Anthologist: Mária Ferenčuhová
Translator: Silvia Okáliová
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Martin Kočiš, Ladislav Lipcsei, Veronika Dianišková, Jana Pacálová, Juliana Sokolová, Michal Tallo, Radoslav Tomáš, Eva Tomkuliaková, Peter Cibo
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Experience, Concept, Imagery. Forms and contexts of contemporary young Slovak poetry
It is almost impossible to identify young poetry without describing what it grows from, what it connects with, or what it defines itself against. The selection of the most up-to-date Slovak poetry which you are now holding intends to reflect the most vital, most productive and most interesting part on the young Slovak literary scene.
Of course, every selection (if it is curatorial rather than all-inclusive or statistical) is a mirror of the compiler’s taste and preference. Not all of those Slovak poets, who have hitherto published not more than three books and are less than forty years old, are represented in this book. Nor can we say that all the distinct poetics are exhibited here. Rather, this is a testimony on contemporary young poetry in a number of forms – the forms which are closest to me personally, and where one finds not just a mirroring of the cartography of older Slovak poetry, but also some entirely new features. Several of the authors have thus far published only one book. It might seem that this is too little to indicate their lines of development, but all of them, without exception, continue to publish in journals or have prepared a further collection that will appear in the coming months. In fact, this anthology includes a number of entirely new and previously unpublished poems.
Opening the selection are three poets, each of whom made his or her debut more than ten years ago and whose writing is marked by long pauses between individual books.
Jana Pácalová’s first collection, entitled Citová výchova (Sentimental Education), appeared in 2003. Slovak literary critics grouped her with a number of other women poets designated as the ‘ANesthetic Genderation’ (principally including Nóra Ružičková, Katarína Kucbelová and Mária Ferenčuhová). Writers of this group mainly published their books under the imprint of Drewo & Srd, and later Ars Poetica. Their main characteristic was that they used unpoetical registers of language (architectural, advertising, linguistic, philosophical or medical) and a seeming depersonalisation of the lyrical subject of the poems; seeming, because it was precisely and only a desensitisation of language that made it possible for an extremely sensitive subject to testify about the world. In this respect, the ‘ANesthetic Genderation’ distinguished itself from the conceptual poetry by male poets (of the so-called‘Text Generation’), who associated depersonalisation rather with irony and postmodern playfulness.
Jana Pácalová’s Sentimental Education has many features of the traditional intimate verse. Only in her second (and hitherto last) collection, Všetko o mojej matke (Everything About My Mother, 2013) did she commit herself unambiguously to the poetics of ‘ANesthetic Genderation’. Here she creates a monothematic poetic composition, focused on the theme of motherhood rendered problematic and stripped of the idealising veneer which art produced by men has imposed upon it for centuries. The lyrical subject of the poems in this instance draws a parallel between her own story of maternity, the story of her mother (designated in the text as Sylvia P.), and the motherhood of Sylvia Plath that was ended tragically. These women’s identities are interwoven and motifs from individual poems reappear, modelled after harmonic variations in music, each time shifted to a new tonality. Disturbing motifs of an unbearable maternity and a disharmonic partner relationship are expressed in terse, even laconic lines. An almost oneiric, erratic, and nonetheless rational poetic testimony rises out of the tension between content and form: the testimony of a woman surprised by her fate and immediately rebelling against it, in order to regain the ability to accept herself, her child, and ultimately, even the child‘s father as well.
Radoslav Tomáš made his debut in 2005 with Chlapec (Boy), a book which connects with the tradition of the Slovak imaginative lyric and draws readers into a world full of visual perceptions, tastes, smells and emotions, first loves, home and departures. Tomáš’s rich visual metaphors culminate in his second collection Vlčie svadby (Wolves‘ Wedding, 2009). Here, the writer works with character archetypes of biblical and ancient mythological figures, whose utterances, however, are in the highest degree contemporary and civilly muted. His Theseus, for example, is a lonely small boy who is concerned with butterflies and with the finitude of life; Judas thinks of his childhood betrayals; Jason is an old librarian who reads poems.
Stylisation to other persons similar to the author (or, perhaps, similar to us all?) is also found in Tomáš’s last book hitherto, Statusové hlásenia (antológia súčasnej európskej poézie) (Status Reports: an anthology of contemporary European poetry). Here, he creates a harmonically sounding polyphony, where fictional characters from thirty-four European countries speak. The book’s structure copies the map of Europe. If we sketch the order of poems onto the map, we get a narrowing spiral trajectory that begins high in the north, proceeds east, and afterwards moves south, so as ultimately to end up in Slovakia, the “heart” of Europe, with the lyrical subject, who bears the same name as the author. Although Radoslav Tomáš’s last book appeared a full seven years ago, his magazine publications continue to show a sense of poetics based on empathy with others, comparison of other persons’ experience with his own, and collision with the limits of the possibility of bearing witness to such experience. These evidently remain stable elements of his writing.
