Authors

Before Hrbáč began to publish his poetry and prose for Brno’s Petrov house, he was relatively well known to readers of Tvar, a literary magazine to which he contributed many reviews and essays on contemporary literature, music, theatre and Czech culture and society as a whole. Even in his early journalistic work Hrbáč is recognizable as a sharp critic and rebel, a permanent malcontent in relation to the amoral and standardized nature of today’s world. Moreover, this work is infused with a professional interest, and this is perhaps also a flaw: as a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine Hrbáč does not deny a continuing fascination with the exact sciences. Though Hrbáč does not take medicine as a theme, his knowledge of the field is re-modelled so as to find expression in subtle psychological anamneses and miniatures of human character, or – as he explains himself in an interview with Jaromír John – the “animal character of the human”, which is not dissimilar to the predatory nature of wildlife and the wild luxuriance of plantlife. His most recent book – a collection called The Tip – includes an independent section called Black Horehound Poem, a paraphrasing of Deml’s My Friends and a lyrical apotheosis of nature at its most prosaic and untended. Also Hrbáč’s poems which take as their subjects cow wheat, chicory, clover, deadly nightshade and Bermuda grass, aspire to the supporting metaphor of the overgrown luxuriance of wild plants and grasses; an analogy is drawn with the lack of orderliness and unruliness of human lives (which are similarly overgrown and untended), and in which animality defeats luxuriance and smugness our natural humility. In his first volume of poetry The Well of the Sinking Heart, Hrbáč expresses his disillusion with the emotional aridity of today’s man, from whom he seeks to distance himself. He does not make this the subject of a moral lecture but rather attempts to draw it in detail and to give it his full compassion; the poet is all the while aware of the marks of absurdity with which the taking of such a position is riddled, an awareness which enables him to keep his soul clear. It is in such an atmosphere of sado-masochism that Hrbáč composes his poetry and prose. Intentionally he exaggerates, over-exposes, transposes things so as to make them bloated and freakish; he works with tools which are crude and uncompromising, producing a kind of ecstasy by the contrast between the grimness of the projection and the modicum of immaculacy and ‘normality’ he succeeds in mining. Hrbáč’s lyric poetry is played out in the space between town and country. This might be taken as an impression of a permanent periphery which exists within us all, a way out from the epicentre of our being with its plots and narratives – a way which leads backwards or onwards to enclosures and fences, wires and walls, to boundaries both imaginary and real. In the collection Underground Star the poetic images are anchored in clearly given countryside realities which are mostly Moravian. Hrbáč is no fussy conservative, no melancholic pilgrim wandering through his memories of a world barely glimpsed; his travels are characterized by discovery and surprise. Rather than merely to paint, merely to record images, he yearns to enter what he sees, somehow to intervene. In the poem Homage to the Surroundings of a Parish, Zboněk wishes to “pay a songbird for his sweat”. “Lash out at that little yellow bird / as it hovers. / Not hit it, though, that’d be too easy. / Not shout down the throat of its beautiful shadow, / which timidly evaporates from the tops of the summer mushrooms, / while the meadow makes do with the looseness of plaster / blown onto hats / blown onto the weeping mosquito.” In his poems Hrbáč is an active element, an element which rejects steadfastness. The work contains something angry, something agitated and argumentative. Perhaps it has traces of boyish schadenfreude, albeit combined with artlessness. The poet wishes to touch things, to examine them, to dismantle them or to combine them to create different states and forms. In all this, Hrbáč’s short works of spellbinding prose – which so far have appeared in the volumes The Trouser Stump and One Day of Ageing – are similar. Whereas the stories in The Trouser Stump – a collection of works from the 1990s – are by and large small sketches, more or less comical in effect, with and without punchlines, in One Day of Ageing we see that the author has moved his territory so as to embrace philosophical speculation, hints of the grotesque and gentle irony. In the miniature work The Prostitute he presents us, in a manner reminiscent of Brecht, with an abstracted portrait of a fallen woman who is enamoured of the brightly-coloured fishes whirling around in the aquarium near her brothel bed. Perhaps the aquarium is a metaphor for the closed world of the brothel; perhaps it reflects the fate of woman to pleasure man. Against the glass walls of the aquarium brush the prostitutes’ thoughts of convent walls – the walls of an institution in which the worldly duty to adore without love is transformed into a concentrated solitude apparently for ever denied to modern humankind. At the end of the story the mini-drama of ideals and hard reality is transcended by something almost metaphysical: a cloudlet of smoke flutters above the prostitutes’ talk and up to the ceiling, where it shapes itself into “a fluffy picture, Picasso laced with Braque, long dead, tingling with the bliss of the hereafter”. At times Hrbáč’s poetry and prose can verge on the morbid and the colloquial; but these tendencies, together with a use of black magic, can work to powerful effect to connect the world of mortal reality to the hereafter.

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Deutsch Petr HRBÁČ, Deutsch.doc

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