poems about the months that has less to do with Karel Toman’s “calendar” cycle than with Šiktanc’s Český orloj (The Czech Astronomical Clock): “Everything / said Maria Veselkova / Holy / she continued // Cut of deer / dressed up / crepe-paper pansies / stuffed with mahonia / slowly putting down roots / in my vicinity // Branches breaking …” (from “November”). Like Šiktanc, Borkovec works with a language dense with the mythical and metaphorical. It is a language rooted in village rituals and practices, in an unadulterated, albeit feral, rusticity bearing the fullness of Reynek’s expressivity and poetic woodcarvings, resonating at times with naiveté and an empathetic frankness. In his following collection, Ochoz, which was published after a three-year pause, Borkovec tries to vary his poetic landscape by pulling back from the keeness of his early work and letting the poem penetrate the prosaic elements that sometimes run against its fragile body. He is even beset by a wave of negation and doubt, moments where he falters and feels sated by art, even a sated, fatigued art urgently posing the question: what is there left to say if the poet rejects his search for form and the attempt to express the known in different words: “… what is there to say beyond this garden / where I stand / ten, eleven, twelve / awaiting a sign / simply waiting for some sign; what to say / when a flight of birds smoothly draws through the sky / great Deleatur?” (from “Deleatur”). Borkovec’s world has suddenly reached a state without any visible joy. Looking out the window, he sees only “the cutout of the square,” immediately apostrophized as the “necessary cutout” of reality. The woodcut is no longer complete. The barking of dogs, the animal parallel to human speech, is silenced and words are “cut off” and “cut in two.” At this moment the creative individual would ask whether the only path left him were to escape into internal exile or into a Březina-like reticence. Yet Borkovec translates the poetry of the great exiles of the outer and inner worlds. Reyn, Khodasevich, Odarchenko, Nabokov were likewise poets of an internal, forced exile. By escaping into his inner world, therefore, Borkovec does not resist the pressure of any easily named power but primarily the pressure of the spiritual emptiness that reigns over the world and always leads sensitive types to feel at home in the seclusion found “between the window, table, and bed.” Here the real and metaphysical fumes of our existence “return” and smother. Everything becomes entangled and bites its own tail like Ouroboros. The “pounding, metal on metal” can be heard only from a distance, and the trees at the garden’s edge evokes in Borkovec’s work, like with Reynek, only the bluish shadow of phantoms. It is as if this children’s refuge, a country orphanage actually, has become a hermetic shell, the hold of a boat, transposed and dragged through a lyrical groping and the urgent work above the roofs of the outer world. It is not until the collection Mezi oknem, stolem a postelí (Between Window, Table, and Bed), which strikes a chord similar to Kafka’s interiority, does Borkovec develop his reclusive modus vivendi with the contemporary anti-lyrical world. In the volumes that follow, Borkovec ventures anew into the outer world, which he does not want to receive only in the passive role of an observer, but as one who works to cultivate the fallow land and transform the inner and outer landscape. Polní práce contains poems full of onerous questions forever errant. At the same time it’s as if there were the tissues of a thin membrane between the outer and inner world, home and abroad, the interior of a house and its surroundings: “We do what? We are involved in space, are silent, we let the dead sleep on. We cut down trees, fence off compost, pry open traps in which mice have com to grief. Evening, we take our dinner out to the garden, bring brushwood back into the room. We return it yellowed to the bonfire, its sweet smoke billowing through our wardrobes. In the twilight we look out at the wall And speak so as not to wake the dead. Amidst the furniture we make love with bodies, which are not the opposite of space.” (tr. by Justin Quinn in From the Interior: Poems 1995-2005 (Seren Books, 2008)) If in Polní práce Borkovec is focused on designating his inner abode, Needle-book, which contains poetry written around the turn of the 21st century, represents a rupture by taking an almost metaphysical, neo-baroque way of viewing one’s pilgrimage through the world. Hesitantly, and maybe unprepared and taken unawares, he leaves his inner walls with the mirrors of the windows and finds himself in an unfamiliar “traveler’s” space, with which he makes contact by what he has at his disposal and what he has appropriated from his previous poetry. In Needle-book short lyrical forms predominate. They can be compared to sketches of landscapes or to the art of the vedutisti, who though their intent was to depict the panorama and essence of a given place were well aware that despite all claims to objectivity the result would nonetheless be a personal, often deeply intimate confession. What is dominant in Borkovec’s most recent work is precisely the impressionistic, a record of illusory transience, a clinging to details that constitute the remains of memory. His last volume to date, Vnitrozemí (The Interior), is a selection from his previous collections plus new work spanning 1990 to 2005. Here the poet suddenly begins to compare his “inland” image of reality with what is beyond the horizon of these islands of the interior. Face to face with the expanse of sea and infinity, “the eye reels, / breaks through and loses a jewel.” “The sea pushes away a half-eaten fish, / as if no one were watching. / In the private depths it dismantles its fibers, / a spine smiles, and then hangs them back on, / as if no one were watching. / As if it had compared itself / to everything it now resembles.”
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