Authors

He left the university after three semesters and from 1982 he had many different jobs: he was a worker in the Spolchemia factory, a draughtsman, an assistant planner and a lineman in Teplice. On New Year’s Eve 1982 at the Roman Catholic parish in Příchovice in the Jizera Mountains he founded the alternative, Catholic-oriented association of poets, authors and songwriters Skupina XXVI [Group XXVI]. From 1986 he also worked with a circle of writers from Teplice and North Bohemia and later also with the Christian literary group Portál (Evald Murrer, Pavel Kolmačka and others.). In 1989 he moved with his family to Vimperk, where he worked as a night watchman at a dairy farm, a forest worker, a warden in the Šumava Protected Landscape Area, a postman and a porter. In the nineties he also made his living as an artist and a cabinet-maker, for example at the charity workshop in Vimperk. At present he is employed at a meteorological station in Churáňov in the Šumava area. He published his first stories in 1982 in the Baptist magazine Rozsievač and in the evangelical monthly Český bratr. Under the pseudonym Jan Donnersberger he contributed poetry to the samizdat Salesian magazine Čtení do krosny, published from 1990 under the title AD–Anno Domini. He edited three anthologies for Skupina XXVI, to which he also contributed as an author. He also participated as an author in the bibliophilic publication Horský triptych, published in České Budějovice and also containing verses by the poets F. D. Merth and R. Janda. His poetry is also represented in works such as the collection of 20th century Czech spiritual lyric poetry Krajina milosti, the poetry anthologies Přetržená nit (1996) and Skřípavé hudbě vrat (2000), and the anthology Od břehu k horám (2000). He lives in Vimperk.

