Authors
František LISTOPAD
Poet, playwright, essayist, journalist, translator, writer, television and stage director, František Listopad was born on November 26, 1921, in Prague as Jiří Synek. He graduated from Gymnasium in 1939 and began to work at the V. Linhart publishing house. In 1941 he joined the resistance, and his father perished in a concentration camp. He enrolled at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in 1945 to study aesthetics and literary sciences. At the same time he edited and managed the cultural section for Mladá fronta, the daily he helped to found. At this time Listopad belonged to a loose association of poets congregating around the paper. Going by the name dynamoarchism, the group also included, among others, Ivan Andrenik, Jaromír Hořec, and Oldřich Kryštofek. In 1947 he was sent to Paris as the editor of the Ministry of Information’s magazine Parallèle 50, and after the communist coup in Frebruary 1948 he stayed. Working largely as a journalist, Listopad contributed to French radio and television. He moved to Portugal in 1959, first to Porto and then to Lisbon, where from 1964 he was a professor of Slavic culture and anthropological artifacts at the Technical College. From 1975 to 1977 he served as director of the Instituto Superior de Ciencias Sociais e Políticas, and from 1982 director of the Film and Theater College. It was around this time that he became interested in directing plays for television and stage, and the latter half of the 1980s he was director and later dramaturge for one of the stages of Lisbon’s National Theater. He published in Portugal under the name of Jorge Listopad. He again took up residence in the Czech Republic after 1989 and published books, collaborated with Czech periodicals, in particular Literární noviny, and worked as a teacher and theater director at the Janáček Music Academy (JAMU) in Brno and the Theatre Goose on a String (Divadlo Husa na provázku).
Listopad’s vast oeuvre can be broken into three constituent parts: prose, poetry, and essays. As a poet, he was first influenced by Halas, and his early work from the mid-1940s is marked by rich metaphor as well by the tragic, sorrowful tone from “the end of history.” He was one of the collaborators of “dynamoarchism,” a postwar literary movement that echoed German Romanticism, in particular with its emphasis on the “creative power of literature, the dynamism of art and culture generally” (Blanka Hemelíková). Close to the poetics of Group 42, the dynomoarchists poeticized fragments of the ordinary, slices of the city’s everyday scenery, and the existential dimensions of its characters. Listopad’s poetry is written in free and spontaneous verse. The individual stanzas, the poet’s “preoccupations,” are arranged on the basis of association, sharp cuts that occur in the poem’s architecture like an element of dramatic tension from their confrontation, an unbound element, almost like a Poetist game. After Listopad emigrated from Czechoslovakia, “his search for the meaning of existence and poetry, and his continual coming to grips with death became the thematic leitmotifs of his poetry collections. Harkening back to his ‘Halas beginnings,’ Listopad’s poetry in exile aims for the symbolic utterance and rich metaphorical expression. There also appeared word experiments, which opened avenues for the word’s independence, the use of neologism, and his long-standing interest in euphony and new melodiousness” (B. Hemelíková). Listopad’s prose retains a fidelity to the lyricism and sensuality of his poetry, and it is focused thematically on the small event or situation, which are often of a romantic or erotic nature whose potential tenderly opens in a wide semantic and figurative fan (Umazané povidky, Chinatown s Rózou). The best of Listopad’s essays is a collection of four wide-ranging, philosophically introspective texts that are meditations on the search for and not finding one’s home in the world (Tristan z města do města).
(rk)
En français 
František LISTOPAD, En français.doc
