Vítĕzslav
Nezval (Czechoslavakia / now Czech
Republic)
1900-1958
Vítĕzslav
Nezval was born on May 16, 1900 into a family of a village teacher in
Šamikovice in Southern Moravia. His father had cultivated an interest in the
arts and had traveled long distances to see important exhibitions. He was
especially involved with music and his teacher was the composer Leoš Janáček.
Nezval's grand-uncle was an eccentric toolmaker and telegraph clerk, a man who
knew the world and spoke several languages—"half scientist, half
poet," Nezval would later describe him. The young boy's life was
profoundly marked by these two men but also by the village culture, close to
nature and the vocabulary of those who worked the soil. In 1911 Nezval entered
the gymnasium in Trebic, where he also learned piano and began composing music.
From 1916 on he was systematically reading and writing his first poetry. In
March of 1918 he as drafted into the first world war, but he was sent home soon
thereafter for partly real and partly simulated illnesses.
With the war over, in the fall of 1919
Nezval moved to Prague and started studying philosophy at Charles University.
This was the time when a newly formed Czechoslovakia (under its
philosopher-president Thomas Masaryk) was emerging as the first real and
socially oriented democracy in central Europe, and the question of its further
political and economic direction was in contention. Like most other Czech
artists and intellectuals, Nezval veered toward the left and in 1924 became a
member of the Communist Party. As with others also—not only in Prague but
throughout Europe—political revolution had its artistic counterpart, and from
1922 on, Nezval allied himself with the "Nine Powers" (Devetsil), a
collective of poets and artists that included among its core figures Jindrich
Styrsky, Jaroslav Seifert, Karel Teige, Frantisek Halas, and Toyen (Marie
Germinova). Written before his twenty-second birthday, Nezval's long poem, The
Remarakble Magician, was included in the group's "Revolutionary Collections,"
a series of books of essays, poems, and manifestos, that accompanied the
founding of a new "poetism" as the principal Czech avant-garde
movement.
Nezval dated his own "discovery of
Poetism" from 1923. As a program and a poetics—developed by Nezval and
Teige in the latter's 1924 Poetist Manifesto (contemporary with André Breton's
Manifesto of Surrealism)—Poetism set itself against "literary poetry"
and proposed "a new art which will cease to be art." In a tension
shared by other movements of the time and later, their "poetism"
tilted between a rejection of "art" in the name of "a pure
poetry...[within] a life [turned] into a magnificent entertainment"
(Tiege) and a commitment to political and social struggle taking shape around a
nascent and, for them, a still admired Soviet Union. Nezval would later rename
the movement "realism" and later still would ally it for several
years with the Surrealists of Paris.
In this way Nezval's public career moved
between political and literary commitments and alliances. With the onset of the
Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s he engaged directly in labor
struggles—those in particular of striking Czech coal miners. In 1932 he
attended the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow, and in the same year
he made an extensive and for him a transformative trip to Italy and to France,
where he met with the leaders of the French avant-garde: Breton, Eluard, Péret,
Aragon. At the same time his recognition as a poet—the central figure of the
new Czech poetry—continued to grow. He received the prestigious State Prize for
poetry in 1934 and donated the entire sum to a fund for helping refugees from
Nazi Germany.
Nezval's meeting with the French poets and
his continuing involvement with Surrealism had a kind of inevitability about
it. As early as 1924 the event and content of Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of
that year (along with that of Yvan Goll) had been disseminated in Prague. From
the early 1920s on, Nezval's connection as writer and dramaturge with Jinrich
Honzl's Liberated Theater involved him in the presentation and translation of
works by Apollinaire, Jarry, Soupault, and Breton, among others. The painters
Syrsky and Toyen, both close to him, emigrated to France and entered actively
into the Paris art scene. From 1928 to 1931 Styrsky, along with Karel Tiege,
published a number of key articles concerning French Surrealism, and in 1931
three important shows of French avant-garde painting were organized in Prague
(an internationally based Poetry '32 exhibition came shortly thereafter), with
Nezval intimately involved in their planning and presentation.
It was only after Nezval's 1932 meeting
with Breton, however, that a more formal collaboration was set in motion.
Nezval came to the Surrealists' defense against attacks by the Russian writer
Ilya Ehrenburg, and in 1934 eleven writers, poets and painters in Prague,
published a manifesto, written largely by Nezval and Teige, in which they
presented themselves as part of the international surrealist movement and a
proclamation of a decision to form a Czech Surrealist group.
The alliance between Prague and Paris led
to a period of heightened activity on the Czech side: new books and magazines,
art exhibitions, visits from Breton and Eluard and others, the establishment of
the Surrealist-oriented New Theater with its productions of Breton and Aargon's
The Treasury of Jesuits and Nezval's The Oracle of Delphi. With
its balancing act of poety and political absolutes, however, the Czech group,
much like is Parisian prototype, began quickly to come apart. In 1938, while
Europe was heading into new war, Nezval issues a proclamation dissolving the
movement, which for a year or so continued existence under Teige and a group of
interested young intellectuals and artists.
