responses
•
k a f k a’s p r a g u e
Jiří Kolář
r e s p o n s e s • k a f k a’s p r a g u e
Translated from the Czech by Ryan Scott
twi ste d s p o o n pre s s prague 20 21
Copyright © 1984, 2021 by Jiří Kolář – Heirs, c/o dilia Translation and Afterword © 2021 by Ryan Scott This edition © 2021 by Twisted Spoon Press All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be used or reproduced in any form, except in the context of reviews, without written permission from the publisher. isbn 978-80-86264-57-8 The translation and publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
contents
Responses 11
Kafka’s Prague 60
Translator’s Note 129
responses
In memory of Jiří Padrta
Art continues to evolve in its daily discovery of the world as part of the general drive toward universal knowledge — no matter the field involved, e.g., science, etc. For this reason, nothing arbitrary, no extrinsic new departure or approach, belongs to art, only departures and approaches already innate to it. Just as with science, where nothing may begin on its own but only when it’s inherently part of things themselves (e.g., mathematics). It always depends of course on how things progress. Without this, no creative approach makes any sense. So nothing completely new can ever really be invented. •
As in science, every new discovery in art broadens the field of human perception and understanding. This noetic aspect is paramount to me, and it also applies to all aesthetic concepts of so-called beauty. If beauty attains perfection, then the aesthetic scope of understanding is generally broadened. If art posits a new worldview, then the scope of human understanding is generally broadened. A beautiful portrait can still be painted even today — yet Leonardo perfected it. Van Dyck consummated this perfection so that ultimately a new direction was required. Rembrandt abandoned all idealization. Picasso enriched his painting through the inspiration of African art, children’s drawings, etc. •
If art by art alone is to expand human consciousness, then no type of endeavor should be foreign to it. Being blinkered severely impedes this expansion and may actually be regressive, regardless of direction,
11
even if forward. Having blinkers on perhaps is useful in times of crisis — and since crisis seems to be a permanent condition, all art in our era is in a way crisis art — if it doesn’t act to retard despite all the boldness and discoveries. I would be skeptical of it. In fact, it appears to be more against than for humanity. Maybe such questions aren’t useful for the individual artist who couldn’t care less, but the fact is, without them I can no longer think. Yet art per se isn’t nonsense, on the contrary, it’s amazing just how necessary and useful it is for understanding the situation of humanity today. And its importance cannot be overstated. Art and poetry don’t necessarily result from the expansion of consciousness but are actually produced through the process of this expansion. A poem, picture, etc., always wants to enthrall, and this is ultimately the intention of any artistic fixation, whose intensity and breadth determine its fruits. Even for poetry the law applies that if one type of art is no longer sufficient as a means of expression, or if a different outlook can be imagined — it should never be called superfluous. Far from it, because right at that time, right at that moment, it is indispensable for a new way of thinking, a new way of expressing. There needs to be more than a single mode of creation today for ample progress to occur. This is absolutely necessary, and this necessity is the very proof of the present inadequacy. A given mode of creation is pioneering only so long as it doesn’t presume to claim that it’s impossible to make progress without it. •
My interest from the beginning has been to locate the points of friction between visual art and literature. Up to now all such attempts have seemed to me devoid of scope and largely lacking in rigor. Even
12
though significant advancements were made, by Marinetti for example, some of the old aesthetic remained underneath. The same holds true for Apollinaire. I find it interesting that what Mallarmé started in this regard other poets like Eliot picked up on, and with the The Waste Land — which I consider one of the greatest modernist poems — he created a de facto collage. In prose it was Joyce who had some influence on a particular poetic period of mine simply by the way he was able to handle the various aspects of realia in Ulysses, where he readily blended argot and the language of sentimental novels into a literary language. •
The word “modern” is very old and has always been applied to those who come up with something new. More recently, it has been used for those who aren’t afraid to experiment — those who’ve not only discovered a new, different reality, but also expressed it differently. And I think this all started in modern art and modern poetry. Poetry had to be done differently. To my mind true poets are those who actually write. A multiplicity of aspects and disciplines is understandable and typical for today. I don’t like to prophesy because all prophets, including those of such status as Dostoevsky, come off as foolish. Even so, I readily admit that I expect a new art to emerge that will likely have very little in common with the art of today. It will offer a different perspective, undoubtedly needing time to crystallize, but in the form of an entirely new discipline. It won’t be poetry, painting, or sculpture, but perhaps something quite different. I cannot even say what right now. Maybe someone will find new relationships between the various disciplines of modern art — as presently exists between
