Ivan Blatny - terms like exile literature, subversion, appropriation, collage, pun, homophony, and even hybridity seem too limited, too stable. His heteroglossic poems are wonderfully strange, prosaic, sparse and distracted at the same time

Ivan Blatny, The Drug of Art: Selected Poems,  Trans. by Matthew Sweney, Justin Quinn, and Alex Zucker, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007.

Lost to the world for decades, Ivan Blatný was, according to the Czech Ministry of Culture, "one of the most significant Czech poets of the twentieth century." Blatný fled Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948, spending the rest of his life in England. This volume spans fifty years of his career and is notable for being the first major collection of Blatný's work in English, including multi-lingual poems and some poems written mostly or entirely in English. Our edition includes an Introduction by Veronika Tuckerová, a Foreword by Josef Skvorecky, an Afterword by Antonín Petruzelka, and Working Notes from the translators.

"The verses and fate of the poet Ivan Blatný...complete the fate of Czech literature, which transcended the borders of the nation, often struggling for survival." —Vaclav Havel

"For Czech-English émigré Ivan Blatný's poetry, terms like exile literature, subversion, appropriation, collage, pun, homophony, and even hybridity seem too limited, too stable. In an age where many—rightly—are suspicious of official verse cultures, here is the voice from a true underground—not the official alternative poetry of the day, but that minorizing, fluctuating underground that undoes hierarchical notions of language and culture. Blatný's heteroglossic poems are wonderfully strange, prosaic, sparse and distracted at the same time. They are as beautiful and singular as Vallejo's Trilce."—Johannes Göransson

Poems kept in a garbage can by an Czech exile. Another sad sack. Yet what a beginning! What great expectations. A reminder that art can break much of what it attempts to heal. - Brian Foley

When a mysterious and silent young man began delighting staff with his piano playing at a mental health unit in Kent in 2005, the numerous suggestions as to his identity included a Czech musician called Tomas Strnad. Although Strnad proved a false lead, it wouldn’t have been the first time a troubled Czech artist had turned to the NHS for refuge. In 1954 Czech poet Ivan Blatný (1919-1990) was hospitalized in Essex for mental health problems. He was to remain institutionalized for the rest of his life, in Ipswich and later Clacton-on-Sea, or “Bohemia-on-Sea” as Nick Drake calls it in his poem “Cigarettes for Mr Blatný.” Blatný had achieved fame early back home, with four books of poems before he turned thirty, but on entering hospital his fortunes contrasted sharply with the Piano Man of half a century later. He was ignored and his writings thrown away. Not until a chance meeting in 1977 between one of his nurses and someone who knew Blatný in Czechoslovakia were his tales of being a poet taken seriously. Relieved of his lampshade-making duties, he was given a typewriter as part of his “occupational” therapy, and new work swiftly followed. Opinions vary as to the severity of his condition, with diagnoses ranging from schizophrenia to simple terror that if he ever left hospital he would be returned to his homeland. Pleasingly, he lived to see the collapse of communism, and sent a message of congratulations to Vaclav Havel (a fan) when he visited Britain in 1990. 

            The early Blatný deals in atmospheric landscapes that might be captions to Josef Sudek photographs (though Blatný came from Brno, not Prague). Behind the Bohemian mists is a clearly audible note of loss and desperation: 

Then everything faded in the woods near Brno,

where the scents of mist and mushroom flow,

and smoke dispersed in clearings near the river.

 

Amidst the grasses, blood-red petals quiver.

But we push on, push on, which is our will.

No. No joy. And hurt by it. And still. 

Proust and his lost love object Albertine are frequent reference points, but the travails of post-war Czechoslovakia led Blatný to update Proust for the title of his third book, In Search of Present Time. The calmer surface of his early work begins to give way to a swirling turbulence that may remind readers of his great Hungarian contemporary, Attila József. This is ration-book poetry with a vengeance, where a badly boarded window on the poet’s flat cannot keep the rain from leaking onto the “even shabbier boards” inside awaiting conversion to a coffin. Repetitions are hammered home like nails or the “wailing refrains” of a singer in “Fifth,” “Desperately monotonous over, and over, and over / And again and again.” 

