Authors

For many years, Jan Suk published his poetry only infrequently; his first volume of verse, Potopené pevnosti [Drowned Fortresses] appeared relatively late in his life, as if this literary gift had been kept hidden up to its author’s reaching the half-century mark. Such a late debut is usually marked by considerable intellectual maturity and stringent creative discipline, often serving as a clear demonstration of the author’s aesthetic orientation – and in this regard, Jan Suk was no exception. If, though, in a certain sense the volume was the first work of an almost “hidden” poet, Suk was nonetheless, at the time of publication, known to the wider reading public as a critic and editor, whose reviews, biographical studies and reflections on the classic poetic texts of Czech as well as world literature had already won great acclaim. Characteristic of Suk’s critical writings (culminating in the publication of a volume of essays under the title Krysy v Hadrianově vile [Rats in Hadrian’s Villa]) is not only a remarkable degree of erudition in the world of poetry, at home and abroad, but equally a truly sovereign capability to sense poetic form and a specific author’s creative personality. These qualities of Suk’s likewise have made their way into his creative writing, as displayed immediately upon the publication of his first book of verse, appearing under the somewhat emblematic title of Potopené pevnosti. Indeed, it is this emblematic quality, reflected even in the title, that clearly points to the principle of a lyrical phenomenology permeating Suk’s verses. Though in large measure appearing to be inserted amidst the real or empirical experiences of subjective space and time, they stretch, following the evident authorial intention, much further or higher, towards a conception of a universe beyond time and space – in other words, to the traditional domains of the philosophical lyric. Particularly in this orientation, Suk stands as a kindred spirit, and indeed a rightful successor, to Vladimír Holan. Similarly to his illustrious predecessor, Suk has a keen eye for the metaphysics of the concrete, and simultaneously the concreteness of our quotidian metaphysics. With equal passion, he allows himself the intoxication and enchantment of striking contradictions and oxymoronic juxtapositions – from which arises his effort, almost a kind of aesthetic gourmandising, to “reflect the unreflectable”, to mirror in these texts something ineffable, something apparently opaque. This is the source of Suk’s underlying conviction of the possibility of proceeding forward “by the light of darkness”, as much as his sense for the all-too-frequent obscuring of fate through veils of chance and accident, so that the individual life may then rise up through the winding-sheet of this accidental contingency. All of these philosophical stances, in Suk’s work, make their appearance with the same natural ease as the innate human urge towards the philosophical quest in search of the sense of events and being, including Being of an aesthetic sort. If, however, we link Suk’s finely wrought vision of drowned fortresses as the chains that surround us (or indeed as our clinging to the consciousness of them) primarily to the genre of phenomenologically conceived philosophical meditations, this is not to say that he has created a poetry that is merely bookish, speculative, artificial, a mechanical reflection of the inner world. Suk’s mature considerations of the essentiality of “coming to oneself” is purified through its plunge into the depths of a purely poetic sensibility, where imagination and intellect stand as equal partners. Within such coordinates, whatever makes its appearance may equally seem the shadow of a present-absent world, a fata morgana, an “appeal and temptation” to those lost in the desert, yet as well the dying echo of a wall collapsing in the face of beauty (or ugliness). For Suk, it is emblematic that he strives for the maximum possibilities of expression; hence it is no surprise that the entire volume is grounded in a deep faith in the “immortality of words” and in a poetry that is capable of fearing “the echoes from them”.

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En français Jan SUK, En français.doc