13
linguistics and biology — and connect all of this one day in a new system. I don’t mean to say a poet will emerge who will comprehend everything, but whoever it is will definitely have to feel and be able to perceive everything. Poetry isn’t just a type of special poetic understanding or a type of language, it’s a special type of perception as well. In art, a person has to be attuned to specific ways of perceiving. There are many people the world over who have no capacity for this or anything of the kind, it simply is beyond their grasp. It is a type of enthrallment and curiosity. The more dulled this sensibility, the lesser the poet. This is why Joyce attempted to create an all-encompassing character, complete from all perspectives, not omitting the most banal acts, such as shaving, and including relations as remote as reminiscences are for Homer. So what we call new art today is likewise attempting a similar polymorphous unity of aspects, methods, and disciplines. •
It would seem that experimentation and daring in art presents more a danger to wrongheaded people than anything else. Start to think for yourself and you are more dangerous than anything that can be made. The truth is, all the power of art and literature largely comes from its ability to produce a shift to a new field of perception. If most of literature has really been used until now to enslave humanity, it’s likely because this stage of its development corresponds to the same stage of a humankind still unable to stamp out war and hunger. When the army barrack takes priority over the hospital. Unfortunately, I have to throw schools into the same bag with barracks, with hospitals I can’t add anything except cafeterias.
14
•
Writers take such a great interest in the world because everything is a mystery to them. And since it is their duty to unravel this mystery, they select certain authors who match their destiny and expand their field of perception. For one poet to be able to expand the field of perception of another, he must learn from those who are expanding it toward other disciplines, whether in art, science, philosophy, or other fields. •
Einstein didn’t visit Picasso’s exhibitions for no reason. And art isn’t discussed among some of today’s leading lights in academia for no reason, just as they don’t discuss religion and mythology for no reason. Usually it’s even one of their main interests — to decipher the mystery of humanity. I like authors who are dissatisfied with how things have historically been investigated and go right to a place to see for themselves, like Levi-Strauss going into the field to find out the truth. When I started to dismember verse, I had to obtain material on the origins of writing in general. This led me to create petroglyphs and knot poems, for example, the inspiration coming directly from such original research. Though history has taken these phenomena into account, they weren’t ascribed any role in the development of poetics. Because at the same time all this is part of the history of poetics, and as such remains alive, just as Altamira remains alive for modern art.
15
k a f k a’s p r a g u e
( 19 7 7-7 8 ) Translated from German by Kevin Blahut
1
Was soll ich tun? oder: Wozu soll ich es tun? sind keine Fragen dieser Gegenden. Die Acht Oktavhefte
“What should I do?” or “Why should I do it?” are not questions that are asked in these regions. The Eight Octavo Notebooks
St. Vitus Cathedral 60
2
. . . etwas Irrsinniges hatte das — mit einem söllerartigen Abschluß, dessen Mauerzinnen unsicher, unregelmäßig, brüchig wie von ängstlicher oder nachlässiger Kinderhand gezeichnet sich in den blauen Himmel zackten. Das Schloß
. . . it had something insane about it — concluding with something like a balcony, whose battlements stood jaggedly against the blue sky uncertainly, irregularly, friably, as though drawn by the hand of an anxious or careless child. The Castle
Prague Castle 62
3
Es ist sehr gut denkbar, daß die Herrlichkeit des Lebens um jeden und immer in ihrer ganzen Fülle bereit liegt, aber verhängt, in der Tiefe, unsichtbar, sehr weit. Tagebücher
It is quite possible that the magnificence of life lies ready around one, and always in its complete fullness, but covered, in the depths, invisible, very far off. The Diaries
New Town Hall 64
4
Als wichtigster oder als reizvollster ergab sich der Wunsch, eine Ansicht des Lebens zu gewinnen . . . , in der das Leben zwar sein natürliches schweres Fallen und Steigen bewahre, aber gleichzeitig mit nicht minderer Deutlichkeit als ein Nichts, als ein Traum, als ein Schweben erkannt werde. Tagebücher
The most important or the most appealing was the wish to gain a view of life . . . in which life retained its natural heavy falling and rising, but simultaneously was recognized with no less clarity than a nothingness, as a dream, as a floating. The Diaries
Old Town Hall 66
34
Warum wurde ich so lange beschützt, um jetzt so geschreckt zu werden? »Der Bau«
Why had I been protected for so long to be so terrified now? “The Burrow”
The Rotunda of St. Martin on Vyšehrad 126
t r a n s l at o r ’s n o t e