Blatný’s love of Langston Hughes contributes to the cabaret feel of the long poem “Terrestris,” whose witch-like central figure joins Baba Yaga and Brueghel’s Mad Meg as an iconic figure of mayhem and destruction. In The Game (1947), Blatný mixes poetry and prose in an absurdist allegory reminiscent of yet another prophet of destruction, Franz Kafka. Then comes his epic hiatus, before the appearance in samizdat of Old Addresses in 1979. It is enormously touching to find Blatný rediscovering something like his old serenity in a poem like “Cigarette”: 

Blue smoke I blew out and blue smoke now floats

to your Pisarky. I think I’m in the woods.

Once more, a Brno tramcar takes me there.

 

We’re going through the trees. We’re swinging round

the Expo and beyond the football ground

to the cemetery, and girls wave in the air. 

            Lives and careers scarcely come more displaced than Blatný’s. As the full scale of his achievement becomes known (and there remains much unpublished work), he can be hailed as the major Czech poet he is, alongside such figures as Vladimír Holan, Vitezslav Nezval, and Jaroslav Seifert. Equally, he might be compared to John Clare, Francis Webb, and David Gascoyne, as one of those rare voices that reach us from the silence of the mental institution. Or just as convincingly, he can be seen as one of those figures lost and found between languages, like Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Emil Cioran. 

Just how lost and found can be seen from the late poems in which Blatný often crossed over entirely into English. How ought a translator to deal with this? (And speaking of translators, the various hands behind these English versions should not go unnamed: Justin Quinn, Alex Zucker, Veronika Tuckerova, Anna Moschovakis, and Matthew Sweney, not to be confused with the Irish poet Matthew Sweeney.) The solution adopted here is to use gray type for text in English in the original, though a cheekier approach might have been to return this material to Czech in the “translation.” In some cases only a title in Czech separates the “original” and “translation,” as though we had wandered into a Bohemian rewrite of Borges’ great short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In one such poem, “The Road is Sowed with Stars,” Blatný ponders his lifetime of linguistic homelessness: “The bumble-bee may also be called humble-bee / they humbly suck the nectar / without being able to build a hive.” Whether in the original or translation, Blatný’s poetry has the rare and moving power to make us feel we are reading a foreign language—and that language is English. - David Wheatley

Ivan Blatny's story is strange. You wonder how you don't already know it. An acclaimed poet visiting the UK on an Arts Council exchange in 1948, he denounced the new Czech regime, was excommunicated, and soon disappeared into treatment in the British mental healthcare system. A chance encounter between one of his nurses and an old poet friend from Brno verified he was indeed a great poet, as he had claimed in the hospital. He was granted access to a typewriter, and he eventually published two more books before his death in the hospital in 1987.
Veronika Tuckerová's decisions as editor in The Drug of Art: Selected Poems honor the conflicting views on his exile. It is hard to say if he was persecuted, paranoid, or both, and contributions by Matthew Sweney, Justin Quinn, Alex Zucker, and Anna Moshovakis lend objectivity. Translations of selections from the first few books are generous and include the longer poem, ''Terrestris'' and the fable-like prose piece ''The Game.'' Later works showcase his use of English, with all untranslated text preserved in gray font.
***

A train wheezed in just now, your train. You're back
in the old country from traveling about.
The inrush left boats bobbing in its wake
and drizzle on the clouded station-mouth.

And drizzle... drizzle on the gasometer's drum,
on the moving van, on a soft grey scarf wound round.
... (p.3)

Blatny is at his best as city naturalist, working with the materials of Brno – bricks and wires, furnishings, ridiculous wildlife. Marcel Proust and Langston Hughes are major touchstones and he clearly shares their lullaby sense of man-made domestic environments. Here, repetition both suggests the austerity of city space and opens the lines as they begin crowding:...

