Authors
Bogdan TROJAK
The poet, translator from Polish and journalist Bogdan Trojak was born in 1975 in Český Těšín. He studied journalism at Palacký University in Olomouc. Since the mid-1990s he has been in charge of the magazine Weles, which he founded. He has worked with the editorial board of the Brno publishers Host, as the editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Neon and for the internet magazine Lumír. In 1998 he was awarded the Jiří Orten Prize for his second collection Pan Twardowski (Mr Twardowski). He lives in Pařezovice in the Drahan Highlands.
Silesian and North Moravian villages and the towns of Vendryně, Ruprechtov, Český and Polský Těšín, as well as Lvov in Ukraine, form the mythical arena and space for Bogdan Trojak’s lyrical-epic poems. Already in his first work, Kuním štětcem (Marten-hair Brushstrokes), the young author showed that, for him, humility is not an empty or nostalgic idea. A poem is just as natural a miracle as though incredible pictures had been painted by nature itself, using, for example “a marten-hair brush”, which for Trojak became a symbol of the poetic clarity and almost monastic purity of his early works. In this debut the reader discovers poems which are more like stories, or at least condensed versions of them, including dialogue. This, connected to and imbued with a recent kind of mythical character, the traces of which can still be perceived, becomes the basic pillar in Trojak’s second book, Pan Twardowski, in which the lyrical element flows quite naturally into an epic stream.
In his debut, Trojak the poet was a surprised and breathless youth, with all his volatility and chaotic voracity, and perhaps even a shade arrogant. In Pan Twardowski there appear significant motifs of romance and adoration, although the poet works rigorously with personal and impersonal metaphors and images. Alongside the female myth, in this case of Mary, treated in a symbolistic and decadent manner reminiscent of Baudelaire, elements from antiquity and the Icarus myth also feature in Trojak’s poetic inventory.
In the book Pan Twardowksi, there flashes by a “gutsy Daedalus” whose descendants the poet meets every day, as well as “the damned beautiful Venus” walking along “the soft black earth of Galician Lvov”. As for the title of Trojak’s second book, it is important to recall another modern myth, this time of Polish origin – Mr Cogito by the recently deceased poet Zbigniew Herbert. If Herbert, undoubtedly Trojak’s guru and role model, is a poet of aloofness and irony, questioning Western paradigms with their emphasis on Cartesian logic, then it is thanks to the author’s youth that we find in Trojak’s verses a nostalgia associated with Wolker or Orten, even if his works contain obvious spiritual and heretical traces, as though gazing out at the endless expanse of Eastern Europe, across Polish and Ukrainian plains and morning mists over the ponds and lakes. Pan Twardowski is not Herbert’s sophisticated Mr Cogito but is rather a rampaging element, a quasi-mythical character from fairy tales and folk stories, like an unexpected blast from the past into the non-poetic space of today. Despite this, in his second book Trojak is neither a conservative nor repetitive author, but rather – like his Twardowski – a modern or postmodern Faust who writes in blood, not to Satan, but poetry, which in a time hostile to lyrical verse is an act as insane as Faust’s bloody signature, which was to ensure the mortal “divine femininity” and immortality.
Trojak’s latest book to date, Jezernice, seems to mirror a current in contemporary Czech poetry as represented by poets such as Petr Borkovec, Jaromír Zelenka, Miloš Doležal, the older Miloš Vodička and the Pardubice loner Pavel Rajchman. In Jezernice, Trojak admits to a closeness to Vít Slíva from Brno, to whom he dedicates the opening poem of this thoughtfully composed collection, bearing the title Karpatské rekviem (Carpathian Requiem). Here we encounter the continually recurring motifs and themes of the earth, heaven, hell, angels, night, cellars and attics, spaces which are always above and below. Unlike in his previous books, in Jezernice the author also describes gloominess, imprisonment in real and mythical spaces, landscapes and fairy tales, which he himself spans artistically and which are shown to be all-encompassing and restricting. That is why there are so many verses here which refer to a journey to the blue mountains, to an urge to travel far, to Macha’s romantic pathos, by which the escapist poet eludes the shadows of living people who are relentlessly and unavoidably moulded by their homeland. In Jezernice, Trojak has opened a path to reach a different place in a different way, but notwithstanding all its sympathetic features, this collection is more reminiscent of a reflective bridge into depths which the poet has yet to encounter and investigate.
(js)
This profile was last updated on July 1st 2007
Deutsch 
Bogdan TROJAK, Deutsch.doc
En français Bogdan TROJAK, En français.doc
