Authors
Michal ŠANDA
The poet and fiction writer Michal Šanda was born on 10 December 1965. After secondary school he made his living in a series of jobs that included stonemasonry, bookselling, street vending, fowling and organ-grinding, as well as making fans on an ostrich farm and painting railway cars. Since 1991 he has worked as an archivist at the Theatre Institute in Prague. He lives in Prague.
The poetic world that Michal Šanda has been creating since the mid-1990s is as diverse and colourful as the range of his manual occupations in the 1980s. He admits to having been influenced primarily by later twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, from Kurt Vonnegut Jr (‘Slapstick and Breakfast of Champions, especially their prefaces,’ he says, ‘are key texts for me’), to Ernest Hemingway (‘It was from him that I took the idea of writing short, succinct sentences’) to Lawrence Ferlinghetti (‘he led me to slightly serious writing’). His debut collection of visual and Lettrist creations stoa carries on the tradition of concrete poetry and experimentation on the border between art and literature. The dominant tendency here is not, however, an attempt at the schematic ‘programming of beauty’, that is, poetry generated by a machine, but a spontaneous lyricism that seems to follow on from the techniques of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918) or Mallarmé’s Post-Symbolist Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897). In the collections Ošklivé příběhy z krásných slov (Ugly Stories Using Beautiful Words) and Dvacet deka ovaru (Twenty Grams of Boiled Pig’s Head) Šanda turns away from the visual function of the word and emphasizes the documentary, the authentic quality of utterance. Here the writer becomes an observer of characters and events, an epic subject who lends his voice to what is mainly the social and interpersonal periphery, the outsider type. In Ošklivé příběhy he relates the comic and tragic pub tales of ‘my old gaffers’, who ‘were spellbinding’ but when ‘they had boozed themselves out of their brains (...) were quite unbearable’, and in Dvacet deka he plunges in to the psychological universe between man and woman. Subsequently Šanda moved from raw poetic record to the opposite, literary mystification. It was a move foreshadowed by his pseudonymous illustrated rock mosaic, the ‘Postmodern jukebox’ Metro, and culminating in Blues 1890–1940, his first work of prose fiction. It consists of ‘fifty one encyclopaedic portraits of bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta’, under which ‘like a pentimento’ gleams the story of Robert Boyer, ‘a gambler by conviction, alcoholic, tramp, and layabout, but also a wage labourer, forced to be thankful even for an opportunity to do drudgery’. The writer challenges the reader to ‘join the game’ by taking a real setting and grafting onto it Borgesian imaginary stories that trace the dark fates of the musicians while exhibiting the author’s enchantment with the aesthetic function of language. Obecní radní Stoklasné Lhoty vydraživší za 37 Kč vycpaného jezevce pro potřeby školního kabinetu (The Alderman of Stoklasná Lhota Auctioning Off a Stuffed Badger for 37 Crowns for the Needs of the School Showcase) is a tribute to the disappearing world of the Czech village in the twentieth century and a reminder of the author’s own roots. Here Šanda creates a fictional setting, which he peoples with poetic characters who conduct stylized archaic conversations. The emphasis on aesthetically perfect proportions in sentences often displaces the point of the narrative and transforms the book into an eccentric showcase of language for language’s sake. At the same time, Obecní radní, like most of the author’s preceding books, develops and plays variations on a several motifs and characters that run through Šanda’s entire work.
(rk)
E-mail: michal.sanda@divadlo.cz
Deutsch 
Michal ŠANDA, Deutsch.doc
En français Michal ŠANDA, En français.doc
