Authors

Jan Novák became a poet in the fertile atmosphere of the 1960s. He belongs to the generation of Petr Kabeš, Pavel Šrut, Jiří Kuběna and Ivan Wernisch, but it would be difficult to find among his contemporaries a poet of nonsense, puns, plots, mosaics, labyrinths, and lyric verse who is as chatty as Novák and also as concise. Critics have characterized his verse as ‘nonsensical, but with meaning’. His poems are little games after a fashion, full of relations that are almost Rimbaldean, of miniatures of a fascinating world, but which, as presented by Novák, do not sound pessimistic or as though there were no way out. Instead, they are like Japanesery or Chinoiserie, like a vague symbol in ink. Novák is a protean poet, a brilliant dreamer, and an acrobat, whose verse seems at first almost too refined, too intellectual. He is not a monothematic author: his one, recurrent leitmotif is irony, sarcasm, a cocktail of ideas, behind which is concealed a stubborn attempt to express laconically the unfathomable character of our world. His approach resists the metaphysical, yet he is unable to free himself of it entirely. It would be an oversimplification to see his characteristic lyrical appearance as a mere echo of Christian Morgenstern’s work, because in Novák’s verse one can also perceive the oppressive features of Celan’s existentialism. The mere title Navštivte Peru! (Visit Peru!) is a call to set out on a journey to an exotic, fictitious land, which results from a Wittgensteinian linguistic maze or from the fact that one cannot cross the boundary of the expressed, which also embodies expression as the inner space of sheer fantasy, as playing what does not exist in reality, but can, through poetry, become reality. In the Afterword, Zdeněk Frýbort metaphorically describes Novák’s poetic principle not as a discourse of the heart but as something expressed with its own colour, fragrance, sensuousness. The original basis of his poetry is the throat, the vocal chords, the singer’s instruments, just as a picture consists primarily of paint, to whose spectrum and selection both the artist and the viewer later bring philosophy and interpretation – in other words, values independent of the actual physiology of the colours. Gaya Gaya is distinctive topography typical of Novák; it is an ecstatic, pilgrimage through the deep, through Moravia with its hilly, not particularly fertile vineyards, which in winter are whipped by the strong winds blowing off the river Pálava, and in summer bask like a coiled snake in the sunshine. The actual content of the poet’s statement here is an almost Dionysian invocation of, and spell upon, the natural elements, a dance above the truthfulness and illusoriness of life, as well as adoration of the little gods of the netherworld and the lares, his bringing the word to be sacrificed on the altar of Demeter, goddess of fertility and harvests. Novák weaves the sharply presented, earthy, landscape cum native country into a peculiar timeless myth, which he suggests solely in outline, in the mysterious, undecipherable ulterior motive and plan, carried out by means of the concrete character of the actors in the drama of the world and the beauty of the human body, trapped by a spell in the body of passing time. The transposition of mortal things and events to the timeless myth of Mother Earth is the characteristic feature of the quatrains in the collection Gaya Gaya. With its apparently surreal title, the dualism of the female and male elements, the principle of yin and yang (reflecting the poet’s lasting fascination with Eastern philosophy and religion), which he systematically imprints his writings with, the volume Týden ženy, měsíce roky muže (Woman’s Week, Man’s Months and Years) is deceptive. Rhythm is introduced into this book by the passage of time. Mystifying information about dates seems to suggest the unwinding of a pseudo-novel, an inclination towards the quality of a plot that is intentionally left incomplete, and does not result in a compact ‘Holan-like’ story. In Novák’s poetry, the impossibility of such a compactness, maturation, or coming to an end is gnoseologically based on the knowledge that ‘we live as if it were probable’. We are ‘birds frightened off by the grammar of talons: the grammar of flight without punctuation, the magnetic needle of a song, which has been boned by the gravitation of fresh blood. He that is stronger than pain should offer a rebate.’ A snippet of a record titled ‘everlasting life. enlisted. Tuesday. barricades’ expresses the remarkable tangled mosaic of Novák’s writings, in which the lofty becomes imbued with the base, the sacred with the profane, the chorale with the worn-out song, myth with caricature, and intricacy with triviality. Novák is a typical ‘creature of worlds’ (to use the words of the poet René Char). His ambition is to become a creature of space. Like Char he too considers his ‘first poetic act: to suffer one’s own invasion, to reassemble his excitements, his delights of love (…), to protect himself from the amnesty of divine right ….’ With Kupé pro Marcela D. (A Coupé for Marcel D.) Novák returns somewhat to the exoticism of his first work, Navštivte Peru!, but its precise Duchampian chessboard, foundation, ground plan, does not constitute a call to travel widely or to cosmic expansion, but, instead, to terrestrial introspection, even a kind of Dalíesque slight uncovering of the surface, a look at the little paths of the human insect beneath the peeled-off bark of existence. In these notes and fragments the spirit of corporeality alternates with the body of the spirit. Here, man becomes a piece on a chessboard or a puppet in a manhunt. Its places are covered with topography; the decline and fall of things culminates in the kingdom of language.

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Deutsch Jan NOVÁK, Deutsch.doc