Authors
Tomáš MÍKA
Poet, writer of prose, publicist and translator Tomáš Míka was born in Prague on 1st December 1959. He graduated in Czech and English from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, after which he worked as a teacher of English. Since the late 1980s much of his work has been as a translator; his translatons into Czech include works by John Bunyan, James Hogg, Washington Irving and Samuel Beckett. In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote lyrics for and played saxophone in a range of music groups. He lives in Prague.
Animals for Slaughter - Tomáš Míka's first volume of poetry - takes as its principal theme a yearning which is often openly erotic, provocative, teasing, and which, in the scale of its depiction, sometimes borders on the pornographic. Less frequently this is the yearning of the lyric poetry of love, which is veiled, unfinished in the telling, enigmatic, and expressed by metaphor and imagery. This author's poetics - tense in the space between male and female principles, caught between reason and emotion - draws from the well of the Romantics, just as it does from the magic of naive stylization and the tradition of literary poeticism. The work has the character of an epic narrative; it develops in extensive, dynamic strands which by irony and especially ironizing of the self allow the author a distance from which to view the self and the world around him. And because Tomáš Míka is first and foremost a translator of fiction, the situation-based humour of his work is complemented by a language-based humour in which he demonstrates a creative interest in verbal ambiguities, the homophonous development of discourse, the transposition of words, etc. "I think that unfortunately I have absorbed much of Beckett's style into my own writing," is how Míka explains this. "And to be honest I didn't even try very hard to resist this. Quite simply it's the curse of those translators who have their own literary ambitions that they put up no resistance to the influence of those they are translating. Generally speaking, literature written by translators has certain - to me, repulsive - features of the translation. This is particularly the case with poetry ... poet-translators fiddle about with form as if they were translating themselves ... they are over-impressed by the aural and graphic aspects of words ... Perfection of form and obsessive playing around with words - these are marks of the original work of translators." We should add that Míka's poetry is intended first and foremost for the page, but it only truly comes alive in public performance, where the word is set against music and dramatic movement. "I've liked the combination of words and music since I was a child," says the poet. "The one works to intensify the other, and if a text is intended to be read aloud and in public, I much prefer a musical accompaniment to a simple reading. In fact, any attempts to make the reading more interesting visually should be welcomed, because a public poetry reading - which consists of a reading and nothing more - can be one of the most boring things imaginable - regardless of the quality of the poems."
Deutsch 
Tomáš MÍKA, Deutsch.doc
En français Tomáš MÍKA, En français.doc
