Authors

Afterwards she spent a short time working in the library department of the District Council in Benešov near Prague and from 1960–1970 she worked as an editor for the National Publishing House for Children’s Books (later called Albatros). She was dismissed for political reasons in 1970 and devoted herself to literary and translation work. From 1991–1993 she was employed as part of Czech Radio’s literary-dramatic editorial staff, where among other things she put together literary programmes, particularly about foreign poetry. In 1991 she set up the foundation Writers for Animal Rights through the Czech PEN club, in whose presidium she is active. Since 1994 she has been working in cooperation with the Prague editorship of Radio Free Europe. She lives in Prague.

A poet, prose writer and author of children’s books, but also a translator, primarily of Marina Tsvetaeva (she has translated and prepared for print several anthologies of the Russian author’s work, e.g. Black Sun, 1967, An Attempt at Jealousy, 1970, Hour of the Soul, 1971, Vicious Circle, 1987, Odd Shoe, 1996), in her verses, stories and novels she displays the qualities of a typically female soul, which are empathy but also a particular sort of melancholy which permeates almost all of her metaphors and ideas. From nostalgia and a Slavic form of sorrow it develops into hints of mythicizing and universality, containing scepticism and doubt about the form of the modern world as well as enduring hope in the possibility of its salvation through artistic and moral cultivation or humanism. Almost all of the lyrical work of Jana Štroblová is anchored in a natural spontaneity which also gives rises to her metaphors and images, while the basic setting of her poetry is the humble Czech countryside, quiet and inward-looking, without sharp contrasts and dramas, distinguished only by changes connected with the seasons and transitions between daylight and the darkness of night. Even the titles of her poetry collections and anthologies indicate that the poet’s tightly ordered little world is ceaselessly permeated by rays of sunlight, impressions of “the play of light”, bewitching “fata morgana”, the mystery of the full moon or the fragmentariness of natural forms and morphologies, which in her verses take on anthropomorphic traits and impressions which are sometimes even ghostly, balladic, and at other times have a human intimacy or fairy-tale quality. In Jana Štroblová’s poetry there meanders through these elemental spaces and halls a constantly postulated and never fully realized form of love, friendship and the potency of interpersonal relations, taking on a sometimes controversial, at other times more amiable aspect and dynamic, which seems to be the driving force of all the poetry of this soul with a woman’s delicacy but a mother’s firmness. The intensity of her romantic feelings and her disappointment, but also the tendency towards deep self-reflection and doubt, distinguishing a person who is emotionally constituted and tortured by a lack of self-confidence, links Štroblová to Marina Tsvetaeva herself (fighting against scepticism, battling against resignation) or to the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, trying in vain to find an abode for love in an inhuman world. In the context of Czech poetry Štroblová is a solitary figure. In her poetic she is perhaps akin to the older generation of Jarmila Urbánková or Jiřina Hauková, although of course unlike the aesthetic refinement of Urbánková’s verses we occasionally find a thorn protruding from her poetry, lacerating wounds, but always in the end a dull resurrection of hope, which again distances her especially from the later collections of Jiřina Hauková. She began to publish books of poetry, which is the focus of her literary work, at the end of the fifties. Her first work was the book Protěž [Edelweiss], brought out in 1958. She published a further three books in the course of the inspirational sixties, but then with the onset of normalization she silenced her poetic voice and turned, for example, to writing children’s books. In 1979 she published the fairy tale Zapomenutá korunka [The Forgotten Crown]. During the seventies she also rendered into verse form translations of old Chinese, Arabic and folk Tibetan poetry. The first retrospective look back at her poetic journey was the book of verses entitled Úplněk [Full Moon], in which at the end of the seventies she turned to allegories and to an uninterrupted romantic dialogue, so that at times she even transformed her heartfelt emotions into pathos and at other times she swathed them in mythical allegory and symbols which from that moment on have been a constant feature of her work. Apart from the distinctive symbolism, the poems of Úplňek are permeated by an inclination towards fairy-tale fantasy, a particular form of magic and conjuring up of beings trapped by enchantment in rocks or tree trunks. There is also a tendency towards metamorphoses in the Ovidian sense and meaning. During the eighties and especially the nineties Štroblová evoked the dream in her poems as “reality transferred from elsewhere” without making use of surrealistic techniques and armamentaria. Some of her anxious dreams grow into the form of extensive “story-telling” compositions or lengthy poems, such as those which make up the book Fatamorgány [Fata Morgana]. The ballad-like story sometimes takes on the form of a sort of lyricized internal drama with both fairy-tale and realistic traits which permeate one another. In the poem Překročený stín the basic scheme arises from the classic legend of a lover transforming into a falcon, whose mistress singes his wings because she wants to keep him by her side. In another composition from Fatamorgány entitled Návrat ztracené krajiny there also appears a motif from the legend of the Phoenix, rising from the ashes. A sceptical, sometimes even depressingly pessimistic tone becomes a dominant feature in the books published during the nineties. Many of the titles of the poems from the collection Světlohry hint at this: Hřích [Sin], Oběť [Sacrifice], Klec [Cage], Nespavost [Insomnia], Prohra [Loss], Hrob [Grave], Strach [Fear], Bolest [Pain]. Here the poetry is found at the crossroads between elementary and rudimentary earthiness and roughness and predestined metaphysics. From the burdensome dreams of a sort of enchanted Sleeping Beauty in a legendary castle and garden, the author emerges from her melancholic shadow for a dialogue with “voices”, so far only suspected rather than heard. At the same time she penetrates and cuts a path through the chaos of the modern world all the way to the beginning, to the Ark, to “pseudo-myths” and “non-prayers”, to “half-dreams” and to derivations of moments, which in the book Hlasy [Voices] she calls by the diminutive “okamžitky” [little moments]. In “non-prayers” she faces up to doubts about faith and its sense in the modern, profane world. An integral part of Jana Štroblová’s confessionally and philosophically oriented poetic work is her prose work, unambiguously bearing autobiographical features and written somewhat in the spirit of the “poetry of the everyday and of revolt” of the 1960s. This is the case with her novel Hra na sochy [Playing at Statues], in which she deals with the passing of time and which is characteristic of an adoration of youth which is sometimes tinged with bitterness. Here the symbol of the statue plays an important role: it represents rigidity and halted time, an almost Proustian return, which in the author’s view is granted only to cold stone and human dreams.

2011 winner of the Vlastní cestou prize, awarded biannualy by the Czech branch of the International PEN Club for lifetime achievement.