Authors

Alena Nádvorníková’s verse rises from and sinks back into waves of a kind of oneiric, yet highly personalized Kunsthistorie. Before becoming a poet she was involved in graphic art influenced by the interwar Surrealism of Teige, publishing a collection of essays entitled K surrealismu (On Surrealism), but also going beyond him into ever deeper strata of the human psyche, where artistic expression, gesture and hand movement metamorphose into thought, and thought is suppressed by artistic activity into the realm of the unconscious and the Jungian archetype. Her first book of verse, Praha, Pařížská (Prague, Paris St), which foretokened her later collections, contains, among other things, the poem ‘Dějiny umění (Sandro)’ (Art history [Sandro]), which may be deemed on the one hand a succinct expression of what Surrealism was becoming, and how, and, on the other, a reassertion of the psychoanalytical principle that typifies so much of her work: ‘She watches him / Reaching for the oranges, / His legs in roll-down boots (way to the left). / She is not concerned / With that whirl of plastic ideas / In diaphanous veils (behind his shoulders), / That one out of his head / That enchants him.’ Imagination, fantasy and telling tall stories perform a rare service to the Surrealists: letting them see through the veil of Maya into an open landscape, more real than reality and dreamier than a dream. This is by no means a ‘whirl of plastic ideas – in diaphanous veils’, in other words the expression of the content of an image, a subject and the characters portrayed, but the internalization of the creative intention, which through the fragility of diaphanous women in veils expresses what ‘comes out of the human head’ and what ‘enchants’ the artist most powerfully. Nádvorníková takes her method of introverted surreal poetry even deeper in the composite Uvnitř hlasů (On the Inside of Voices), where poems rub shoulders with oneiric diary entries, snatches of memories, picture-poems, miniatures and silhouettes du temps. The work is dominated by a peculiar Dalí-esque timelessness and only the final line assures us: ‘How much time? As much as there are voices’, or that only by stepping outside his own individualism, freeing himself from his own ego, does man-as-statue, ‘innocent monster’ or mysterious Golem of Prague set himself in wavering, unsteady motion. But anything that smacks of time ‘must be put out of doors’, because the soul needs at least a glimpse of timelessness, one ray of infinity. This principle, which may be described simplistically as gnoseologically art-historical, is reinforced in her later books and takes over completely. Dreamily undulating and confused visions gain in transparency, things start disappearing from the picture-poems, all that is left of a still life is an empty table, and all that remains of landscape is a lonely desert. Streets become depopulated, like the deserted squares on the magical canvasses of Chirico. In Vzpomínky na prázdniny (Memories of the Holidays) the central axis is made up of only apparent records of various trips and places that have each their own introspective history, but one that expands into an incommutable genius loci. But more than of places lived out and absorbed, this is a Mácha-like or Calvinist view of the atmosphere of a town or country after ‘things have slithered out of place / Wonders have burst into flame’. This evokes a sense that we have already visited these places in a different or previous life, touched their mercurial faces, asked about them through the mouth of the sphinx within us, or via our intellectual background, that is, by repeatedly applying those faculties with which we are pre-equipped as we know them from the analysis of visions and illusions and from Freud’s interpretation of dreams. The diary-like method of writing verse, ever overflowing, ever reaching beyond itself to other lives and lots, is the backbone of Kompoty noci, krystaly dne (Compotes of Night, Crystals of Day), the very title of which captures the day-and-night dualism of being and the interpenetration and two-way influence between day and night. At no point, however, is it said that dreaming has displaced reality or that it is about to assert itself against reality by a somewhat demonic or tyrannical act of usurpation. Here, suddenly, the arsenal of history yields before the urgency of the present moment. Life thrusts its way out of dreaming. The Baroque, Calderonian principle of la vida es sueĖo is gone for good. Memories of childhood (sometimes reminiscent of Štyrský’s horror games), flashes of futile, unrequited, ‘closureless’ loves, the desolation of nights through which dreams cannot break into the light of day – these are the main leitmotifs of this gloomily poetic ‘nightmare’. In the Afterword to Nádvorníková’s last collection to date, Děje (Acts), Jan Šulc remarks on the change in style towards an openness that is abandoning the earlier ambiguities and rebus-like qualities and cleaving instead to pure action and stark, legible records revolving around life. The hieroglyphic past, the poet’s personal Kunsthistorie, is receding into the background, letting the foreground ring out – and its ringing quality is a major feature of this verse – with something pure and abstracted from reality. Club moss, vervain or dandelions may become the next obvious artefacts in Alena Nádvorníková’s poems.

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Deutsch Alena NÁDVORNÍKOVÁ, Deutsch.doc

En français Alena NÁDVORNÍKOVÁ, En français.doc