Chapter 2 sequence

"Life is elsewhere" is a famous saying of Rimbaud.André Buhler quotes this quote in the conclusion of his Surrealist Manifesto.In May 1968, Parisian students wrote this sentence as their slogan on the wall of the University of Paris.But the original title of my novel was The Lyrical Age.I changed the title at the last minute because I saw the uneasy look on the faces of the publishers who doubted that anyone would buy a book with such a difficult title. The lyrical age is youth.My novel is a narrative poem of youth and an analysis of what I call "lyrical attitude".The lyrical attitude is a potential posture in every human being: it is one of the fundamental categories of human existence.As a literary genre, lyric poetry has existed for many centuries because humans have been capable of lyrical attitudes for thousands of years.The poet is its embodiment.

Poets are also great figures across European history, starting with Dante.He is a symbol of national identity (Camões, Goethe, Mickiewicz, Pushkin), he is the mouthpiece of the revolution (Bélangeri, Petofi, Mayakovsky, Lorga), he is The mouthpiece of history (Hugo, Breton), he is a figure of myth and an object of actual religious worship (Petrarch, Byron, Rimbaud, Rilke), but above all he is a representative of divine values, This sacred value we would like to write in capital letters: poetry. Yet what has happened to poets in Europe over the past half century?His voice is barely heard today.Before we are fully aware of it, the poet has disappeared from the grand and tumultuous international scene. (His disappearance is clearly one of the symptoms of that dangerous transitional age in which Europe has found itself and which we have not yet learned to name.) European poets remain, thanks to a wicked irony of history, The most recent brief period in which it played a popular role was the period of communist revolutions in Central Europe after 1945.

It is worth emphasizing that this particular era is full of genuine revolutionary psychology, and their adherents experience them with great sympathy and eschatological faith in a new world.The poets felt as if they were standing at the front of the stage for the last time.They thought they were playing their usual roles in the great theater of Europe, unaware that the theater manager had changed the program at the last moment and replaced it with a burlesque. I have seen firsthand the age of "the joint rule of executioners and poets."I heard Paul Éluard, my beloved French poet, publicly and formally disassociated himself from his Prague friend who was about to be hanged by Stalin's Supreme Court judges.I was traumatized by this incident (which I wrote about in "Laughter and Forgetting"): an executioner kills, which is normal after all; and a poet (and a great poet) sings with poetry, we think it is sacred The entire value system of the violation suddenly collapses.And nothing is safe anymore.Everything becomes problematic, suspicious, an object of analysis and suspicion: progress and revolution.youth.Mother.Even humans.And poetry.A world of collapsed values ​​appeared before my eyes, and gradually, over many years, the image of Jaromil, his mother and his lover took shape in my mind.

Please don't think Jaromil is a bad poet!This is a cheap explanation of his life!Jaromil is a gifted poet, imaginative and passionate.He is a sensitive young man.Of course, he was also an evil man.But his evil is also latent in each of us.on me.on your body.On Rimbaud.On Shelley.On Hugo.In every young man of all times and under all institutions.Jaromil is not a product of a particular era.A particular era simply illuminates a hidden side, releasing something that would only be dormant under different circumstances. Although the story of Jaromil and his mother takes place in a certain historical period, it is described truthfully (without any ironic intention), but my purpose is not to describe an era. "We chose that era not because we were interested in it per se, but because it seemed to offer an excellent trap for capturing Rimbaud and Lermontov, lyricism and youth." In other words: for the novelist, a The specific historical situation is an anthropological laboratory in which he explores his fundamental question: what is human existence?As far as this novel is concerned, several related questions are raised at the same time: What is the lyrical attitude?What is youth?What mysterious role does a mother play in forming a young man's lyrical world?If youth is a time of inexperience, what is the connection between inexperience and the desire for the absolute?Or is there any connection between the desire for the absolute and revolutionary zeal?And how does the lyrical attitude manifest itself in love?Is there a "lyrical form" of love?Etc., etc.

Of course, the novel does not answer any of these questions.These questions themselves are already an answer, as Heidegger said: Human existence has a form of question. The original idea to write this novel came a long time ago, in the mid-fifties.At that time, I wanted to solve an aesthetic problem: how to write a novel that belongs to "poetry criticism" and at the same time it is poetry itself (to convey the passion and imagination of poetry).I finished this novel in 1969.It was never published in Bohemia. It was first published in France in 1973, and a year later in the United States in a brilliant translation by Peter Coucy, for which he was nominated for a National Book Award.Coucy is the best Czech translator in the United States.The fact that he reworked the novel a few years later to revise it to make it more faithful to the original shows his dedication to perfection; in other words, he was a true artist among translators.I sincerely thank him for this excellent translation and hold his hand firmly as a friend.