Veronika Dianišková entered Slovak poetry at the age of twenty with Labyrint okolo rúk (Labyrinth Round the Hands, 2006). Critics compared this debut with the writing of probably the most prominent contemporary woman poet, Mila Haugová (1942).Striking symbolism and work with primarily female mythological motifs were what first of all drew attention to Labyrinth Round the Hands – secondly, its broad scope. The book comprised no fewer than 80 poems, hence it seemed that this writer would be exceptionally prolific.
Surprisingly, it was only in 2014 that Dianišková’s second book was published, the slender and muted Zlaté pávy sa rozpadnú na sneh (Golden Peacocks Dissolve in the Snow). Motifs of journey and being, or becoming, appear here; in addition, however, there is the motif of writing and the (in)admissibility of words. The enclosed lyrical space in the book connects with a further prominent Slovak woman writer, Anna Ondrejková (1954). These two authors are linked by more than poetics. Anna Ondrejková illustrated Golden Peacocks Dissolve in the Snow and Veronika Dianišková was the editor of Anna Ondrejková’s december: Izoldine vlasy horia (December: Isolde’s Hair Is On Fire 2014). Both books were issued by the small publishing house that Anna Ondrejková founded and directs.
Dianiškova’s third book of poems, the slim in volume Správy z nedomovov (Reports from Non-homes) finally came out in 2017. The writer is drawing on experience acquired as a social worker in low-threshold accommodation for homeless people. However, the book does not take the form of primary-level social criticism. Empathy with the socially disadvantaged is intensively combined with the writer’s own sensibility, and in the second part of the collection, entitled Bird Atlas, she actually assumes the metaphorical forms of small, non-migratory songbirds. Motifs of non-home, non-nesting and ultimately Non-countries (as the third and final part of the book is called) thus bind this fragile collection into a compact whole.
Hence the poetry of the first trio of Slovak writers tends from private and intensive inner experience either to an empathetic perception of the others (Tomáš, Dianišková) or to a conceptual deconstruction of the stereotypes touching private (female, maternal) experience (Pácalová).
Notable in the second trio of poets, Martin Kočiš, Eva Tomkuliaková and Juliana Sokolová, is a lesser penchant for lyricism and, by contrast, a conspicuous conceptualism, or alternatively, an experimental working with form or language.
Martin Kočiš connects most strikingly with the experimental poetic tradition of the ‘Text Generation’ (Peter Macsovszky, Peter Šulej, Michal Habaj), which was one of the most progressive trends in Slovak poetry of the 1990s and has had a considerable influence on many poets and on the poetics of the younger and youngest generations. The Text Generation based their poetics principally on ludic, postmodern, often ironic and multi-significant game-playing, with references to an already-existing textual universe. Kočiš, however, plunges deeper into the history of poetry and also draws from visual or visual-textual tradition, represented in the 1950s and ’60s by Emmet Williams and many other poets from the Fluxus movement, and in Slovakia by Milan Adamčiak (in the 1960s he was composing graphic and visual poems which could also be used as musical scores). The first half of txt.txt (2014), Kočiš’s debut volume, is marked by playful metatextual, sometimes self-referential poems on literary production. Here, he uses the jargon of literary scholarship, sometimes surrealistically, but always in a very imaginative way. The second section of the book bears the marks of visual and concrete poetry, where the semantic dimension of language gives way to graphic design. This leads up to a concluding section that actually takes the form of photographs: instead of the name-tags on house interphones, embossed plastic tapes with words that make up a poem are stuck on the bells of the individual apartments. Kočiš’s linking of the visual and the textual, using grainy black and white photographs, acquires a peculiar cachet of anachronism, whereby the writer (perhaps) indirectly acknowledges the distant sources of his poetry. The word “perhaps” is used here deliberately because the book features a quotation from Peter Macsovszký’s Gestika (Gesture): “Often I copy someone’s idea, without knowing that it already exists”.
Eva Tomkuliaková’s debut collection Sie forma (The Sie Form, 2014) likewise proceeds from the Text Generation’s poetics and their strikingly sterile, often self-referential formulations, but is essentially distinguished from them by the feminist perspective from which the author examines language and testimony. Also distinctive is a thoroughgoing linguistic detachment and, stemming from this, also an emotional distancing. The book is based on the gender subversion of a narrator testifying in the grammatical third person, and designated in the jargon of literary scholarship as the “er-form” (from German,er = he), to a narrator-woman. Tomkuliaková systematically applies the third person of narration in her poems, and from the grammatical standpoint this “sie form” is, indeed, practically identical with the masculine er-form. That is to say, the main difference is in attitude: in the consciousness and the declaration that the narrator is in no sense the omniscient and all-seeing narrator-god, but always (even despite her detachment) “proceeds from the self”.
