Authors

Ever since his late official debut Za oknem Erben (Erben outside at the Window), the poetry of Jaroslav Kovanda has been a remarkable experiment with language, where archaic expressions interweave with dialect, neologisms of his own making and striking visual forms, which carry on the tradition of Czech concrete poetry. Kovanda’s verse takes us through the landscape of his memories, comprising places and times, which rise spontaneously from subjective memory until their contours finally assume the shape of an archetypal map of the world in which we live, particularly in the last century. ‘I see poetry as a record of an era’, Kovanda explains, ‘as if we were projecting slides for each other. You’ve made some, while I have different ones in the back of my mind. What poetry seeks to do is hit upon a funny, surprising, original way of putting them together and saying: ‘Here! This is what I’m like!’ And when I’m messy, my slides are messy; and when I only think of gaining riches, then the poems are poor, and when I believe that I live in a miracle, then my poetry may acquire some of that wonder.’ Kovanda’s expression is a continuous, definitive, personal testimony, like Jiří Kolář’s, and yet in each of his works Kovanda is also an evasive, vigorous seducer of expressive form and the potential of language. Legenda o Svedrupovi (The Legend of Svedrup), the second title from his mysterious aesthetics mill, carries the reader back to the 1930s and 40s, to a tangle of grotesque and tragic tales dominated by the jovial figure of Kovanda’s uncle, the folk story-teller Jan Fila a.k.a. Svedrup (much like Hašek’s Švejk or Hrabal’s Uncle Pepin in Cutting It Short). These long epic poems, which Kovanda has composed from snatches of stories heard from his father, evolve around a single figure and a single story, contrasting the tangle of verse, fragments of poems and poetic sketches, which he brings together in his third collection, Odpolední klid (Afternoon Break). In this small volume, Kovanda goes back to the 1950s, the ‘schizophrenic era’ when ‘I heard one thing at school and something quite different at home’, and in austere, dynamic poems thoroughly grinds up the techniques of the literary avant-garde (mainly of Poeticism and Surrealism), and of ‘Civilism’, together with the poetics of the Beat Generation and elements of experimental poetry. The short volume of sonnets Nebe nad kantýnou (The Skies Over the Canteen) once again brings a sense that his style is more relaxed, though it is mainly written as a debate with the traditional form of the Shakespearean sonnet, which in Kovanda’s interpretation is at once a documentary and a fascinating display of language.

(rk)

E-mail: psi.vino@volny.cz

Deutsch Jaroslav KOVANDA, Deutsch.doc

En français Jaroslav KOVANDA, En français.doc