Was it after the war already? Was it autumn? Was it Spring?
Someone accompanied me outside on guitar
And I strummed upon the strings.
It was that famous empty Sunday,
It was that famous empty Sunday,
Bouquet, chair, ribbons, and more.
Your flat was empty: She's taken a lover's leave.
Some gentleman in black struggled with a wreath.
...

***
In the masterful long poem ''Terestris,'' the city is haunted by its own surplus of inhabitants,

...
... above the rooftops, dreams
great one another,
and speed criss-cross
to the bedrooms of their dreamers, tipping their hats,
bowing deeply
chimneys, stars, weathervanes of smoke.

And even higher than dreams,
among the towers and hills. . .
appears
sometimes
the witch Terrestris
...

This clarity moves into surreal description, to ignite the dream-idea:

behind the town to Bitch's Grove,
here kittens and moths fly through the boughs, where
bees carrying earwax fly down
hither and thither into the curly hives of beautiful Terrestris

Thousands, millions of youths
falling face first
into those dull rough hairs, which resemble
matted horsehair sticking up out of old mattresses,
. . . .
(45)

***
In the later, shorter poems, we see more English and sense the pressures of the hospital compressing and mincing the lines. To be fair Blatny's work is abstract, not autobiographical, but the brief lines and seeping languages raise questions about stimulation, deprivation and mental freedom as creative axes. The unsupported repetition reads as a chilling echo of restricted life, and expanding into English brings only sterile hospital language:

''Poetry is a panacea for all illnesses'' (106)
''Perhaps it is macaroni cheese / I'll go for dinner''
''always under pressure of the moral institutes,'' (107).

There are some good lines about bumblebees, and history, but mostly these last ''poems'' are murky fragments.
Still, where the present trend toward firmly controlled, wry projects cleaves wit from realism, where discussions of a poet's work refer constantly to the poet's explanatory prose, this is a good read. Blatny refreshes ideas of poetry as sibylline utterance, of the sublime confusion of negative capability and of giving an open yes to all contradictory things. Consider the last stanzas of ''Above the wooded quarry'':

Loud songs rose from the drinking halls,
steps squelching by, the dark spread up the hill,
the clink of glass and hoarse refrains gone still,
and shadows crowded from the railway tunnels.

Then everything faded in the woods near Brno,
where the scents of mint and mushroom flow,
and smoke dispersed in clearings near the river.

Amidst the grasses, blood-red petals quiver.
But we push on, push on, which is our will.
No. No joy. And hurt by it. And still.  -  Denise Dooley

This handsomely presented paperback represents the first substantial publication in English of the Czech modernist Ivan Blatný (1919-1990) — preceded only, it appears, by a couple of poems translated by Edwin Morgan, ahead of the game in this as in so many things. Over the past two decades Blatný has been extensively translated into French and German as well as other languages. His oeuvre divides neatly into two distinct chronological portions: works produced in Czechoslovakia before the poet’s defection upon the Communist seizure of power there, and works produced subsequently in England.

Section 2

The selections from Blatný’s earliest poems, Brno Elegies, published (as Melancholy Walks because censors considered that the true title could imply opposition to the country’s German occupation) in 1941 when he was just twenty-two, are written in rhymed quatrains — gamely handled by Justin Quinn, the translator of this section, one of five in the book as a whole — are heavy with nostalgia. This must be the Blatný whom Milan Kundera recently recalled as “the poet I most admired when I was fourteen,” although citing a poem that is in fact of later date. There is an intoxicating sensuality to these longing recollections, as in the briefest of the translated elegies:

3

The plain spreads out form you when you’ve gone by
the cemetery wall where greensward glistens.
Beat on it desperately and in reply
a startled bird flies off into the distance.

