Authors

As a post-revolutionary poet, for a long time things were difficult for Jirous. The match between the Communist regime of the years of Normalization on the one hand and an art historian who became the artistic brains of Plastic People of the Universe and a writer of metrical, naive verse on the other, was an uneven one. Having spent nine years behind bars – where he was returned repeatedly for various activities hostile to the state – he suddenly lost his ideological adversary. His poet’s “vanitas”, which had had an element of concreteness and which it is fair to say was in daily attendance, and which he claimed ironically to “relish” (as we can read in the sublime Magor’s Swan Songs, 1986) – this “vanitas” lost its contours as it seeped out over the open terrain of an open society and was submerged in the grey. Magor’s summae (Torst, 1998), an anthology taken from thirteen collections comprising a body of published and unpublished work begun in 1973, seemed to confirm Jirous/Magor’s ongoing dilemma and perhaps even to accentuate it. In the new, free environment up to 1998, Jirous published only Magor for Children (1991), a book of rhymes and stories for younger readers, Magor in the Twilight (1994), and the twin collections of old and new verse, Magor’s Mystical Rose and Protective Surveillance (1997). It is possible that Jirous was confronted with a fundamental question throughout this period: either to take stock of his oeuvre and make his subsequent work a variation on and a pulverization of his existing poetics and themes. (This was the route favoured by Jiří H. Krchovský – Jirous’ younger contemporary in the Czech Underground scene of the Seventies and Eighties – in his 2003 collection The Last Page, and it proved a disappointment of his readers.) Alternatively, Jirous could attempt to use new means to grasp new themes. Fortunately, not long after the publication of his summae, Jirous chose the second option. The first entry in Jirous’ “vita nova” (which, incidentally, is the title of the most recent collection by the poet František Pánek, with whom Jirous has much in common) was the 1999 volume Magor’s vanitas, published by Jaroslav Erik Frič’s Brno house Vetus Via. This work of one-hundred-plus pages moves on the one hand in the shallow waters of expression by phrase and vulgarity, theatricality and brutality, decadence of mood – all of which is interconnected with rage and sorrow to a greater extent than the cathartic irony and self-irony we know from Jirous’ earlier work. Many of the poems have, as with the earlier work, one foot in the social criticism of bought-up, fitful, ontological enquiry – that is to say in the dichotomy that in the Normalization years was not merely an incentive for Jirous, but something which became a pre-condition of his capacity to create. But in Magor’s vanitas we find an innovative counter-movement: on the one hand the far more limited use of aestheticized rhyme, as used by Jirous’ mentor Egon Bondy to legitimize his totally realistic report on the status quo of human life in the Czechoslovakia of the early Fifties (and which was deployed to oxidize Daliesque mystification in the guise of the awkward poetry of Bondy’s confrere Ivo Vodseďálek); on the other hand, Jirous addresses anew a double phenomenon which seemingly he has re-discovered – woman and landscape. Jirous’ 2001 collection The Swan Flogger bears heavy characteristics of love and nature poetry; its principal interests are great desire and faith re-found (Perhaps love, too / Will notice me yet). We might describe this work as a bringing together of ritual worship and underground dance, which at least symbolically serves to conciliate the artist with his world, partly and temporarily softening the split between manic litanies and a self-flagellating, depressive humility. And what of Jirous today? Rattus norvegicus – a collection written, with a few exceptions, between 2002 and 2004, once again published by Vetus Via – uses for the most part free verse to express the search for its romantic, Mácha-esque roots. Its rhymes seem to occur by chance rather than by programming. We see the author retreating from the outer world into his own self; the public has perhaps by now been driven out of his field of vision definitively, to be replaced by the intimate. Gone are Jirous’ use of surface effect and vulgarity, while the new tone of greater intimacy invests the text with a power of sensitivity and empathy which might surprise some. Jirous writes in this collection: “They show up sharply / the contours of the dark pine woods / from the fields the scent, languid / of the drying potato harvest.” Elsewhere he writes: “Her eyes gazed / into the dark / thick black lashes / motionless / their enclosure.” But the romanticism of Mácha, and perhaps that, too, of the “blaue Blume” poet Novalis, is characterized not only by the artist’s devoted quest for the femme fatale, the faith that “tenderness and love / these are for ever”; the romantic soul also takes on the risk of refusal, has an appreciation of the elusiveness of the aim. And Jirous’ present-day work – filled as it is with an admiration for other classics of Czech verse, for the balladic power of Erben’s Kytice [The Bouquet] or the wistful melodies of the decadent poetry of Hlaváček – supplements its adoration and glorification with a binding together and then knocking to the ground (and this with a Sisyphean regularity) of loneliness and despair, the knowledge that the poet always “speaks / with regret / with sorrow / with despair”. Sometimes Jirous is unexpectedly direct, as in this quatrain: “But where am I supposed to hide / under the cool rocks? / Tell me / sweet mama!” Rattus norvegicus is a strangely moving work, its melancholy protracted. And it goes that bit further to reconcile the ageing author to the world – to the reality to which for so long after the revolution of 1989 he failed to find a key. The evidence of his latest collection suggests that Ivan Martin Jirous has indeed found his key, and also the door to which it fits. What is more, he has found the most important thing of all – the courage to step inside.

(rk)

Deutsch Ivan Martin JIROUS, Deutsch.doc

En français Ivan Martin JIROUS, En français.doc

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