Like Jiří Kolář and Bohuslav Reynek, Karel Zlín has two facets to his work. He creates poems, stories, pictures, sculptures and illustrations, although in both cases, whether he is using literary or artistic media, he is the creator of a kind of magic realism or surreal worlds where through the outlines of static architecture and phenomena navigate shadowy beings or things, drifting away, which are in essence the unforgettable expression of that which is unique and unrepeatable. As with all true poets, Zlín moves from the phenomenal to the general, from talk and speech to the music of silence, from confusion and chaos to the clarity of “a pool to be found at the centre of everything”. The poems from the 1960s were compiled into a collection called Hledán (Sought), emerging from the rich poetics of the day and harmonizing with the ambitions of a pleiad of Czech poets such as Kabeš and Juliš, Hejda or Wernisch. On the other hand, he was also continuing in the great metaphysical tradition of baroque, romantic and romanticizing literature or the spiritually oriented works of the prophets of modernism in the context of European lyricism (Apollinaire, de l’Isle-Adam, Leopardi, Gryphius), as well as Czech poetry (Březina, Karásek, Dyk, Holan).
The dominant image in Zlín’s debut work is “a landscape in the form of a face which has been thrust aside”, and the contrast between the transient and the permanent. In Zlín’s metaphors the stable and lasting can take on the form of an almost demonic enormity or holiness, whereas the fleeting and dissolving call up a longing for a lost and unattainable beauty, whose one form is futility, the baroque vanitas vanitatis, strengthened by the romantic cult of precarious individualism and concreteness, struggling against vain philosophizing and simple generalization of phenomena. The entire collection is dominated by an existentialist tone, the Rilkean night, “passing into the forgotten, seeing into the lost”. For the poet, time is also “the construction site” of a home, postponed indefinitely, still uninhabitable and provisional, growing out in all directions like Jung’s famous Bollingen Tower. The logical outcome of such vague premonitions was the poet’s emigration, immediately bringing about a metamorphosis in his poetics. The tendency towards meditation and quiet remained stable, with the search for an inner home, this time of course the search for “a second home”, an abode for foreigners, which allows the pilgrims to rest somewhere in an attic for one or two brief nights. From 1976, when Zlín went to Paris and started to make a living as an artist, there begins a period of lyrical evasiveness, of the pressure of the unfamiliar and the distinctly exotic environment into which, like it or not, the poet has to unpack the contents of his luggage, his chattels from home. If in Paris, and later in Italy, Zlín withdrew from his homeland and abode, as a substitute he found a primordial home and land of myths to which we all return throughout our lives.
The next book of poetry, Dům druhých (The House of Others), brings together both verse from the beginning of exile and unpublished work from the start of the 1970s. It reflects and echoes specific individuals (Hölderlin, Shelley, Nerval) but principally places of archetypal beauty or aesthetic luxury, as he almost decadently describes touring the castles of the Loire, a self-absorbed and removed world where one’s gaze falls upon “the tiny flowers in the grass” and where “a white sheet of paper is dappled by the mildew of the centuries”. Just as Hölderlin’s mad soul is lost forever in an inner world, the poet’s ego gets lost/rambles in places associated with romantic notions and plots, slowly shifting to become a dead or stone still life (natura morta), which can be stirred to life for a moment only through poetry (“On the green water of a Venetian canal / floats an open book of poetry”). While the first part of Dům druhých is full of distant poems with an almost paper-rustling melancholy and the atmosphere of the writer’s education and erudition, in the second part there is a return to the problematic Bohemia, an ash-grey place, colourless, rudimentary, lyrically purist and sparse. The whole thing retreats into detail, the reality of facets of refinement and the elegance “of weathered prints”, “attributes left over from other signs”, “a network imprinting itself upon the vacant eye”. However, at the same time, the poet also demands the “dance of the eye”, and it is with this in mind that “if you linger on the spot, all is lost”. His mother tongue becomes a Bachelard candle flame during emigration, life transforms into a perpetual odyssey with overtones of the seductive Sirens and with the danger of narrow rocky passages.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Zlín fell completely under the influence of Italian and ancient myths. He moves from romanticism and melancholy to the original sources, to hymns to the night, to the symbiosis of Europeanness with the Orient, to a Nietzschean and Faustian journey towards the Mothers. Like the late Roman Emperor Hadrian, the cosmocrator, Karel Zlín also attempts to encapsulate in his as yet unpublished compositions “the theatre of the universe”, in whose centre will be found the notorious cabinet, aula regia, hiding the world’s puzzles. Some of Zlín’s poems are reminiscent of anthropomorphic architecture and “sun barques” (these are titles for his sculptural objects), inclining towards the death of reality and towards the resurrection of dreams about the absolute/eternity which drift towards us from an infinite distance. This is also why Zlín translates so well the poetry of Leopardi, the hymnal compositions of Nerval and the work of the Italian writer Ugo Foscolo (Hroby [Graves]).
(js)
This profile was last updated on 1st March 2007