And startled through the sky he loops and pegs,
who danced on graves and sang the dead his jokes.
Regret draws tighter, tighter, till it chokes.
You watch his flight, lead clipped onto his leg.

You watch his flight, how he lightly wheels,
a wound upon the sky that slowly heals
above the meadows, cradled by a beck.
That silver furrow… groove… that thread… a speck.

4

The breaking up of sense that concludes this poem is rare in the Brno Elegies but is essential to Blatný’s second book, This Night (1945). Here, rhyme is rare, and syntax is sometimes fractured, but the repetition of entire lines becomes a recurrent device. Like the still lifes the cubists painted during the First World War, these poems of the second build vast worlds out of concatenated fragments from daily life. War turned out to be a good collaborator for Blatný: The intimate ache that made his perceptions of the natural world and daily life so poignant found a larger echo in the atmosphere of a continent tearing itself to bits.

5

One would have been curious to learn something of the poet’s experience of the war years, but the editor’s introduction is silent in the matter. In the poems, a few simple humble objects, not even described but simply named, loom huge: “Papers, books, a pitcher” — last bits of dependably concrete reality. In contrast to these near, tangible objects, the landscape in which the poems are set is crisscrossed by distant trains that are not seen, only heard — they “grumble on the viaduct.” “The railroad bridge is / A sad song in the air.” These sounds are a broken music of departure: “But Europe is setting off on journeys too.” Blatný’s poems of this period unwind in stubborn, uneasy repetitions, continually turning back on themselves and reusing phrases as if language itself had to be rationed out frugally like any other needful possession in difficult times. Here is “Small Variation” in Matthew Sweeney’s translation:

6

Thursday 8 pm. On the table:
Matches, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp.
My tools.
You already know my music from five or six things,
You already know my music from five or six things,
My little song.
As it sizzles on the stove, as it bubbles in quietude
The song of the interlude,
Which happens only once in history.

Matches, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp,
And dust on all of them.
The silent horse gallops and carries it on hoof.
Dust of the barren flat.
Dust of the barren flat.
For the last time unsettled, is lost into history.

Thursday 8 pm. On the table:
Newspapers, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp.
Newspapers: Papandreu, Pierlot.
Furniture: Divan, ornamented credenza.
My little song.
Big drops hit the badly boarded window with a splat.
We’ll get wet inside the flat!
We’ll get wet inside the flat!
And even shabbier boards
Will be left for the coffin.

7

Blatný’s post-war Czech poems are less intense, less affecting than those in his first two books — and the two relatively long poems of the later ‘40s given here, ‘Terrestris,’ a Symbolist extravaganza in which the earth is conjured as an all-devouring witch, and ‘The Game,’ a dream narrative primarily in prose whose Freudianism now seems dated, show the poet straining unsuccessfully for more dramatic effects than his fundamentally lyrical gift could produce.

8

In 1948, Blatný arrived in London and immediately made a speech on the BBC denouncing the new regime in his country. His Czech citizenship was revoked and England became his home. A few months later he was briefly hospitalized for mental illness but until 1954 he made a living as a journalist, “collaborating at times with the BBC and Radio Free Europe,” according to Tuckerová, though he seems hardly to have written poetry during this period. In 1954 he was again hospitalized, and spent the rest of his life in a series of institutions.

9

At some point he began writing again, but it was only after a chance meeting between one of his nurses and a Czech poet who knew Blatný that his later writings reached the novelist Josef Škvorecký, living in Canada, whose press, 68 Publishers, issued a selection of them in 1979 under the title Old Addresses. “It was our book,” according to Škvorecký, that “finally persuaded the attending physicians that Blatný was a real poet, not just a madman who believed he was a poet.” Three years later, another collection was published in samizdat in Prague, Bixley Remedial School, and then in a different version by Škvorecký’s press in Toronto in 1987. Blatný himself took no part in preparing any of these publications.

