Poetry interpretation, its constitution in Slovak literary theory and criticism is usually associated with the 1960s, namely with M. Hamada, S. Šmatlák, V. Turčány, A. Bagin, F. Miko and his theoretical initiative as well as the circle of the authors involved in Nitra projects and collections devoted to "the interpretation of a piece of writing". The present article reviews briefly the tradition within the current poetry analysis. The fundamental inspiration is considered to be Czech and Slovak structuralism of the 1930s and the 1940 - updated in the 1960s - structure as an analysis tool used on a particular piece of writing as well as a means to understanding changes in literature. A non-standard, however key moment to date, is poetic exposition of liberating imaginative play in the modern, avant-garde and contemporary poetry. The emancipation of poetry and criticism from the guardianship of ideology at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s accented – in association with the philosophy and literature of existence – the concept and the phenomenon of situation: a contemporary man´s situation, a situation as a premise of a literary work and the art as an appeal to the man in his situation. Writing about poetry was at the same time a politically progressive syncretic reflexion, and so oscillated between structure and situation. The changed 1970s pushed most of the inspirations and outcomes into anonymity or urged their cryptic forms. The present-day productive areas of poetry analysis may be summarized into key words: corporeality as a writing base, tropology and inter-mediality. The substantial part of poetry analysis, interpretational as well as potentially historiographical, is nowadays formed by the dismantling of its preserved image from the times before 1989 and the identification of those „symbolic“ ideological codes, which it was confronted or contaminated with. In conclusion the present article raises a question what can be obtained from the differentiations between the „imaginary“, the „symbolic“ and the „real“ (in J. Lacan´s sense).
The article deals with the argument over Milovanie v husej koži (Lovemaking with goose pimples on) by Miroslav Válek. The collection of poems published in 1965 became in 1966 the subject of the argument between M. Hamada and S. Šmatlák. M. Červenka of the Czech side got involved in it as well. The presented text reconstructs it as a chiasmus of poetry and criticism, structuralism-inspired analysis and interpretation of a poetic text and its radicalizing, existentially appealing finalization of the thinking process. The protagonist of the polemic M. Hamada deliberately situated it on the boundary between literary and moral-critical social debates. What M. Hamada vehemently identified in Válek´s „fourth book of restlessness“ was Nihilism and related amorphous, fragmentary, and cliché lyric messages. The other participant of the argument S. Šmatlák defended M. Válek in the name of everlasting Humanism including the negative moments of the human and the world using. The argument is contextualized in the article as an argument over moderating the form of the poetry in the 1960s (on the one hand analytical unmasking of the human situation and on the other hand his cathartic poetic saviour), the nature of criticism (work at the service of the text as opposed to the efforts to autonomously reflect on literature and the state of the world), as the confrontation between the traditional and ideological reflections of Humanism and the related contemporary issues (the philosophy of existence, M. Heidegger, Structuralism of the 1960s, literature itself ranging from S. Beckett to J.-P. Sartre). The argument anticipated the schism of Slovak literature in the 1970s and 1980s, namely Šmatlák´s ideological viewpoints in the 1970s and 1980s and Hamada´s moralizing gestures as of the 1990s. The article records the impact of the argument on the interpretations of poetic texts in Slovak writing about poetry, its methodical dimensions as well as the still open issues of reading Válek´s poetry itself. Finally, it takes notice of potential connections with F. Halas´s poetry updated from the mid-1950s.
The article maps in a synecdochical manner the poetic journey made by Ján Ondruš (1932 – 2000) from the elementary lyric situation and mood – The Sonnet to the constellation of dream, natural elements or cycles and poetic imagination – A Drop of Dream to the vivisections, textual-physical exercises typical of the author – From Hospital. The main focus is on analytical reading of the text From Hospital (collection Šialený mesiac /The Mad Moon, 1965): the genre, the semantics of the names and motifs, the constitutive duality of „agent“ and „patient“. The article also maps how the debutant poet´s initial lyric melancholy transforms and becomes more problematic: from the discreetly present traditional iconography to the poetics of corporeality in the sense of „patient“.
