The poet Ivan Wernisch was born on June 18th 1942 in Prague. His son from his first marriage is the poet Michal Wernisch, better known as Ewald Murrer. He graduated from the Industrial College of Ceramics in Karlovy Vary (1959), and had various manual labour jobs (a cleaner at the Petřín Tower, a cement worker at the septic tank on Trojsky Island, an advertising agent, a night watchman at a carpark, etc). During normalization he worked on hundreds of programmes about Czech and world poetry for Czechoslovak Radio, from 1990-1999 he was the editor of Literární noviny (Literary News), after which he worked with the Brno publishers Petrov (until 2005) and the Prague antiquarian bookshop Ztichlá klika. Since 1998 he has been the editor of the Prague-Příbram Edice současné české poezie (publishers of contemporary Czech poetry). He is also involved in translation work (P. Klee, P. van Ostaien, H. Sachs, A. P. Chekhov etc.) and editorial work (he compiled Ivan Diviš’s Theory of Reliability an
The poetry of Ivan Wernisch, the most widely read and perhaps most translated contemporary Czech poet, grew out of the avant-garde which was formed by a whole new generation of poets in the first half of the 1960s – the poetry of Pavel Šrut, Jiří Gruša, Antonín Brousek or the recently deceased Petr Kabeš. The optimism, vitality and colour of the poets from the First Republic – Biebl, Nezval or Seifert, as well as the proletarian poetry of Jiří Wolker – had been silenced over the course of three or four decades by motifs of scepticism, weariness and the tragedy of life. Wernisch’s debut in 1961, Kam letí nebe (Where The Sky Flies To) is a playful collection which also contains sadness and flights of fancy that quickly transform into the fall of Icarus. Whilst Kabeš took this as a starting point for radical experimentation, for hermetically quoted collages, Brousek fell into a rhyming fury and self-destructive disillusion and Šrut withdrew into creating works for children; Wernisch, meanwhile, escaped into dreams, to a hallucinatory landscape of absurd invention, of grotesque visions set in strange, exotic lands, long ago, rooted in the mastery of language as well as linguistic and situational humour.
The literary scientist Milena Vojtková wrote of the books Zimohrádek [Winter Castle], Těšení [Anticipation], Dutý břeh [The Hollow Shore] and Loutky [Puppets], which were published in the 1960s, that “there is the characteristic intoxication of imagery, an elemental joy from the description of fantastic ideas, growing to a litanic invocation, which with a liberating embellishment utilises the principles of repeated words and word association, tracing round the basic motifs of otherness, anxiety, emptiness and defiance.” Already by the 1960s it is possible to see in Wernisch’s work the formation of two strands which will start to intermingle, and which will generate a continuous, permanent tension: a grotesque strand which comes mainly from the purifying source of Dada, bringing to his verse elements of the absurdly comic, frivolity and the author’s favourite - mystification. Then there is the expressionist strand, obsessed with ruin and death, crushed by personal sorrow and disillusionment with society. Whilst in the 1970s and ‘80s an absurd, nonsensical tone predominated (see the 800-page collection Blbecká poezie [Idiotic Poetry], summarising the author’s samizdat work), the tone of his post-revolution poetry is more depressing, more resigned, leaning towards the end, decline and death (the collections Proslýchá se [Rumour Has It], Cesta do Ašchabadu [Trip to Ashgabat], Bez kufru se tak pěkně skáče po stromech [Without A Suitcase You Can Easily Jump Around The Trees], Hlava na stole [Head On The Table], etc). And as Vojtková notes, since 1989 his work “has been dominated by an emphasis on the independent communicative act, on the attempt to free the text from its hereditary baggage in favour of a formal purity of communication.” The work of Wernisch can be seen within the context of postmodern literature: he polemicizes with genres and brings to the world their creative varieties (eg, a parody of diary literature in Pekařova noční nůše nebo Růžovejch květů sladká vůně [The Baker’s Night Hamper Or The Sweet Smell of Pink Roses] ), he mystifies and splits into several voices (eg the character of Václav Rozehnal and his collection Z letošního konce světa [From This Year’s End Of The World] ), he blatantly borrows and uses unattributed quotes, he paraphrases and integrates extracts from various other works, therefore, he “steals” (Beránci vlci [Lambs’ Wolves], Frc [Pawn Shop] ), in the same way as he playfully dives into the waters of folklore, traditional songs as well as high-brow poetry, philosophical maxims, aphorisms, lines of prose, reflecting on his own and other creations – all the time effectively and inventively appropriating as he pleases from any genre or style.
(rk)
This profile was last updated on May 1st 2008