10

The poems in Old Addresses are very mixed in nature, presumably meaning that they were composed at quite different times. Some employ traditional verse forms — for instance the sonnet ‘Cigarettes,’ or ‘Football,’ which is a double sonnet — while others are quite irregular in form, such as ‘From a Terrace in Prague,’ with its juxtapositions of short lines with extremely long ones, but many of them reflect the interpenetration of memories of Czechoslovakia and present experience as a patient in England. In ‘Sunday’ the poet imagines the visits he might receive, but never has, from old acquaintances such as František Listopad, another exiled Czech poet living in France and then Portugal, or Karel Brušák, a somewhat older writer who’d come to England in the late ’30s and become well-known among his countrymen for his wartime broadcasts for the BBC Overseas Service; but the poems ends,

11

they’ve been abroad here for years and I still haven’t seen them
I have poems ready
we’ll talk about literature
the world will be full of life again.

12

Bixley Remedial School is something quite different, and probably accounts for much of the interest in Blatný’s work today. These poems are quite brief, most of them just six or seven lines long, and are much more casual in tone than any of his earlier work — sometimes downright jokey, as in ‘Janus Sapientiae,’ a poem composed directly in English, which begins, “The Monx speak Monx / I speak czech and english.” Indeed, one of their peculiarities is the freedom with which these poems mix Czech and English — though perhaps the poet’s use of the lower case is a more accurate reflection of his attitude toward the two languages — with some German and just a smidgen of French and at least one word of Spanish thrown in for good measure. The notational immediacy of these poems, and their concrete nature, nearly devoid of overtly figurative language, mixed with their unfetteredly free-associative movement from line to line and their jaunty polyglot construction, gives them a texture quite unlike anything else, all the more so in that Blatný’s English and German, at least, can be idiosyncratic. The poems keep reminding themselves of details of usage and of the poet’s potential mistakes: “A group of factory buildings may be called a plant / God the linguist teaches us to breathe,” begins ‘Outside and In’; in ‘Anarchy’ the poet reminds himself, “Choc-ice is in czech called Eskymo / I used to have three on a bench at Felixstow Road.”

13

The last poems in the book are uncollected poems almost entirely in English, each printed facing a reproduction of its neatly handwritten (or in a few cases, typewritten) manuscript. Except for their relatively monolingual construction these poems are similar to those in Bixley Remedial School. In fact one might have thought that the poem called ‘Both’ had been the source for the name of the collection in which it does not appear:

14

If it were morning in the Pines I could take gun-powder
it is afternoon on Bixley
or at Bixley
the praepositions in english are a trouble

God never made a serious error or blunder
“on” or “at” I think that both are right.

15

Blatný’s worries about idiomatic correctness, more than his dismissal of those worries, would seem cognate to the uncertainties that must arise when trying to establish the text of a poet who, for a good part of his life, wrote without any expectation of publication or indeed of any sort of readership at all — and who, when publication finally became a possibility once again, had no real involvement with the process. One thing that the reproductions of the late manuscripts assure us of, at least, is that Blatný definitely did treat these texts as works: carefully copied out — they betray none of the signs of being first drafts — in a clear hand, they were certainly meant for the eyes of others. So if some of the texts seem more like random jottings than finished poems, the reader should think again: This informality was a considered aesthetic choice, an artifice.

16

But that still leaves the question of which texts to publish, a choice the author was not able to make himself. According to one report passed on by Tuckerová, he “filled several hundred copybooks,” and elsewhere we are told that “he left behind thousands of pages of writing, very little of which has been published to date.”

17

Just how contentious editorial choices may be becomes clear when one reads the Afterword by Antonin Petruželka, one of the publishers of the samizdat version of Bixley Remedial School, who derides as unreliable and misleading the selection made for Old Addresses — whose publisher, Škvorecký, has provided the present volume’s Foreword. The two men are equally at odds as to the poet’s mental state: Škvorecký recounts that on the single occasion he saw Blatný, it was clear that he was deeply ill; Petruželka insists that he was only “so-called mentally ill” and instead “a bright, joyous, sensitive man.”