The short interpretation of Š. Strážay´s (born 1940) collection of poems Malinovského 96 (1985) is meant to be a contribution to the intended series of „microanalyses“ of the key works of art written for the History of Slovak literature after the year 1945. The text maps and characterizes the author´s subject matters: poetry, everyday life, female element, partnership, urban environment, suburban countryside, periphery... Overlapping life-authentic discreet self-portrait and fragmentary lyric image of the world has support in intricate literariness. The article identifies the inter-textual sources and interconnections (J. Kostra, B. Brecht, J. Joyce, G. Flaubert, J. Hollý). Then it presents genre-style characteristics of Š. Strážay´s poetry: description, enumeration, part-taking in the events, frequently frozen, and finally a reflection on all the things the author has seen and experienced. Writing as understood by Š. Strážay´s is a clarifying, communication-open, cathartic part of the contemporary reflecting human´s living natural world seen and lived soberly, without illusions.
The text is an act of reading the poem The City from the collection The Interier (1992) by Štefan Strážay. The motif of covered sculptures is a poem set at the turn of the years 1989 – 1990. The article tracks the motifs of bad signs, spectres and revenants. It relates them to the theme of history and problematic future. The associated background to the reading is provided by the poems by L. Novomeský, M. Válek and I. Kupec written in the 1960s featuring sculptures, i.e. funeral monuments – as the witnesses, opponents, objects of historical changes. The interconnections between sculptures and lyric texts occurring in the article were inspired the works of R. Jakobson and Z. Mathauser. The article takes notice of the 1960s reflections on sculpture by D. Tatarka and J. Patočka. It confronts sculptures and city as such in Strážay´s work with the poem by F. Halas written in the troubled late 1930s. The Strážay´s ascetic, minimalist poem is situated amongst other lyric texts giving historical accounts of the late 1980s (I. Laučík, I. Kupec) and on the distant horizon of the emphatic possibilities of poetry opened up in the 1960s (M. Válek, J. Ondruš).
The present paper dealing with Ivan Laučík´s (1944 – 2004) poetry is organized into several steps. It was inspired by M. Merleau-Ponty´s ideas about the chiasmus of corporeity and the world, about perceiving elements and things, about the functioning of the living language, fragmentarily known in the Czechoslovak context since the 1960s and probably marginally noticed by I. Laučík. The paper refines cave motifs, or topoi as a synecdoche of nature in Laučík´s poetry – it is done by confronting his own poems with Rudolf Těsnohlídek´s book of documentary essays Demänová published in the year 1926. An attempt at defining the semantics of the motifs is made by referring to Laučík´s essay about speleologist J. Volko-Starohorský, where there is a poetically inspiring designation crisis and a crisis situation of existential corporeal commitment projected into the relation between language and cave experience. The paper highlights as an interpretation problem the transition of Laučík´s poetry from an excessively „open“ way of writing of the late 1960s to relating his poetry of the 1980s to natural and cultural landmarks of the Liptov region, biographically well-known to the poet. These ideas are further exemplified by critical reading of three poems. The poem Jahoda (Strawberry, collection Vzdušnou čiarou, As the crow flies, 1991) shows Laučík´s participation in a latent discussion of the 1980s about ecology, the critical reading documents the biographical context of the poem, notices irony and a commemoration gesture. The poem Alexy´s pastel moves on from the visual work of art to reviving its model – a sacred architectural monument falling into a ruin at that time and shows so far unnoticed possibility or form of Laučík´s poetry – a „quasi-geographical recording of history“. In the case of the poem Milí priatelia! (Dear Friends!, end of the collection Na prahu počuteľnosti, On the Threshold of Audibility, 1988) brief fragmentary critical reading uses the motif of a hat to refine the chiasmus between communication and anonymous loneliness, as well as the motif of avalanche in the sense of liberating risk and disaster. The paper situates Laučík´s poetry, which is difficult to read and sometimes even hermetic.
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