Authors

The hallmark of Radek Malý’s regular, strictly rhythmical verse is his raw, occasionally exalted and deliberately exaggerated delivery, relieved by a wry grimacing and Decadent stylization. Because ‘the ailing sun spouts blood’ in his days, the poet turns to the night and man’s unconscious pole – dreaming and darkness, since ‘from darkness we came and to darkness we shall return’. But in Malý’s poetry the night is not the haunt of surreal phantoms, but the focal point of our fascination with and fear of unknown landscapes; it is backlit by the cool silver of the Moon, which casts human life as a ludicrous lurching progress towards death. The poet is a dogged individualist and anarchist pacifist who strictly rejects authority and established hierarchies of values, protests against the absurdity of war and concludes that ‘for some time now he’s actually despised people’. He is a precocious sceptic who has walked a godless world (‘Hey there, God! / Have you died / Or are you just asleep?’), and is now standing on the bank of the river Lethe, at the interface of being and non-being, looking out for Charon and having a single wish: ‘to snuff it quietly, sooner rather than later.’ But in his first work, Lunovis, as in the subsequent Vraní zpěvy (Crows’ Songs), Malý relativizes his Expressionist inspirations with an informed Morgensternian grotesqueness: his dynamic prose-like verse is full of rage, juvenile impertinence and mocking tones, while at the same time vibrant with intellectual humour and searing self-irony. Likewise, his exemplary Decadent apparel, run up out of the poetics of Karel Hlaváček, František Gellner, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic or his contemporary Jiří H. Krchovský, is far more a witty, appealing game full of allusions and paraphrases than a real dance on the grave of the day and all existence.

(rk)

E-mail: kastanvkapse@seznam.cz

Deutsch Radek MALÝ, Deutsch.doc

En français Radek MALÝ, En français.doc

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