For Nezval the war period was a time of
withdrawal and holding back. When the Germans took control of Czechoslovakia in
March of 1939, he was not persuaded to leave the country, although arrangements
had been made for him to do so. Most of his books were forbidden as
"degenerate art," and he turned his attention to painting and to the
writing of plays, most notably Manon Lescaut, based on Prévost's famous
eighteenth century novel. In 1944 Nezval was arrested by Germans but was
released soon thereafter.
After the liberation in 1945, Nezval
returned to poetry and to increasingly recognized publication, though rarely
with the avant-garde thrust of his earlier work. For a while he was the
director of the film section of the Information and Culture Ministry in Prague,
and after the Communist takeover in 1948 he received a number of official
prizes and considerable governmental support. His political affinities and
international stature made him a prominent member of that network of tolerated
avant-gardists/poet-heroes that included Neruda, Brecht, Picasso, Hikmet,
Eluard, and Tzara, some of whom he shared pro-forma hymns to Stalin in the
early postwar years. In 1945 he again traveled to France, this time to meet
Picasso and to see the French premier of his play Today the Sun Is Setting on
Atlantis. But by then he had experienced his first heart attack and he had the
sense that death was closing in on him.
The last years of Nezval's life were a
time of frenetic activity—publishing poems, essays, and copious translations of
world literature. Nezval died on April 6, 1958.
—Jerome
Rothenberg and Milos Sovak
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Most (Brno: Bedřich
Kočí, 1922); Pantomina (Prague: Ústřední studentské knihkupectví
nakladatelství, 1924); Diabolo (Prague: Vaněk & Votava, 1926); Karneval
(Prague: Jan Fromek, 1926); Menší ružová zahrada (Prague: Jan Fromek,
1926); Akrobat (Prague: Rudolf Škeřík, 1927); Blíženci (Prague: Rozmach, 1927);
Edison (Prague: Rudolf Škeřík, 1928); Hra v Kostky (Prague:
Rudolf Škeřík, 1929); Básně noci (Prague: Aventinum, 1930); Jan ve
smutku (Prague: Bohumil Janda, 1930); Posedlost (Prague: Bohumil
Janda, 1930); Snídaně v trávě (Prague: 1930); Skleněný havelok
(Prague: František Borový, 1932); Zpátecní lístek (Prague: František
Borový, 1933); Sbohem a šáteček (Prague: František Borový, 1934); Žena
v množném čísle (Prague: František Borový, 1936); Praha s prsty deště
(Prague: František Borový, 1936); Absolutní hrobař. Básně 1937 (Prague:
František Borový, 1937); Historický obraz (Prague: František F. Müller,
1939; expanded edition, Prague: Melantrich, 1945); Pět minut za městem
(Prague: František Borový, 1940); Stalin (Prague: Československý
spisovatel, 1949); Zpěv míru (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1950); Chrpy
a měta (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1955); Dílo Vítezslava
Nezvala, (30 vols.) (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1950-1990)
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TRANSATIONS
Song
of Peace,
trans. by Jack Lindsay and Stephen Jolly (London: Fore, 1951); in Three
Czech Poets: Vítĕzslav Nezval, Antonín Bartušek, Josef Hanzlík
(Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1971); Antilyrik and Other Poems,
trans. by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000);
Novel
It's
on the gazes of the women
that
it flickers in the length of mirrors
an
indigo adventure
mixes
with the midday sleep of soda water breaking free
extinguishing
the evening
A
cigarette draws off a day that's past
a
memory in a box with the geraniums of summer
fragrance
fading as the garbage truck rolls past
So
when I paint these eyes
it's
an enormous still life these eyelashes brushing
the
down comforter on which the setting sun
projects
a green to pas a cypress idyll
Farewell
the grimace from the far side of the lawn
where
some great game bird starts up the evening show
but
stops short sobbing into her black pearls
in
the backwash of a kiss that strips you bare
And
now I see her standing naked
where
the cafe mirrors multiply her image
until
it lets me fall asleep
and
I forget my indigo deception
An
exchange of gazes
buzzes
now like poisons
above
the ranunculus's sweet inebriations
united
by an icy chandelier
Then
there's a letter slipped into a magazine
and
later taken out
that
I'm now burning in this ash tray
Or
there's a handkerchief that some one dropped
and
that a waiter picked up eyes fixed on his shoes
And
the next day footsteps marking time
were
entering the trolley an exchange of greetings
our
first rendezvous
What
rotten luck
a
rainy day three hours talking on the bathhouse colonnade
the
indigo dissolved is dying out
in
the thin blue opening between the little clouds
Loud
ticking of a watch a sash that rustles like a snake's tongue
ironic
crunch of chocolates a cry emitted where the makeup doesn't take
a
frayed bouquet of peonies small boudoirs of the sun
Pieces
of luggage left on desolation highway
deprived
of combs and handkerchiefs and photographs and letters
an
offhanded wave adieu
out
on the platform reading destination: moon
damp
and disenchanted
Until
one day in an elevator without memories
a
meeting with a flash of ostrich feathers on a little blonde
sparks
a renewal of the poet's chess board
and
oh the games I play on it oh darkest night
—Translated
from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak
Shirt
[PREAMBLE]
How
do they seize me these strange beings with no names
All
their history as simple as Gibraltar
Bastards
of reality and air who wander over Africa
The
angelus clangs out
......