18

Having only The Drug of Art to judge by, it’s hard not to sympathize with Petruželka’s image of the poet. Certainly Blatný’s late works are not those of a tormented poète maudit like Gérard de Nerval or Dino Campana. Like his early poems, they tinged by nostalgia, but no longer in a plangent, haunted way; instead they are wryly, ironically nostalgic — and not rarely joyful for all that, though never less than problematic. It’s partly thanks to the problems his poems pose that I suspect we are going to keep hearing more about them as time goes on.

19

In Blatný we discover, not only an unfamiliar Czech poet, but also an unfamiliar English poet, and one whose English is very much his own. All the more curious that it’s so hard to tell where the Czech poet leaves off and the English one starts. In the best of his late poems, it no longer matters:

20

Queen, drones, bee-workers, život vček
that is the bee-hive’s personnel

Now I must whisper in a low tone
I was today a dying drone

But I am fresh and Glück-alive
back in the úl, back in the hive. - Barry Schwabsky

What if poetry does not transform the world but merely watches as life flickers into darkened silence? Such is the question that haunts the poetry of the Czech poet Ivan Blatný (1919–1990). In the poems that make up The Drug of Art, a new collection of Blatný’s work translated by four different writers, we are given a collage of images from the poet’s surroundings that are not meant to express the beauty of life but only to stand in evidence of its reality. For Blatný, poetry is not a means of transcendence. Instead, it allows us to come to grips with the world that’s given—from the terrors of war to the most commonplace household objects. Most often in his work, this means facing hardship, sorrow, and death unadorned. A humble music of images repeats and mixes in a halting song. The poem “Small Variation” opens,

               

Thursday 8 pm. On the table:

Matches, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp.

My tools.

You already know my music from five or six things,

You already know my music from five or six things,

My little song.

Blatný’s early poems look to the work of Langston Hughes, a debt made apparent not only by emulation but also by Blatný’s use of several epigraphs from Hughes’ work. Like Hughes, Blatný records the homely details of a modern urban life resonating with the magnitudes of love, death, hope, misery, and alienation. Both poets draw on the blues as more than a sound or structure, presenting it as an attitude toward life, a philosophical stance.

In 1948, while on a cultural exchange tour of England, Blatný publicly criticized the regime that had taken power in Czechoslovakia that spring and announced that he would not return home. The response was severe and immediate. He was condemned in the Communist press, as well as by his friends and fellow writers. Thus began a nearly thirty-year silence during which he sought psychiatric treatment and political refuge as a resident in various English mental institutions.

Blatný’s poetry was rediscovered in the 1970s. The intervening years of isolation had reshaped his work. His later poems are direct and incomplete, reading like postcards that, by turns, lament his exile, as in “Sunday,”

maybe Brušák will show up on the road

or Listopad

or Dresler

they’ve been abroad here for years and I still haven’t seen them

I have poems ready

we’ll talk about literature

the world will be full of life again.

or, as in “Autumn,” celebrate his one lasting companion, the written word,

I found a letter, written only in lead,

rain worn, half torn.

O epistolary era, where have you fled?

I have written long letters as Rilke used to;

no more, farewell, it’s November, late.

The red horses are out of the gate.

Disunion is the necessary condition for all of Blatný’s poems. The thread that links the disparate modes of his career is an assertion that violence is inextricably political and personal, psychological and real. Blatný’s writing makes this recognition feel terribly alive.

