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IVAN WERNISCH - A VOICE FROM CENTRAL EUROPE
Abstract
The title of the following essay was inspired by the first English written monograph about the personality of Milan Kundera which has the same subtitle “A Voice from Central Europe”. ?1? Critical vision of Europe in the second half of the last century in Kundera’s novels and essays is generally known. Ivan Wernisch (born 1942) is internationally less famous than Kundera, because he did not emigrate after the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968, he published mostly in samizdat and began to be highly appreciated and translated to foreign languages especially after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. His unofficially published poems were admired by Václav Havel and set to music by the famous underground rock group The Plastic People of the Universe. Wernisch is now understood as one of the most original Czech poets of the last five decades. Maybe it is caused by the fact that his texts are not rooted in the impulses of French modernism as it used to be so common before WWII. In the golden 1960s he started to become a representative of post-modern poetry in the tradition of German (and Scandinavian) way of expression. The methodology of comparative literary studies prevails in the following text, as well as traditional ways of analysing modernist and post-modern poetry. The essay is based on interpretation of typical samples of the poetry of Ivan Wernisch as they are available in the book of translations called In the Puppet Gardens: Selected poems, 1963–2005 (Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 2007).
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References12
Porter, R., Milan Kundera – A Voice from Central Europe, Aarhus, Denmark, 1981. ISBN 87-87044-55-2.
Wernisch, I., In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963–2005, Ann Arbor, USA, p. 140, 2007, ISBN 978-0-930042-93-6.
Ibid, p. 3.
Ibid, p. 14.
Ibid, p. 15.
Ibid, p. 145.
Ibid. p. 22.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., pp. 30–31.
Ibid, p. 47.
Fialová, A. (ed.), V souradnicích mnohosti – Ceská literatura první dekády jedenadvacáteho století v souvislostech a interpretacích, Praha, Czechia, p. 202-210, 2014, ISBN 978-80-200-2410-7.
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