Roman Szpuk’s poetic work to date, only published in book form after 1989 and collected in more than fifteen volumes, extends between the echo of eternal Macha-esque pilgrimages to infinity and a propensity for the brotherhood of those like-minded drifters, recluses and loners who wander through the history of humanity and poetry from Basho through Villon, Dante and Blake to Rimbaud or maybe to the solitary Polish writer Edward Stachura, of whom Szpuk is a great admirer. Szpuk characterizes himself as a woodland creature, homo silvaticus, or as a man who, on his journey through the landscape, and especially his beloved mountains and foothills with their stunted formations of villages, hamlets and small towns, is planting the imaginary plants of poetry in an analogous way to Elzéard Bouffier, “the man who planted trees”, from Giono’s famous prose work, to whom the poet devotes one passage of his lyrical composition Troucheň (2002). Szpuk is a melodic and hymnic poet, and has been since his first book, Otisky dlaní, which brought together part of his poetry published in samizdat or whispered into a lonely space, from the times when he wasn’t able to publish officially. His first poems appeared in Revue Teplice in 1985 as a result of his link to the circle of young Teplice literati, songwriters, rebels and pub rowdies, nonconformist beings, whether spiritually or religiously oriented towards diverse variations on the Christian ethos, or towards post-surrealist outlooks and echoes, or even the underground atmosphere of ephemeral texts, mostly passed on verbally in a circle of friends. On New Year’s Eve 1982, in the Roman Catholic parish of Příchovice, Szpuk founded a literary association and community which, perhaps through the influence of the wartime Skupina 42 or the post-war German Skupina 47, was given the name Skupina XXVI. As he states in an interview for the Catholic magazine Promlky, he first founded Skupina with two poets, Květa Brožová and Pavel Kukal, as a reaction “to the need of a few isolated poets to meet up and share together not only their poetic efforts but also the fate of those disinherited from all the major currents of the time, whether from the official culture or from dissent.” In the eighties Skupina published three anthologies, not exclusively oriented towards poetry but also other genres, in which, apart from Szpuk and the aforementioned founders, there began to appear personalities with an often diverse and conflicting poetic – from Svatava Antošová through Pavel Kolmaček and Jiří Hauber, a member of the contemporary group Portál, from the classical writers of Czech spiritual poetry František Daniel Merth and Ivan Slavík to the young generation of poets and poetesses, such as Oscar Ryba, Hana Fousková, Patrik Linhart, Robert Janda, the Poděbrad songwriter Martin Vácha, Jarmila Hrabalová, Iveta Pokorná and Sabrina Karasová. Although Szpuk wrote several manifestos for the “Twenty-Sixers”, the group never came forward as a unit with a distinctive programme or under the banner of an unofficial spirituality and religiosity. At the end of the eighties Skupina got in touch with the literary theoretician Květa Neradová, one of the founders of the periodical Souvislosti; however, the members of Skupina including Roman Szpuk never wholly agreed with the proclamations of theoreticians and artists of this orientation, because they seemed to them to be too stuffily official and clerical. On the contrary, what suited Skupina was freedom, rambling around the countryside, Macha-esque meditative solitude, the elemental force of the earth and its forms, an uncorrected and enthusiastic passion to be poets against all the adversity of the time and against the civilization of “mobiles and computers”.  It was only natural that this distinctiveness sometimes spilled over into almost anarchistic and iconoclastic discussions and polemics and that some of the members reminded the public of “bawlers, drunkards and rowdies” (Roman Szpuk). Everything that characterizes Skupina XXVI also found its way, as if in a great arc, into Szpuk’s philosophizing, landscape and woodland reflections and excursions on the edge or even beyond the boundary of the civilized world. At all times of the year Szpuk goes walking alone for tens of kilometres by day and night along the ridges of the Šumava among the decaying trunks of fallen trees and then meditates in his verses on the crucial concepts of life, love and death. His poetry, basically without great twists, written in a cultivated although often also slightly rough way, operates in the dimension of pantheism, linked with modern wandering through a ravaged country and natural landscape up to the view of the cosmic, almost Březina-esque distance, where restless, whirling stars swirl around as in the famous painting by Van Gogh. It is characteristic of Szpuk that he measures the stagnation of complex human relationships against the grandeur of “creative” nature, conceived in a Goethe-esque way. The poet confesses that it was music which led him to poetry, specifically one heightened experience when in the quiet of the Šumava dusk the essence of Bach’s spiritual music suddenly revealed itself to him and was personified for him not only in the specific morphology of the landscape but also in the form of a sort of forgotten or even defeated deity of the earth.  Through the poem he is of course aware that even this musically lexical stillness or offering of the countryside can be disturbed or stained by “soldiers’ blood” and desecrated by the loud, coarsely shouting voice of banality (for example in the poem Barvy from the book Ohrožen skřivanem). Szpuk started out as a prose writer, the author of several cycles of stories, and so elements of story-telling, specific places and events, are often projected into his poetic disputations and treatises. In the collection Ohrožen skřivanem in the section entitled Lidská hora we find the three-movement poem Rybářova žena [The Fisherman’s Wife], in which the linchpins of Szpuk’s poetic can be seen. The poem has three “protagonists”: there is the fisherman’s wife, who finds herself in “the evening of half-closed gates to heaven” as she prays in the sand at the shore for the safe return of her husband. The woman is alone “with a shoal of fish in spirit”, just as the second “hero” of the poem is all alone at sea, a fisherman with an almost Hemingway-esque sense of the emptiness of the nets he casts, which do not sink to the bottom of the sea, and also the bottom of his wretched fishing boat. It is, however, a link with the land, a floating island of solitude, where the fisherman is beset by the shades of the living and especially the dead: “upon the surface drift colours / from the dissolved faces of drowned men”. In the magical cycle of life and death, they return once more in the form of splinters and fragments to the sandy shore where a fisherman’s unsuspecting child plays, picking up the relics of death and the colours of the images of drowned men. Human hills versus heavenly mountains with creeping clouds, green seas of forests and quietness with the percussion of the wind’s strings suffice for a poet such as Roman Szpuk to create an independent world of poetry and a lyrical experience of secluded existence, only here and there, more by mistake than on purpose, touching upon human breeding grounds and remote, forgotten places, snow-bound by anxiety and by that biblical joy which comes from a person passing the test of the elements and the outer and inner darkness and not abandoning hope, as rays of sunlight will burst through the crown of his human tree. Roman Szpuk is a lyricist of solitude and brotherhood, but also a creator who finds himself on the boundary of (eternal) light and (possibly temporary) darkness.

E roman.szpuk@seznam.cz