Authors
Petr KRÁL
Poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator, Petr Král was born in Prague on 4 September 1941. He took a degree in dramaturgy from the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), Prague, and later became an editor at Orbis publishers, in charge of the Film and Filmmakers series. In the wake of the Soviet-led intervention of August 1968 he left for France, where he found employment in a gallery and a photo-laboratory; later, he was an editor in the Gallimard publishing house. He has also worked as an interpreter, translator, screenwriter and reviewer. In 1984 he lived in Québec, Canada. In 1990–91 he was the Czechoslovak cultural attaché in France. He translates into French, mainly modern Czech verse, and has edited a number of poetry anthologies. In 2010 he became the Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Since 2006 he has been living in Prague.
Against the background of glossy magazines and billboards, TVs and film screens, the everyday world usually appears as a spectre-inhabited ‘grey zone’ or the far-fetched action of a silent slapstick film. In this world, the dream is not a great expansion of reality, a union of disparate things, or a crossing-over from the real to the imaginary; instead, it becomes the inner domain of man or a small piece of private property. The poetry of Petr Král gravitates towards the core of this ‘grey zone’. In the 1960s, the young dramaturgy student met the leading Czech Surrealists of the day, particularly Vratislav Effenberger. As a novice poet, he took an interest in the leading figures of Poeticism, the native Czech arts movement of the interwar years, including Vítězslav Nezval and Karel Teige, while harbouring an affection for the Neo-Baroque poetry of František Halas and Vladimír Holan. Whereas the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century represent a stepping-out of the riverbed of time, Král, in his earliest cycles of verse (Tyršovské přeháňky [Tyršian Cloudbursts]), sensitively considers the onslaught of modern history, mainly in its bizarre, grotesque forms of neo-nationalism and totalitarianism. His book about Miroslav Tyrš is an idiosyncratic tract. Rather than portray Tyrš, the founder of Sokol (a mass Czech organization for physical-training, established in the nineteenth-century) and figure of the late National Revival, as a man imbued with the waning Romanticism of the poet Karel Hynek Mácha, he portrays him, Král style, as a kitschy old melancholic colour photograph, in which he is almost lost in the crowd of Sokol members, fanatical figures of the movement, who ultimately turn into spectral mechanical monsters who carry out an impersonal verdict. When we consider the Stalinism of the 1950s Communist régime, the era in which Král grew up, it becomes clear that his poetry would eventually be marked by a clash with the superficiality of the various cults springing up. Their pathos had to be deconstructed, whether with irony and the grotesque, which Král had already employed in his verse, or with a surreal game, the tool André Breton had used to stir up and relieve the tediousness of politics. After emigrating to France, Král became a cosmopolitan figure (like František Listopad from the previous generation of émigrés); he became a citizen of a Paris that was no longer the home of the bohemians, Surrealism or experimentation, but the alienated metropolis of Camus, now also exposed to the incursions of the ‘grey’. Encoded in Král is a photographic, observant perception of the world around him. His poetry is sometimes even overburdened with isolated, confined images lacking further causal links. Inside the totality of a poem or a lyric cycle, such images do not unite to create a panoramic view of a single universe; instead, they appear as a mosaic, a collage, a symphony of different tones and modalities. The movement of the observed objects – places, people, stories and things – seems to be of greater importance to him than the shifts inside himself, which would be reflected in a change of poetics. Although his work is polysemantic, it is without great dramatic turns or events, inner eruptions or reversals. Nonetheless, as we enter the deeper layers of Král’s all-embracing poetry, we find that what prevails there is random memories of childhood, of an atmosphere linked to the ‘reality’ of Bohemia and particularly of Prague, which, compared with the ‘big’ world, often appears to be a grotesque or a masterful sketch with variations on the typical Kafka or Hašek theme of moderate ‘Czech narrow-mindedness’. Even the smallest trace of myth in his writing leads Král to doubt the relevance of the mythological fabric inside the grey zone of the present. This logically results in demythologization and a shift to the domain of the grotesque, of slapstick, which, unlike the gentle babbling of Hrabal, has oppressive, obsessive, at times even tragic features. In the introduction to Groteska čili Morálka šlehačkového dortu (Slapstick or, The Morality of the Custard Pie), an inspired look into the era of slapstick, Král cites a poem from his youth, which seems to offer a view of the world as a cinematic dream, a recollection of things and events that linger in the indeterminate space between reality and unreality: ‘It will be three o’clock before long the queue now passing right across the embankment / Along the walls of old slaughterhouses similar to a bleached bone / The drama of nothing happening continues to grow the map-like blotches of dried-up blood are still valid / But I search the white plaster in vain for the cluster of ink-stains / Like the brawls in silent slapsticks’. The verse of Petr Král confirms the elasticity of the Surrealist method, yet he declares that in his collections from the late 1960s he parted ways with Surrealism as a form of life fulfilment, and entered the realm of emptiness. Along with emptiness and nirvana, the poet’s works published while an émigré (for instance, Pařížské sešity [Paris Notebooks], Chiméry a exil [Chimeras and Exile]) consider with even greater eloquence the kinds of eternal longing that is embodied not in objects but feeds on itself, eventually devouring the one who desires. This conception of longing ultimately leads to an unmistakable outcry, which was recorded by Král in his early months as an émigré in Paris, and has remained emblematic of his work in general: ‘We do not die; it is much worse than that: we disappear. In other words, we have never existed. Reality does not exist.’
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Petr KRÁL
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