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Autumn gradually moving into winter, somewhere in the borderlands of north Bohemia, a storm about to break – heavy leaden clouds above, the landscape below darkening, then the heavens torn asunder with the first crash of lightning as a lone black figure makes its way from the apocalyptic downpour towards the dim lights of home. Such passionate moods and compelling images, weighted both with the willingly admitted traditions of Expressionism as with the more obliquely indicated sympathies with morbid decadence and strained romanticism, not only are the essence of the most recent volume of poetry by Radek Fridrich, but in a more flexible sense of his previous publication. The strong bond to the North Bohemian landscape, to its mythologies and intricately interwoven Czech-German history, which Fridrich continually strives to capture, to bring to life, to revive – all these are intensively feld components of this poetic oeuvre at the very least from the volume V zahradě Bredovských [In the Breda Gardens], published in 1999, through the cycle Erzherz of three years’ later date, up to the very newest volume Molchloch. The poet’s “newt hole” presents the reader with the hitherto most diverse range of poetic techniques, of widely variegated levels of language and stylistics: beside tightly contained, expressive texts of a physicality verging on the naturalistic, we encounter diary entries and descriptions of dreams, or variations on the text-recitations of Vasko Popa; other poems are marked by the rhythm and melody of folk songs, while still further texts resemble “one-second stories” or directly evoke the spectral atmosphere of specific towns in the Czech Sudetenland. Mysterious and secretive, Molchloch is, like all of Fridrich’s previous poetic creations, an all-enveloping book, of an animalistic instinct and spontaneity in its unimpeded word-flows; a book from which fear seeps out into the reader, bringing with it an authentic paralysing anxiety. The work of Radek Fridrich is eloquent in its verbal austerity, its brevity and enclosure – in how its suggestively metaphorical verse, generally following the line of a concrete story – makes its way to a discernable goal: the sense of Fridrich’s poetry is to allow the individual narratives of the landscape and its human inhabitants to be swept along in a single torrent, out of which, at the very end, the poet himself rises up, or in other words his position in contemporary time and space. Fridrich brings the past into the present, rehabilitating the half-forgotten or the utterly vanished. Many times his words and verses have sharp edges, often the poet “ weeps when the shards / cut into the memories”, yet the result – the “ordinary life” that emerges before the reader is not simply a life interwoven with pain, death, failure. In addition to all this, human existence in Fridrich’s vision contains an admirable reconciliation and resolve: “Bad times they were, but a man / has to survive somehow”, the figure of Anton Ettrich reflects in Erzherz, and Rudolf Keßler agrees: “Our life was more than a little / rough, yet we never whinged.” Through the veil of gloomy, hopeless, apocalyptic, death-haunted moods, this veil covering Fridrich’s personal variation of Alfred Kubin’s “land of dreamers”, there also shines through a sense of catharsis and hope: a hope that despite all of its pain, “life maybe has a secret / hidden sense”.

(rk)

Deutsch Radek FRIDRICH, Deutsch.doc

En français Radek FRIDRICH, En français.doc