city for failed acrobats
by Douglas Messerli
Vítězslav Nezval Antilyrik, translated from the Czech by
Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001)
Nezval, born in the village of Šamikovice in Southern Moravia, studied
philosophy at Charles University in Prague at the very time when Czechoslovakia
was the "first real and socially oriented democracy in central
Europe" (Rothenberg and Sovak), and like most Czech intellectuals of the
time aligned himself with the Communist Party. The artistic counterpart of the
political revolutionary spirit of the day was, for Nezval, an alliance with
what was called the "Nine Powers" (Devetsil), a poet's and artist's collective that included some of
the major figures of Czech experimentalism, including Jindrich Styrsky,
Jaroslav Seifert, Karel Teige, Frantisek Halas, and Toyen (Marie Germinova).
One of his first publications with this group was his long poem The Remarkable Magician, published at
the age of 21.
From 1923 on Nezval presented his own program of poetics described as
"Poetism," which set itself against "literary poetry" and
proposed "a new art which will cease to be art." This movement would
later ally itself with the Surrealists of Paris, particularly after Nezval's
meeting with André Breton in 1932. Over the next 35 years Nezval would continue
to publish, despite periods in which his art was banned and described as
"degenerate," dozens of audacious works of poetry and fiction, as
well as works of drama and art.
Our collection was only the third selection of his work to appear in
English, and included several remarkable poems, including "City of
Towers," where Nezval mesmerizingly repeats the word "fingers"
to celebrate that human tool that helped him to bring his Prague to life:
o hundred-towered
Prague
city with fingers
of all the saints
with fingers made
for swearing falsely
with fingers from
the fire & hail
with a musician's
fingers
with shining
fingers of a woman lying on her back
..........................
with fingers of
asparagus
with fingers with
fevers of 105 degrees
with fingers of
frozen forest & with fingers without gloves
with fingers on
which a bee has landed
with fingers of
blue spruces
.............................
with fingers
disfigured by arthritis
with fingers of
strawberries
with spring water
fingers & with fingers of bamboo
"The Dark City" presents a dream-like ghoulish world, a city
like a carousel, houses like accordions, streets composed of beds from which
the citizens come out like "giant worms" or "A pack of dogs that
leaped out of a mirror." As the narrator escapes this nightmare world, the
city crumbles into ruins and is left as only a pile of earth and ash.
A similar nightmare world is experienced in "The Seventh
Chant" from The Remarkable Magician,
in which the sights and sounds of the city are linked to European history:
I heard the
secrets in a kiss
the words around
it circling like a line of colored butterflies
saw thousands of
bacteria
in a sick man's
body
& every one
of them looked like a spiky chestnut
like a cosmos
making war
with a skin of
scaly armor
I saw a human
break free from his dying comrades
in the pit of
history that has no bottom
"Fireworks 1924" consists of 82 directions which Nezval
defines as a "cinemagenic poem."
"Diabolo: A Poem for Night" is a longer more narrative work
that recounts the movements of a sexually attractive but also vampire-like
woman as she removes her clothing and ultimately "her breasts & rests
them on the nightstand / then slips out thru the monastery crypt to take
confession." Like the poem that follows, the woman's courtier is
represented at times as being an "acrobat," a man caught upon the
wire "between his wife's bed / & another woman's." The "nite
vaudeville" Nezval describes becomes a story of equilibration, a
"marriage halfway station for failed acrobats," presumably fallen
beings from the wires connecting the city's many spires (Prague is commonly
known as the city of a hundred spires).
In his 1927 poem "Akrobat," Prague is seen as a meeting place
of all Europeans as the acrobat, both a marvelous shape-shifter and a fallen
fool, reveals the pleasures and tortures of modern life. Like a fairytale, the
poem, Nezval argues, "redeems our happiness," to which, by the end of
the poem, Nezval bids "farewell": "I leave you now so I can keep
returning."
In 1999 I visited Milos in Prague.
Milos, who comes from an illustrious Prague family, spent a couple of
days touring me through the city, the first night taking me to the Švejk
restaurant whose walls carry the drawings by Joseph Lada and George Grosz for
famed Czech novelist Jaroslav Hašek's The
Good Soldier Švejk.
Back in Prague Milos took me out to a
splendid dinner at a lovely restaurant. I believe I ordered boar. On our way
back home we walked across the Vltava River, stopping in a small park along the
way where he pointed across to the home (more like a lit-up mansion, it
appeared to me) in which he had grown up. "What a beautiful city," I
sighed.
Prague was in near-complete renovation
when I visited. Nearly all of the buildings which had not previously been
repainted were enjoying new coats of the bright colors that now identify the
Prague skyline. Milos scoffed, somewhat jokingly I presume, at all the
renovation. "I somehow got used to and now prefer the old gray city Prague
was for so many years under Soviet rule. Everything now seems so artificially
bright!"
A few years later, Milos introduced me
in Los Angeles to beloved Mexican poet Manual Ulacia, with whom Horácio Costa
had lived for several years before I met him on my first trip to Brazil. Ulacia
drowned while swimming in the ocean this year. A good swimmer, he was swept out
to sea by undercurrents and was unable to return to shore.
Los Angeles, October 17, 2009
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