The Drug of Art is a massive undertaking, and the collection provides a generous and varied sampling of Blatný’s poetry faithfully and ably rendered into English. Blatný’s stylistic variety makes it fitting that his work be rendered by many hands. His poems from the 1940s are expansive gestures toward representing the world in which he lived. They follow railroad tracks and city streets, pursuing heartache and decay with the Romantic longings of youth. By contrast, his poems from the 1970s are interior and fragmentary lyrics outlining remnants and absences. As far as the translations are concerned, Blatný could have received no better introduction for readers of English. Of the large-scale apparatus of critical material—there are eight forewords and afterwords in all—that accounts not only for Blatný’s history but also that of the translations themselves (almost like documents proving the existence of this vanished poet), the most complete and helpful is Veronika Tuckerová’s introduction, which provides enough valuable context to lead readers straight to the core of these haunting poems, at once shaped by and kept apart from their own troubled history. - Jason Stumpf

Ivan Blatný: a Brief Introduction
Anna Moschovakis

Click to read selections and translations from Blatný's Bixley Remedial School

Veronika Tuckerová introduced Matvei Yankelevich and me to Ivan Blatný's poetry in 2003, and before too long we decided to work on a book of Blatný’s poems for Ugly Duckling Presse’s Eastern European Poets Series, with Veronika as guest editor. After these many months working closely with Veronika and with other Blatný scholars (notably Antonín Petruželka) to prepare that book, The Drug of Art, for publication, I may be as versed in Blatný’s biography and work as a non-Czech speaker can become in so short a time, but most of the facts and ideas presented in this brief introduction are stated more thoroughly by others within the pages of that book. The Drug of Art, which includes poems from the full span of Blatný’s publishing career, will be available this summer from http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/page-Blatný.html.   –A.M.

The Monx speak Monx
I speak czech and english
I have an instrument for getting traffic-wordens out of the drain-pipes
and changing them into an apple-rose
                        —from “Janua Sapientiae” by Ivan Blatný

