Authors

The publication of Surrealistické východisko (A Surrealistic Way Out) 1938–1968, brought out by Československý spisovatel (Czechoslovak Writer) in 1969, classified Roman Erben among the post-surrealist circle of the UDS, within whose framework various influences intersected in the 60s – Beat culture, existentialism, experimental poetry and surrealism, but also jazz and bebop improvisation or absurdist drama – and which helped to mould such diverse and distinctive creative individuals as Milan Nápravník, Věra Linhartová, Vratislav Effenberger, Zbyněk Havlíček, Stanislav Dvorský and Petr Král. Král himself appraised Erben’s early series Uhlí (Coal), a collection of black-and-white graphic creations on the border between Art Informel and drawing, as “a rare message, in which the author’s hand… recorded with the sensitivity of a seismograph not only the crucial ‘rustlings below us’, reaching out from somewhere in primaeval caves to modern cellars, but also significant shifts taking place between the graphic and verbal elaboration of this mental concept”; with these words the essayist hinted at the future duality of Erben’s work, his defining movement between the word and the image.Erben never worked within the tradition of contemporary concrete poetry or formulated his poetic message like Jiří Kolář or Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová – that is, as a text whose words expand into a graphic form of communication, as a consonance of semantic expression with the visual sphere. He was more interested in the possibility of parallel, analogous expression – and to convey this possibility the author exploited a theme through words and images both in his belated first book Artyčoky chána Kučuma (Khan Kuchum’s Artichokes), a selection of texts from 1962–1989, and in a second volume of texts entitled Honitba v salónu (Hunting in the Parlour), which chronologically ties together and presents to the reader poems dating from 1990–2004.
Erben’s poetry flows in waves of images, aphorisms, metaphors, random notes in the margins of focused thoughts, it digs out “what was left in the pockets”, what fills “the folds of clothing” – it does not walk upright and yet with long steps, its movements are “leaps / touches, pauses”, gliding, whispering, clapping, oscillating, whistling, waving; the sensation that “the whole world gambols/ around us on all fours”.  The movement is primarily a horse galloping, a man walking, a dog running, a foot dancing, a hand gesticulating, facial expressions – and above that: “the Maestro Wind”. The poems in Artyčoky chána Kučuma and Honitba v salónu – which are not random sequences of images, but episodic texts, not Petr Král’s “emptiness of the world”, but a constantly bubbling and overflowing “fullness of the world”– are eternally unresolved, opening and extending towards the next possibility, are fidgety and undisciplined, constituting a neverending “work in progress”. The same applies to their author himself, whose thought, just as with Tristan Tzara, is made in the mouth and for whom every additional reading of an old text means its recasting into a new and still changeable form. Erben’s poems have the character of instructions and descriptions, training and warm-up exercises, but also mischief-making and hoaxing, growing out of the setting of the city of Prague, out of the districts of Nusle and Michle, those “two elderly ladies with thick sunglasses, who had their day long ago”, they have the character of instructions for a journey through reality, they are a collection of landmarks to help us to see what has escaped us, to get hold of what seems to be out of our reach. Through his precariously personal writing, with texts spinning around the author’s subject, the poet recaptures what time has carried away, what flowed away with our childhood – “we are recapturing the world that was stolen from us,” writes Erben and in the texts he hoards his memories and his former and current obsessions, he records his personal and irreplaceable secrets. Since “only memory is left intact / by the scissors. Life cannot be retouched.”
In Roman Erben’s writing, distrust is present as one of the basic values: a touch of scepticism, a touch of irony and self-irony – distance from the world of technology and also the world of poetry, a mild social criticism, an emigrant’s frivolous take on a tarnished form of Czechness: “Almost everything that Bohemia has stood for / will be lost. Look for the blaze / which comes from it!” In essence we can understand all of Erben’s literary work as an original form of anti-poetry, as a polemic with genres, with histrionic and cryptic lyrics and with extensive narrative zones, as a distrust of stylization and as a distrust of fiction. To the poet, it is only really about one thing: Not closing off possibilities, not letting one’s vision grow dim. Because “in each drop, the same as in a rabbit or in an ape, we receive an inexhaustible quantity of tiny messages. No word is left out.”

(rk)

This profile was last updated on 1st April 2006

Deutsch Roman Erben, Deutsch.doc