Authors

Since his first volume of poetry, Nebe jasně zelené (Sky of Bright Green), Jiří Gold has been a lyric poet of existence, a philosophical poet of the Socratic school, even though his first collection makes no attempt to deny the influence of poetry in praise of civilization (civilismus), the poetry of small, insignificant events and allusions, which was dominant in Czech poetry in the 1960s. In his first work, Gold seems at first to have merged with the current that was introduced to Czech lyric verse by Karel Šiktanc, Jiří Šotola, Jiří Pištora, Petr Kabeš and Pavel Šrut, poets not associated with any movement or group who wrote, however, in a spirit similar to the waning Poetism of, say, Vítězslav Nezval and Jaroslav Seifert, which was penetrated by undertones of scepticism, nihilism and disillusion. The programme that acted as the glue holding all these authors together was a sort of counter to mythicism or at least the rejection of erstwhile poetic models and canons. Gold also paraphrases mythology, taking it from heroism to praise of civilization, which in his work is marked by irony and a tendency to a grotesque perception and portrayal of the world. On the second plane of this battle in the ‘bright green sky’ a Rilkean echo remains, within which is grasped the antithesis of mere glimpsing, observation of the world and non-participation in its course, and an almost Dionysian devotion to the world and to the principle of the eternal dance. In Minotaurus (Minotaur), his second volume of verse, Gold penetrates deeper into the corridors of the intricate labyrinth, to draw a picture of our world also as a fabulous, invisible creature, on whose account this world was conceived as a castle or impregnable fortress, as a stone colossus, as well as a place to hide from the wildness and rampancy of being. The verse of this collection is without a trace of the lyric conception of life. Here, as in the works of Sartre or Camus, it has to do with the clear-cut dualism of existence as the extensive element, becoming infinitely layered and overlapping, and, on the other hand, essence as the intensive element, the divine phenomenon of being, which can be perceived, however, only during the brief moments when one is beyond the labyrinth walls. Gold’s former intentional demythicization of the world is now substituted for by an attempt to create new myth, new concealment, new allegory. He works with allegory almost like Vladimír Holan, but without abandoning the pellucidity of Rilke or the attraction to metaphysical transcendence. In Minotaurus, which is composed internally and where nothing is left to chance, the style of Gold’s subsequent works is born. Observation of existence becomes problematic, almost impossible: sight is a sense that is walled-up, veiled, and light penetrates only to what is behind the eyes (zá-zrakem) – that is to say, the miracle (zázrakem) of being. Like his contemporaries, Gold remained silent during the long years of renewed hard-line Communism following the Soviet-led intervention of August 1968, while in a quiet corner his work matured into individual lyrical records of passing time, in which reflection of both the world and one’s innermost self would come to be connected with a consistent ‘diary’ style of inventiveness and concise, laconic language, moving from the superficial to the essence of things, from many layers to the straightforwardness of philosophical metaphor, to questions rather than answers, and more to allusion than strictly given form. In the 1990s Gold published four collections of verse in short intervals. They contain individual texts linked, with few exceptions, to the concrete by information about the time in which they were made. In the spirit of clashing antitheses flowing into the darkness of fleetingness and temporality develop the records from 1991, which the author employed in composing a sort of collage in Noci dní (The Nights of the Days). Compared to the ecstatic imagery, concreteness bordering on harshness, and the naturalism of the poetic metaphors of the first collections, this volume displays a clear tendency to abstraction, generalization, and abbreviation of ideas, while the philosophical essentialness of the lyric statement comes to the fore. The use of infinitives and verbal forms in general has increased, whereas the use of nouns has dwindled away. The experience of the world clashes with asceticism, action with death, and time with timelessness and the void. The punctuation in this collection, as in the earlier Samospád samoty (Freefall of Solitude), Mezery v mlčení (Spaces in the Silence) and Sutě: písky: drtě (Rubbles: Sands: Gravels), is limited strictly to the colon, but it is used abundantly. This suggests the principle of continuous development and extension of the intellectual design in the spirit of a sort of Nietzschean return to the beginning. The closed formal structure and intellectual architecture of Gold’s records is not, however, without an almost neo-Baroque intricacy and metaphoric quality. The concretely perceivable and describable world radiates through the idea much as it did in the work of the Baroque poets. Sutě: písky: drtě, Gold’s most recent work, contains poems that approach moral, yet very non-didactic, lessons or postulates, or even sophisms, in which the poet’s ego continuously exhorts the other side, the shade of another being, hidden in his own heart and freewheeling reason.

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This author profile was last updated in 2006

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