Slovenská literatúra

4

Authors: Jana Juhásová

Monika Kekeliaková Zumríková: Poetry of Paľo Oliva

5

Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

Hrabčáková, Katarína: Semiopoetic aspect of poetic identity. On the issue of femininity in contemporary Slovak poetry

8

Authors: Viktor Suchý

Early poems of Ján Ondruš (1932 – 2000) published in literary magazines in the late 1950s contain fragments of imagery that can be grasped through the notion of still life and also of what can be thought of as “pre-still-life situations”. Literary still life built from words, lines, and images can also be understood as a staging of an eternally repeating event – a celebration or a feast –, as a renewed vivification of the inanimate nature, a setting in motion of a still image, adding sound to the mute visual artefact or also as a defiance of the chaos, entropy, and transience. The poem “Sobota [Saturday]” (1956) for which the motif of bread is central, offers suitable material for the tackling of the modelling of space in the poetry of Ján Ondruš. In the poet’s staging of the process of baking bread, the event becomes a magnificent secret rite in which elements of fire and earth meet in archetypal and monumental fashion. Moreover, the text can be said to contain a poem in a poem (“Hľaďme, chlieb [Behold, bread]). The result of an ordinary activity of baking bread is presented as an outcome of a magic process. The procedure, in sharp contrast with most poems by the same author that tend to slow down phenomena and events, unwinds in front of the reader as a quick retrospective.

14

Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

Occasional verse is one of the oldest forms of lyric and it can be thought of as a form of materialisation and consolidation of memory. The character of this inevitably fleeting type of poetry that expresses an engagement of its author on a private or private matter much depends on historical and social changes. Occasional verse is inseparably bound to the time of its composition as it addresses chosen aspects of the era and – especially when it comes to public occasional poems – makes visible the large period narratives. These attributes can also be identified in the Slovak poetry written after 1948 when Czechoslovakia entered the era of state socialism and the poetry in question was part of the system of socialist realism. When observing period’s occasional poetry from the point of view of memory studies (especially general locations of memory and the theory of memorials), one can note striking similarities (poetological, functional) between a significant proportion of the period poetic production and war memorials built at that time. The article explains these relations as part of the specific construal of the national and socialist narrative in which differences between individual and collective experience, everyday life and festivities, history and present, memory and history got radically blurred.

18

Authors: Ján Gavura

In the early 1930s, a group of young Catholic poets entered the Slovak literary scene with a new approach to the creation of poetry derived from mysticism. Poets Pavol Gašparovič Hlbina (1908 – 1977), Rudolf Dilong (1905 – 1986), and Ján Haranta (1909 – 1983) found encouragement in the works La Poésie pure ([Pure poetry], 1926) and Prière et Poésie (Prayer and Poetry, 1926) by Henri Bremond who proposed aesthetic instructions that should lead to absolute poetry. The paradoxes of mysticism and poetry, however, proved to be unachievable in poetic practice, even less so when blended with new avant-garde movements of poeticism and surrealism. The most notable approach to absolute poetry in the first half of the 20th century can be found in the work of Janko Silan (1914 – 1984), whose epic-dramatic poetry, self-referential character of verse, and natural-human pantheistic and panentheistic view of the world eventually surpassed poetic spontaneity, wordplay, and Freudian psychoanalytic method. The most radical attempt at absolute poetry came after 1989 with the work of Erik Jakub Groch (b. 1957), who, through depoeticisation, reaches the threshold between literature and mysticism, pursuing goals in both the literary and extra-literary space. An important aim of Groch's absolute poetry is an attempt to execute transfer from literary to actual epiphanies.