Authors

The work of Zbyněk Hejda has always stood outside of the influences of the day, and under Communism was hardly suitable to the reigning ideology. During the two decades of “normalisation,” Hejda was deprived of the possibility of legal publication (the majority of his books were first published abroad or in samizdat), meaning that even though his first volume of poetry was completed in the late 1950s, he only entered the awareness of the general reading public in the 1990s. When, in 1996, Hejda’s collected poetic oeuvre was published in a single volume, it became evident that his literary work is “poetry in a single piece” – that for years he has written variations on a single theme, this being the awareness of human mortality. Hejda’s poetic vision is stripped down to a select few predominant motifs and the barest of scenery, situated in a space beyond time, or a generalised pre-modern time-frame. His world is one facing a mythical apocalypse: a desolate rural landscape, usually autumnal or wintry, “a landscape burnt dry of colour”, where all that can be observed is a general hastening to death and decay. The inescapability of death at times resembles the Baroque obsession with the “birthing of nothingness”, expressed metaphorically as a mother (an actual person or nature itself) giving birth to children that fall straight into the grave – as in perhaps Hejda’s best-known poem of the suicide who hanged himself with the braid of his dead mother’s hair. In contrast to hectic urban life, Hejda presents the setting of the village, where the central points of human existence appear in more concentrated form. Yet Hejda’s villages are in no way refuges of a bygone order, but filled, by contrast, with a nervous tension that the author brings with him from the city, or from the modern world in general. The lyrical subject of these poems oscillates between the cemetery (recalling the transience of mortal existence) and the pub, as the site of sin and ecstasy, the place of a fleeting moment of forgetfulness of human misery. (Among poets of a younger generation, a similar concentration of theme and similar restriction to a limited set of coordinates is also found in the work of J. H. Krchovský, though his own stylisation bears the unmistakable stamp of an ironic grimace.) One highly uncommon trait of Hejda’s is the position of woman in his poetic texts: in essence, he recognises only two types, the mother and the whore. The latter for him embodies a dark perilous Eros, a destructive passion, desire bearing an almost Biblical threat („V nehynoucích klínech děvek / neúnavně se zmítá maso“, „Děvkám se líbí ras, / už si stahují sukně, hle / líhnou se hadi“, „Za ním hlasy, i děvek, / tušíš nádherné hořící klíny“). Yet, like the village pub, the fallen woman likewise serves as a symbol of forgetfulness, a brief halt before the gates of the “eternal kingdom of the worm”. In contrast to this, Hejda’s relation with the mother (to be understood as the author’s own mother, in no way a general concept) is one of almost paranoid anxiety. The unceasing fear for his mother’s life, and for the mother as the embodiment of a private ontology-memory („Můj Bože, stejská se až do maminky. Stejská se k smrti“) is itself supplemented by the motif of young girls, a frail counterpoint to the author’s ever-present “coffinings”. As far as literary inspiration is concerned, Hejda’s texts clearly display echoes of German Expressionism, whose leading practitioners (Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn) he also translated into Czech. Nonetheless, in Hejda’s literary pedigree one can also find many “domestic” influences – among them K. H. Mácha, Jakub Deml, Halas or Holan. Despite this, Hejda’s oeuvre presents readers something quite rare within Czech literature: a vision singularly ascetic, relentlessly single-minded, avoiding all temptations of hope (even though a distant “hellish” optimism can occasionally be discerned). For the readers of today, Hejda’s self-declared existential standpoint is far from the irritation that it was to the ideologues of Communism („A tak tu jsme, že jsme sem uvrženi, / my jen tak náhodou, my pro nikoho, tak…“) – far more, we can view him as a suggestive minimalist, capable of sketching the entire drama of existence in a few scant lines („Dva lidé posunují svým příběhem / a je jim smutno na konci cesty“) and leaving the rest to emerge through the internal tension behind the poetic text. An equal part of Hejda’s literary work are his diary-like prose pieces and jottings, e.g. the memoir “Nikoho tam nepotkám” [I’ll Meet No One There] or Cesta k Cerekvi [The Way to Cerekev], “a holiday journal from Horní Ves”. These are raw, unstylised notes, usually bare evidence without reflection, that with the passage of time capture the magic of the quotidian routine, various family reminiscences, along with dreams that are also used for the author’s poems and represent, for their creator, a natural component of the world. And with equal naturalness, Hejda’s prose expresses a sense of a bond with the dead: in the memory of the living, they remain with us and freely circulate “on the path from the cemetery to the village / and from the village to the cemetery”, for Hejda, the “truly promised path / to the truly promised land / to the one promised land”.

Bibliography:

Všechna slast [All Pleasure], Mladá fronta, Prague 1964 Blízkosti smrti [The Closeness of Death], PmD, München 1985 (KDM, Prague 1992) Lady Felthamová, La Différence, Paris 1989 (KDM, Prague 1992) Pobyt v sanatoriu [A Stay in the Sanatorium], KDM, Prague 1993 Nikoho tam nepotkám [I’ll Meet No One There], Archa, Zlín 1994 Valse mélancolique, Petrov, Brno 1995 Básně [Poems], Torst, Prague 1996 Cesta k Cerekvi [The Way to Cerekev], Triáda, Prague 2004 Sny [Dreams], Revolver Revue, Prague 2007

(jn)

Deutsch Zbyněk HEJDA, Deutsch.doc

En français Zbyněk HEJDA, En français.doc