On
one of those steamy nights the end of June in 1935
I
walked past the Luxembourg Garden
It
was just striking midnight
And
the streets were empty
With
the emptiness of moving vans
Deserted
like Ash Wednesday
And
I thought of nothing
Had
no wishes
No
I wished for nothing rushed to nowhere
Nothing
weighed on me
Like
a man sans memory I walked and walked
A
many yes like a box
The
way old men walk who no longer need to sleep
I
still don't know what caught me maybe my own sigh
The
trees out in the garden filling with white bandages
I
looked back at those paper bindings
Over
an iron hedge
Could
I have been singing as I walked?
Just
singing
And
Paris sold off like a slave
Convulsed
and crazy
Paris
with your bridges made into your chains
Prague,
Paris, Leningrad and all the cities
I
have ever walked thru
Now
I see a herd of women bound with ropes
The
glow in drowning them the sky still free
Like
bracelets that a crowd is rushing over
Oh
you gates you bridges
Of
the one and only city that I see
A
cith cut thru by the Seine and Neva
by
the Moldau
And
a brook where peasant women wash their clothes
The
brook I live by
And
windows
Thru
the first a statue comes in from the Place du Pantheon
The
next looks over the Charles Bridge
Thru
the third I'm staring down the Nevsky Prospect
And
still more windows
How
I love the grocer's paper cones
With
secrets that lie too deep
That
they remind me of an empty changer
With
its heaps and heaps of shirts
A
shaft that holds the common grave of nameless women
I
know a forest with its broadleafed burdock
under
which a girl's breasts' hidden
And
a tin cross to and these white hands
A
sofa stuffed with gauze that reeks of antiseptic
Who
are you woman like a sewing machine I stare at
Like
the Boulevard Montparnasse that self-same evening
When
I was sitting down outside the Cafe Dome
And
studying the frieze on that one building thirty
five
storeys up
I
thought that it was snowing
In
my mind I took part in the final new year's eve
of
the 19th century before it ended
Under
a tree filled up with songs a carriage waited
In
vain I tried to find the house the sewing machine inside
its
shuttle that held a thread I longed to have
Then
walked back to the Luxembourg again
The
wonder of those gardeners who care so for their trees
they
wrap the fruit in little sacks
Like
you who cover up your bare breasts with a shirt
As
beautiful as a water pail turned over in a house of mourning
As
beautiful as a needle in a birch bark with the year and date stitched in
As
beautiful as a poppy head that's shaken by a bell
As
beautiful as a shoe out in a flood floats past a window with an oil lamp
As
beautiful as a wooden stake on which a butterfly is resting
As
beautiful as a baked apple in the snow
As
beautiful as a bedboard struck by lightning
As
beautiful as a wet rag in a fire
As
beautiful as a loaf of bread at midnight on the pavement
As
beautiful as a button on a cloister wall
As
beautiful as a treasure in a pot of flowers
As
beautiful as a psychic's table and the words writ on the gate
As
beautiful as a garland in a shooting gallery
AS
beautiful as a scissors snipping off a candlewick
As
beautiful as a tear inside the eye
As
beautiful as a the hairwheel of a clock inside a mare's ear
As
beautiful as a diamond in a condotierre's rifle
As
beautiful as teeth marks on an apple
As
beautiful as the trees in the Luxembourg Garden
the
trees wrapped in white linen
stiff
with starch
—Translated
from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak
A
Duel
When
she sent forth her fingers like a swarm of birds
Into
the beard hairs of a man bowed down like barley
Her
back started to pour down like rain
Over
her buttocks flowed like a bidet
An
uneven fight it was
Old
man and statue slugged it out
Ending
with three swipes and a bloody dagger
But
the killer
Falling
to earth before his victim did
Eyes
shut tight could see wild poppies
Which
would scorch his beard with fire
Of
a never gratified desire
—Translated
from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak
______________
PERMISSIONS
Novel,"
"Shirt," and Duel"
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