The poems selected for this anthology come from a second book Cudzie slová (Foreign Words), that is already scheduled to come out in the autumn of 2018. Tomkuliaková is experimenting here with several voices: for example, a hypnotic voice influencing consciousness and unconsciousness, or a neurotic voice assembled from banal conversations, which, in a homogeneous current, give an impression of absolute uncertainty and doubts about the nature of reality. Tomkuliaková’s new poems are based on fragments of various discourses (scholarly, psychological, and particularly the esoteric discourses of directed meditations) which are combined, using a collage method, into affecting, sometimes abstract and sometimes surrealistic, images of “a landscape of the soul” – a landscape which occasionally, and in a very precise, absurd or monstrous manner, overlaps with the landscape that surrounds us.
Juliana Sokolová, in contrast to the preceding poets, does not in any way explicitly connect with any of the domestic traditions. She grew up in Libya, studied in Great Britain, and has spent the early part of her professional career in several European countries. She writes bilingually, first in English and subsequently creates versions of her text in Slovak. As a result, her first book My house will have a roof / Môj dom bude mať strechu also appeared bilingually, both in English and Slovak, but (altogether symptomatically) not at home in Slovakia, but via the Czech publishing house Fra. My house will have a roof is composed principally of shorter philosophical poems with gnomic lines, reflecting Sokolová’s cosmopolitan life and philosophical education. Not coincidentally, its fundamental theme is the search or the need for home.
Two longer poems included in this anthology are from a new, hitherto unpublished text. More so than in the debut volume, one can see in them Sokolová’s interdisciplinary approach, writing on the borderline of poetry and philosophy. In her philosophical works, Juliana Sokolová has explored, among other issues, the question of mourning. With this theme, her poetic “tractate“ Kuzmányho is a fine demonstration of how the philosophical mode of thinking is permeated into the space of poetry.
The final three writers made their debuts only very recently. While one of them, Peter Cibo, is closer in age to the poets mentioned above and his Apnoe (Apnea) may be accordingly seen as a belated debut, the other two, Michal Tallo and Ladislav Lipcsei, belong to the youngest (and apparently very productive) generation. Each of them, scarcely two years after the appearance of their first books, have another one prepared for publication.
Judging by Apnea (2016), Peter Cibo, too, may be seen as one of the poets inspired by the Text Generation. However, equally notable in his texts is the influence of the introspective lyric or even the “poetry of everyday life” of the 1960s. Cibo, like the conceptualists of the Text Generation, uses vocational and scholarly terminology, or the language of information technologies and the new media, although in contrast to the Text Generation’s postmodern and linguistic game-playing, he uses these resources principally to express the emotions, perception and experience of the subjects of his poems. Dominant in his writing are motifs of remembrances of childhood, first relationship losses, solitude amidst the city, and the apparent void of feeling in modern communication technology.
We also find a combination of more or less conceptual work on language with a recording of experience in the poems of Michal Tallo. Tallo creates mental, architectural, and even technicist landscapes of text. He sketches an outline of their abstract space, in which he registers the corporeal, medical and psychic states of the lyrical subject. But he does this in a manner which is rather reminiscent of reports on the condition of a machine and its ongoing processes. Despite his use of the language of information technology and the new media (from his early childhood Tallo had grown up in their embrace), his poetry is primarily love lyrics. In his second book ∆, which is scheduled to be published at the end of 2018, the entire world literally becomes a metaphor for turbulent love relationships, beginning with the evolution of animal genera and going on to the disappearance of living languages. After the controlled, coolly commented emotions of his first book, Tallo comes to the point of abandoning detachment. He no longer uses language as a buffer solution, but as a material from which worlds grow and subsequently, tumble down under its weight.
The final author in the anthology, Ladislav Lipcsei, is perhaps the most passionate. In contrast to most of the poets preceding him in this book, Lipcsei has never kept his imagery on a rein. He refused to allow himself to be fettered by any formal restrictions in his debut collection Svätým mečom (By the Holy Sword, 2017), nor did he look for unifying lines or any concept which would determine the appearance of his book, or even what it would be about. His rich imagination and intuitive approach to the work make him somewhat of a successor to the Beat Generation. Mighty floods of images pour into poem-rivers, and individual motifs race from poem to poem. Nonetheless, one should say that Lipcsei professes affinity not only with the beatniks, but also with the tradition of religious poetry. His all-embracing – and quite ecumenical in religionist terms –view of the world conveys something similar to mysticism of enchantment or trance from the transcendental.
The most contemporary Slovak poetry is (no doubt like all poetry) a pulsing, many-headed organism, imbibing impulses from the world around and transmuting them, with extraordinary sensitivity, to literary images. In this selection of nine of the younger and youngest Slovak writers, we will find practically everything: from introverted lyricism and love poetry, through awareness of social problems and gender inequality, to a taste for experimentation with language and poetic form. And in what sense is this young Slovak poetry distinctive? In most cases, it is “instructed” by poetry at home and from the world, and it is relatively intellectual. The writers think quite a lot about the perspective from which they write and the context which they are entering. But my own encounters with the poetry of other countries, cultures and traditions (either at poetry festivals or in translations in books and journals) have long ago convinced me that poetry is a universal language, one which all sensitive people in the world understand. I have therefore no doubt that perceptive readers in Greece will grasp the message that this anthology conveys.
Mária Ferenčuhová