Authors

Pavla Šuranská’s poetry was written between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Despite being influenced, as she frequently acknowledges, by the deliberately primitivist versifying of Czech underground authors, her poetry stands with one foot in the diction of Expressionism, in the caustically introspective spirit of which the poet longs ‘to lock myself inside my pain and say that I am not’, and the other in the tradition of Czech religious poetry, the core of which is in the profession of silent submission and the desire ‘to bend over the green grass, kiss it and beg forgiveness for the morning sickle’. Her modest volume Tvar jiného ticha (The Shape of Another Silence) is the elemental confession of one whose strength ebbs away with every line, ‘dying at the foot of two extinct volcanoes’, while at the same time finding strength since ‘the blackest night’, as she writes, ‘is my hope’; only then ‘do strength, life and unbearable merriment stream through me’. And it is out of the night, sleep, darkness or dreaming, as metaphors for man’s incapacity to see the world with his own eyes, that the ‘third bank’ of Šuranská’s verse emerges: her near-prose diction betrays an intuitive affinity with the poets of Surrealism or Magic Realism. Behind the poet’s ‘burnt-out eyes’ reality and super-reality naturally intersect, the utterly untrammelled imagination of the world within and an intense vision ą la Rimbaud compensate for the never-seen settings, characters and actions of the world without. All in all, the poems of Pavla Šuranská read as remarkably serene: ‘Feel sorry for myself in some sense, no, far from it. For the very fact that I’ve been granted life I must have due regard for it. I can detect some light with my right eye and I’m glad I can see the rays of the sun, though now I don’t think I want to see properly’, she confided in an interview.

(rk)

E-mail: p.suranska@seznam.cz

Deutsch Pavla ŠURANSKÁ, Deutsch.doc

En français Pavla ŠURANSKÁ, En français.doc