Authors

‘Dreaming for me is a part of life, and so too of my texts,’ Lukáš Marvan revealed in an interview, outlining thereby the basic poetic coordinates of his entire verse output. Likewise the title of his latest collection to date – Noční cesta denní krajinou (A Nocturnal Trip through a Diurnal Landscape) – is indicative of the repertoire of his motifs: the poet moves spontaneously between day and night, dreams and reality, records of dreams and records of what ordinary people say. And the landscape in tints of the surreally civil in which Marvan moves is a landscape sui generis, a landscape an sich and above all für sich: it is a vacant world and infinite universe pervaded by silence, it is space and time made matter and inspiring fear; but it is also pervaded by the author’s eternal yearning to experience this fear. In the same interview Lukáš Marvan went on: ‘Some dreams have been with me since childhood (…). In my dreams there are places to which I return from time to time and where I seem to live parallel lives. A major theme is travelling, departing for some land from which there is no return.’ His first book, Levhart nebo leopard (Panther or Leopard) is a book of primal chaos: given that the poet recognizes that Jiří Kolář has had a major influence on his work, the style of Levhart nebo leopard can be viewed as a unique cut-and-paste collage, though more in the spirit of Kolář’s Surrealist beginnings than his later rationalism. With ‘chance’ magic and beauty, the ‘external’ poetic mode encounters the ‘internal’, motifs of the day intertwine with motifs of the night, and brutally expressive features (‘If they won’t keep me in / I’ll slash my wrists again / So that the nurse sees it’) switch immediately into exquisitely intimate, delicately dreamlike miniatures (‘He woke up in a mist / Far from the shore / Propped on a black dead fish’). On the one hand Marvan develops the poetics of Skupina 42 (The 42 Group); this is in the utterances overheard ‘in the street’, when the authorial subject – Jiří Kolář’s ‘eye-witness’ – lends his voice to the anonymous actions that surround him and constitute daily life. The other side of these narrative sequences is the poet’s lyricized addresses to himself, an inner discourse that is buoyed up by the maelstrom of a liberated and liberating imagination and which evidently builds on both the premises of Surrealism and those of the Czech version of Spanish-American Magic Realism. With his second collection, Stíny a příběhy (Shades and Stories), Marvan’s verse started to shift from hints and presentiments to ever greater concision and an ever clearer end-point. ‘From attempts at “pure” poetry (…) I went step by step towards myself,’ says Marvan. ‘It doesn’t come at once; if you try to cram too much in, it sticks out. I simply came to myself, like when you’re playing the piano or a drum and start improvising and it sort of plays by itself.’ The poet’s first ‘flight’ is transformed into a pensive and concentrated walk, or single steps, along a path that bends almost exclusively towards his inner landscape. And in this landscape, which has more of the night than the day to it and in which little room is left for the records of ‘eye-witnesses’ and ‘eavesdropping poets’, the raison d’źtre of Marvan’s writing materializes with full force – fear and anxiety at living in an infinite void, hand in hand with an incessant urge to go forward to meet that fear and anxiety, touch them, taste them, let them pervade the self and transpose their reflection in a distorting or inclined mirror into verse. Yet at the same time – especially in Noční cesta denní krajinou – Marvan foregrounds his attempts to detach himself from the quiet and the dark: ‘my face gleams like a mirror’, ‘each man has light within him’, he writes. His journey from primary chaos, fear and silence seems to end at the threshold of a landscape of peace and the light of day. ‘These days (…) I experience great bursts of happiness from the company of people, from love for them,’ he adds. ‘People as beings, not just one specific individual. Man must never feel alone anywhere; for he is never alone anywhere. It depends whether he knows, senses it. I know it sounds strange, but one is actually happy all the time, though without knowing it.’

(rk)

E-mail: lukasmarvan@hotmail.com

Deutsch Lukáš MARVAN, Deutsch.doc

En français Lukáš MARVAN, En français.doc