Responses, which Kolář once called “an imaginary interview,” was compiled in Prague and Paris in 1973. Though the work offers insights into Kolář’s life-long artistic experimentation, it is not simply an artist’s statement or manifesto. Comprising seventy-one responses of varying lengths with no questions, the individual texts range across biographical details, descriptions of techniques, and reflections on the artists and writers who influenced him. Despite its fragmentary nature, there is a common thread running through it: Kolář’s exploratory approach to art and literature through which he engages with their history, major works, and the very materials of writing and painting to seek new avenues of expression. “So nothing completely new can ever really be invented,” he writes in the first response in reference to art and science, fields that for him shared a common investigative nature. Though this statement might seem peculiar at first for an artist who was defined by inventiveness, it is not necessarily incompatible with his techniques if viewed as a description of the parameters within which creativity takes place rather than as a proscriptive command. Artistic activity is, according to Kolář, circumscribed by its nature, by the materials and practices that form a framework in which an artist works. In doing so, the work becomes something new, not in the sense of unprecedented, but as something recontextualized or repurposed. As he states in the second response, “As in science, every new discovery in art broadens the field of human perception and understanding.” Kolář is not creating anything new per se but new ways of looking at what is already there. Kolář’s initial experiments assumed, relatively speaking, a more
129
traditional literary form. He wrote poetry and prose from the late 1940s through most of the 1950s. His early collections, starting with Baptismal Certificate (1941) through to Days in a Year (1948), were soon published after completion. Subsequent collections had to wait until the late 1960s and after to see publication since following the Communist takeover in 1948 he was deemed a political undesirable, even landing in prison for nine months in 1953. Despite the appearance of his poems – mostly in samizdat – in the 1960s, Kolář’s output was increasingly shaped by a desire to “go beyond verbal expression,” as Jindřich Chalupecký once put it. He called this nonlinguistic method “evident poetry.” It involved arranging visual elements instead of words in verse. They were among his earliest attempts to draw nonlinguistic elements into poetry while still involving the process of writing, or processes akin to writing. The “muteness” of his evident poetry, also known as silence poetry, of the 1960s could be interpreted as a reaction to the ideological constraints on expression — they were a way to speak when the language of literature at the time mostly required the official sanction of the Communist regime’s Writers’ Union. While in private Kolář lamented the “parroting of directives” he witnessed, little of this sentiment is overtly addressed in Responses. In fact, the text is mostly reticent about politics. Five years prior to its composition, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, ushering in a period of increased political repression known as normalization. Persecution and censorship intensified, people fled, others were imprisoned on political grounds, and the vast majority of the population adjusted to a life of even more circumscribed possibilities. Yet Responses, despite a passing reference to the Nazi occupation, has very little to say, at least directly, about the Communist regime. Nor does it comment much on the
130
work of other Czechoslovak writers and artists. Bohumil Hrabal is referenced twice, Urbánek, Piesen, and Malich just once. Other significant contemporaries with whom he was close, such as Vladimír Boudník or Josef Hiršal or Václav Havel, do not feature at all. The text predominantly revolves around Kolář’s artistic practice and influences. Chalupecký argued that Kolář’s shift from conventional writing in the 1960s is best seen in poetic rather than political terms. Kolář wasn’t silent because language had become so tainted by officialese as to be irredeemable but rather because language had become exhausted of creative potential. Yet, as Responses reveals, his fascination with language persisted: “I had to obtain material on the origins of writing in general.” Elsewhere he employs the language of biology: “I also needed to know the composition of a word’s blood cells,” and physics: “certain clusters of words represent powerful fields of energy.” Art and science both are part of his project, the allusions to science revealing a view of language as something material rather than an abstract system of symbols. As such, it interacts with other objects, creating a world comprising these multifaceted interactions, sites of meaning that Kolář explores through art and literature. Seen in these terms, Kolář’s artistic experimentation was not a way out of these interactions. Instead, to belabor the spatial metaphor, it provided a way in, an avenue for interrogating the parameters of the artistic practices in which he worked. As many have noted, his visual art is based on a fragmentation of both word and image, a destruction of their given context to create a new one. To draw a line, however, from his literary influences to his visual work is not a matter of convenient interpretation. Jumping between the two poles of literature and visual art, Responses embodies this preoccupation and reveals through
131