The poet who wrote these lines had good reason (and plenty of time) to hone his instrument: He spent most of his adult life in institutions, in exile from his native country, denounced or forgotten by many of his former friends, even declared dead back home. And while he was considerably better off than that last declaration would suggest, his publishing career was practically moribund—stalled by the “traffic wordens” of Communist censorship—for more than forty years.
Born in 1919 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Ivan Blatný enjoyed early success as a poet, publishing four books before he turned 30. On the heels of the 1948 coup d’etat he defected while in England on a government-funded cultural exchange trip. Shortly after denouncing the new Czech regime on BBC radio (and being severely attacked for it in Prague), he briefly entered a mental hospital in London. Later, he would say that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” brought on by the stress of his situation. For the next several years Blatný worked occasionally as a writer, collaborating at times with the BBC and Radio Free Europe. In 1954 he was definitively institutionalized, although he moved facilities several times; the last few years of his life were spent in a nursing home in Essex, which is where he died in 1990. According to a statement by the  Czechoslovak ambassador in London, Blatný's Czech citizenship had been restored to him by the time of his death.
Blatný left behind thousands of manuscript pages. In 1969, after years of unproductivity, he had begun to write again in earnest, but most of what he wrote before 1977 is presumed lost; beginning that year at least a portion of his work was preserved, thanks in part to the efforts of an English nurse who had ties to Czechoslovakia. Some of Blatný's manuscripts were transported to people who managed to publish them—either in samizdat, which was punishable in Czechoslovakia, or abroad. The poems presented here are from Bixley Remedial School, a book published in samizdat in Prague in 1982 (an altered and expanded book of the same name was published in 1987 in Toronto).
There is a stark difference between the poems Blatný became known for early on and the ones he would write after spending several years in England. The early poems are lyrical, often elegiac, and filled with details about the poet’s life. Blatný was a member of Group 42, a group of Czech poets and artists founded in 1942 around the tenets put forth by the theoretician Jindřich Chalupecký. The Group's foundational ethos was a kind of existential civilism; Chalupecký wrote that "the reality of the modern painter and poet is the city; its people, its pavements, lamp posts, store signs, houses, stairwells, flats."*
The city, and the poet’s material surroundings, are still present in Blatný’s later work, but the lyric mode becomes less prominent, giving way to a more opaque poetics of collage that engages the reader in a playful hunt, refusing to make meaning clear, never telling the whole story. English (along with French and German) becomes integral to Blatný's writing practice, and many of his poems of this period are thoroughly multilingual: Not only is the code-switching often seamless but the fact of multilinguality itself figures in the poems, becomes part of their subject. “I speak czech and english,” the poet claims in the above-quoted stanza, following Czech rules of capitalization for “Czech” and “English” while following English rules for “Monx,” which is either a misspelling of "Manx" (the name for the people of the Isle of Man as well as their language) or a neologism. In another poem he writes “I am a poet of only one language, but I love foreign insertions,” leaving the reader of his many multilingual (and some English-only) poems to wonder whether it may amount to a lack of imagination to assume the “one language” is to be read literally as Czech, or indeed any other language we have a name for. (Another language Blatný studied was Esperanto, known practitioners of which were persecuted by the Nazis, who  ruled over the Czechoslovakia of Blatný’s young adulthood).
Opinions of Blatný’s mental condition vary widely; some believe he was very ill, perhaps with schizophrenia or something similar, while others maintain that he was quite sane and chose to remain in hospitals because they provided sanctuary and assuaged his persistent fears of being deported. The fear was not without foundation: Czech secret police did, in the late 1950s, attempt to trick the poet into returning to Czechoslovakia to perform propaganda duties, sending a former friend as a secret agent to persuade him. Blatný’s prose-poem “The Game,” written in 1947, tells a nightmarish story of a character called The Passerby who encounters the resistance of border officials as he attempts to cross to the other side of “the Curtain.” The senseless brutality that he is forced to undergo is referred to alternately as a “game” and a “trial”—in the end, the Passerby voluntarily succumbs, vowing to play the game out “until the end.” But the poet, whose voice returns in the final stanzas of "The Game,” turns that apparent act of submission on its head: Poetry, the poet suggests, can constitute resistance to the game, a resistance writ small. For an example he turns to Chinese poetry, which he says offers “very little … nothing more than the sky and a bird flying across it, / a bird flying across it; a bird, but a real one, one that has ceased to play the game, / one that will play no more…”**
Coercion, repression and censorship helped shape the destiny of the author of “The Game”—for the people who published his work, they were the salient facts of life. Maybe Blatný's poetry changed partly in response to the circumstances in which he lived, which could understandably have led to a poetics complex enough to resist cooptation. Maybe his work would have evolved similarly had he lived in “less interesting times.” Maybe it doesn't matter. By the time Blatný wrote “Janua Sapientiae,” though the traffic wordens might still have been hiding in the drain-pipes, his instrument—poetry—was fully capable of rendering them powerless, even sweet.
FOOTNOTES
* Jindřich Chalupecký, “Svět, v němž žijeme,” published in 1940. As quoted in Obhajoba umění 1934-1948, (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1991). 71, 73. Translation: Veronika Tuckerová.
** Translation by Alex Zucker, from The Drug of Art (UDP 2007)

 















Small Variation

Thursday 8 pm. On the table:
Matches, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp.
My tools.
You already know my music from five or six things,
You already know my music from five or six things,
My little song.
As it sizzles on the stove, as it bubbles in quietude
The song of the interlude,
Which happens only once in history.
Matches, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp.
And dust on all of them.
The inaudible galloping horse carries it on its hoof.
In the deathified flat, dust up to the roof.
In the deathified flat, dust up to the roof.
For the last time the unsettled loses itself in history.
Thursday 8 pm. On the table:
Newspapers, cigarettes, tobacco, knife, and lamp.
Newspapers: Papandreu, Pierlot.
Furniture: Divan, ornamented credenza.
My little song.
Big drops hit the poorly boarded-up window with a splat.
We'll get wet inside the flat!
We'll get wet inside the flat!
And even worse boards
Will be left for the coffin.

7 December 1944