Authors

In his foreword to "Letenka do noci" ["Flight into the Night"] - an anthology of contemporary surrealist poetry - the essayist and poet František Dryje writes of Josef Janda as "above all a sceptic". Herein perhaps lies a paradox: could an inclination to scepticism really provoke the imagination of the poet to such vivid, ironic and absurd charades as we find in former rock musician Janda's first volume of poems (The Tapir and the Gun), his digression into prose (Once Upon a Time in the East), and his most recent work (Poems)? "Sometimes I think the wisest creature / on this earth is the worm / For he has no brain / He does not suffer the obsessive need to go soft / at whatever cost and with no apparent cause." Would the author of lines such as these turn his back on the opportunity and his own ability to understand the world, as if there was nothing here for him but a deep distrust of everything? Although Josef Janda has been a member of the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists since 1984, his artistic credo has always been closer to the pataphysical. It is most important for Janda - just as it was one hundred years ago for Alfred Jarry, and is today for Eduard Vacek - to control the exception, not to approach the world head-on but to do so from the side or with one's back turned towards it - and from this angle to look around for a reality and then slowly to take possession of it and to transform it into a shape one can tolerate. The point of departure for the poet is a critique of society's "-isms", which are basically the same before and after the revolution - in the form of a sarcastic and satirical commentary on the times, when it would be possible "to teach even an old straw mattress to whinny", on the post-1989 ideology which has seen change as if "by magic wand / in the invisible hand of the market / lining its own pocket with what is left". And from this position of a Hašek or a Péret, Janda's lines shoot off halos over the heads of those artificial, tragico-farcical figures who have populated the world since time began, and who happily allow one or other ideology to become reality. "What I'd most like to do is bite you all," Janda writes laconically, adding elsewhere in more detail: "Even after all these years / I always marvel / at how many gigantic fools / can be crammed / onto this small planet". Janda is able, however, to take aim at and open fire on himself with comparable fervour: "I just died / Death has four ears / Best wishes, Josef J." And behind this vanguard of words there wanders the caravan of a special imagination, which turns everyday matters on their head, thereby building - it is to be hoped - a comforting existential roof over the head of the poet. Janda's highly expressive vocabulary, the plebeian, earthy diction of the pub wit which emerges from his lips and waits at his fingertips as if on the offchance, without any attempt at stylization or additional provision for aesthetic qualities - all this takes the reader to a place populated by remarkable anthropomorphs and their remarkable myths. A "fish" flits through the pages of Poems, which "digs in the mud with a ladle / while eating a pirog", and further "teeny snail dwarfs ... / jumping up and down, and in their helicopters / flying to work on an enormous sculpture, / long covered in moss". The place Janda's writing inhabits is defined not by resignation, nor by rage, nor by a constant need to subvert; rather it is a place where one waits with pleasure to see who, when, what or where will be seized upon by the author as his next hero, subject or location, to be drawn into the plot of his private panoptic, this seemingly nonsensical theatrum mundi which with nonchalance parrots and penetrates folk literature just as it does advertising. The poetic coordinates are an intersection of the liberated imagery of a Pavel Řezníček or a Viki Shock, the "blue humour" of Brno's A.I.V. artists' circle, and certain qualities of the surreal familiar from the work of Julius Cortázar. It is certainly not important that we make sense of all of Janda's writings - whether the early work with the more spontaneous imagery or the more recent, which carries elements of the epic and has punchlines. Perhaps this state of permanent confusion of languages is even desirable, as "who knows if it didn't get muddled up / So many words scattered to the wind ". But above all: "Why should people understand one another, after all? Aren't they held together far better by the possibility of - as they call it today - consensus?"

Deutsch Josef JANDA, Deutsch.doc

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