its fragmented nature that for Kolář there was no strict distinction between them: “My interest from the beginning has been to locate the points of friction between visual art and literature.” The pairing of Responses with the collage series Kafka’s Prague should be seen in this context. If it is not a culmination of Kolář’s reinvention, then it’s certainly a testament to it, since his interest in collage dates back to the 1930s when he was first “enthralled” by Surrealism. His early work relied on the juxtaposition of unaltered images, techniques he called rapportage and confrontage. Over time, his techniques evolved, becoming so distinct that each one required the coining of a new term, the number ultimately exceeding 120. The crumplages of Kafka’s Prague are created from images of famous Prague landmarks as well as houses and streets, places of importance in Kafka’s life. Crumplage, a portmanteau word combining “crumple” and “collage” (muchláž in Czech), involved the meticulous moistening and crumpling of paper, the results of which are “the brother of chance.” The new image that emerged as a result of the creasing became the point of the piece. As Charlotta Kotik once remarked: “Just as words take on different meanings each time they are used within a new syntax, an image also speaks in different ways when placed into a new visual configuration.”* That the series was originally conceived as a leporelo, which can be a pop-up picture book or a concertina book, underscored Kolář’s ongoing preoccupation with the intersection of the literary and the visual. Interestingly, Kolář’s collage techniques highlight the continued role language played in his work because the meaning of his visual *Charlotta Kotik, Jiří Kolář: Transformations (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1978), 13.
132
work is derived, at least in part, from the extensive idiosyncratic nomenclature he invented to classify them. Crumplage, rollage, prollage, Magrittage, and chiasmage, to name just a few of his lexical creations, dictate how the viewer should understand the visual work and appreciate it as something singular. The names of these techniques bring to mind Kolář’s notion of a word being part of a field, in this case one that includes his collages. For this reason, a translation has to respect not only the meaning but the effect of a word. Many of the terms have been translated to preserve a reference to the underlying principle of each technique, which Kolář perceived as a discrete practice. As an “imaginary interview,” the translation has also tried to preserve the text’s conversational tone as well as its occasional wooden phrases and syntax, as if mimicking Communist apparatchik-speak. It should not be read as a transcript, but rather as a creation in its own right where the flow and juxtaposition of ideas imitates the associative spontaneity of speech, which he viewed as distinct from poetic language. For Kolář, it was uncontrived and elemental, and Responses derives its meaning from this impromptu tone as much as the content. In fact, the imitation of speech calls attention to a paradox in his project. If he had, as Chalupecký argued, abandoned the use of language for his poetry by the 1960s, why did he lean on it so heavily here? Responses offers no answers. It is merely another abrupt turn for an artist who was driven by reinvention. For this reason, Responses should not be read as Kolář’s final word but as capturing a particular moment in time amid his creative flux. r. s., prague, 2021
13 3
jiří kolář (Protivín, 1914 – Prague, 2002) was one of the most
important postwar poets/visual artists in Central Europe. A member of the avant-garde Group 42 (disbanded in 1948 following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia), most of his major texts were composed in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1952, he was arrested, jailed, and branded an “enemy of the state” when the secret police discovered the manuscript to his prose and poetry collection, Prometheus’s Liver. He is, however, more well known internationally for his collage innovations, including his famous series Weekly 1968. He developed a number of techniques for combining and manipulating scraps of texts and images from a variety of sources to portray the destruction and fragmentation of the world around him, and by the 1970s his work was being exhibited throughout Europe. Kolář signed Charter 77, which put him in direct opposition to the Communist regime and ultimately forced him into exile. He lived in Paris from 1980, but frequently visited Prague after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, spending his final years in the city.
ryan scott is an Australian writer and translator based in the
Czech Republic. His poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in a number of publications, including Disquieting Muse Quarterly, B O D Y, Overland Express, and New England Review (Australia). He is the translator of A User’s Manual by Jiří Kolář.
r e s p o n s e s • k a f k a’s p r a g u e
by Jiří Kolář Translated by Ryan Scott from the original Czech Odpovědi (Köln: Index, 1984) Artwork by Jiří Kolář German translations by Kevin Blahut Typeset in Garamond Pro / Univers Design by Silk Mountain first edition 2021
twisted spoon press P.O. Box 21 – Preslova 21 150 00 Prague 5 Czech Republic www.twistedspoon.com twistedspoonpress@gmail.com image to word 6 Printed and bound in the Czech Republic by Pro Tisk Distributed to the trade by central books www.centralbooks.com scb distributors www.scbdistributors.com