Authors

The early stages of Jiří Suchý‘s creative oeuvre date back to the mid 1950s. Popular music at that time was dominated (apart from agit-prop) by sentimental dance songs about love. It is this milieu that Suchý entered with his songs such as Zlomil jsem ruku tetičce (I Broke My Auntie’s Hand). These songs resounded with the author’s characteristic means of expression: a Dadaist playfulness, hyperbole, a phenomenal rhyming technique and a singular approach to language in general. This was later developed in a poetry that eschewed pathos, lyrical slapstick, a modern weaving of images, a diffusion of style plateaux – and it should be added – also a certain amount of sentiment and nostalgia. This, however, did not prevent Suchý’s songs from attaining – as if involuntarily – a programmatic rejection or disregard for the period ideology and bogus pathos of the 1960s. Suchý, a cultural Renaissance man, deservedly received the highest recognition in the realm of songwriting, which he infused with new life. "As a youth, I learnt to read modern poetry and view modern paintings. Voskovec and Werich (legendary Czech pre-war actors and entertainers) taught me how to adjust the Czech language to the needs of jazz," recalled Suchý. He also embraced Czech rock’n’roll and other imported musical rhythms. He was aided in this by – while naturally maintaining a rhyming structure – the playfulness and loose figurativeness of modern poetry. He would often profess his admiration for Vítězslav Nezval’s poems: “Chaplin is carrying a present to his beloved/On a motorbike/Mirror/Stars/Caviar/Any food to bite”. Among his other sources of inspiration, he credits, for instance, Morgenstern, Rimbaud and Chesterton and artists such as Chagall, Dalí, Tichý, etc. The poetics of Suchý’s texts can be aptly demonstrated in one single verse from his poem Kuchyňská měsíční svita (Kitchen Moon Shine): „Oh, moon, moon, moon/We are dancing here in your honour/Snuggling cheek to cheek/Like onions in vinegar...“ This is condensed Jiří Suchý: lyrical poetry, punning, elements of Dada, a fixed form, pure rhyme, random bookish expressions, overall euphony. Naturally, the aesthetic and semantic scope of his texts is not drained by the poetics or comicality of the language. Occasionally, even the hidden moralist in him finds voice - whether he is decrying war (Tulip), defeatism (Life For Me Is Like a Well-Worn Vest) or an automated perception of the world. His belief in the miracles of everyday life (i.e. what lurks beneath the surface) can be found in a number of his most popular songs: “The child believes / From house to street / A secret corridor might lead / About such things / The housekeeper / Knows nothing.” (Schoolchild) or “She does not care about her hair / And marvels at the beauty of the world / She sees plenty of other things / And that surely has value. (The Vain Cousin). “Jiří Suchý‘s thespian activities are primarily connected to his home stage, Semafor, which merged verbal humour with musical slapstick and was often dubbed "the song theatre" or "musical theatre". Even though Suchý and his colleague Šlitr were heavily inspired by the work of V+W, they steered clear of copying it. "We favour a different genre than the Liberated Theatre – not political-satirical revue, but more musical comedy,“ Jiří Šlitr once stated. The Semafor plays incorporated sections of dialogue and songs often linked through a pseudo-epic motif, sometimes nostalgic reminiscing about the golden age of cabaret, tingl-tangl or slapstick, later championing parody-laden paraphrases of classic texts (such as Erben’s The Bouquet). The characters in the plays usually do not possess elaborate psychological depth and the plot lack a certain dramatic shape – this, nevertheless, was not at all significant for the Semafor poetics. Suchý later recounted: The naive beginnings of Semafor proved popular with the audience because of how they differed from perfect theatre – a combination of art and non-art, irresponsibility, honesty and, most importantly, fun, as well as an idiosoyncratic period atmosphere. In the 1960s, Semafor functioned like a magnetic field. During normalization (Šlitr died in 1969), Jiří Suchý was explicitly ordered to "back off" by the powers that be. In spite of this, he did not become bitter: instead he turned to exploring various creative outlets at the theatre and acting collaborations (his most fruitful artistic partnership with the multi-talented Jitka Molavcová), though in the end the author seemed to have become stuck in the safety of a traditional Semafor poetics that did not need to be radically changed. Sometimes he was accused of making his world a "poetic junk shop" (Přemysl Rut). Nevertheless, thanks to the fact that Suchý never abandoned his weaponry of playful Dadaism and surreal dreaminess, his texts have remained imbued with magic, albeit with a veneer of a certain formal conservatism. After 1989 – aware that "the acme of my popularity has long been over, understandably,” – Suchý embarked on new projects, including a number of books. From his artistic memoirs, through lively erotic lexicons and collections, in which, by means of collage, he portrays a diverse picture of his many creative activities (including songs, poems, rhymes, memories, essays, short stories, drawings, photographs, etc) to his poetry collections, in which his voice grows somewhat serious, his vision of the world darkens (see for instance his collection The Black Vessel (Černá vzducholoď) his writing does not lose its original poetic dynamics and omnipresent hope in semantics. His collected works have recently been published.

(jn)

This profile was last updated May 1, 2006

Deutsch Jiří SUCHÝ, Deutsch.doc

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