The Absolute Gravedigger

by Vítězslav Nezval

  Image

  Of a vile kiss

  Between the snout

  Of a mustached codfish

  And two paralytic generals

  But in Nezval’s original handwritten version of the poem, these lines were far more blatant:

  Image

  Of a vile kiss

  Between Mussolini

  Hitler

  General Franco

  And General Delaroche

  Over the bloody surface

  Covering the five continents

  One could argue that the connotations of the Chaplin mustache remain clear enough, but Nezval’s normalization of these lines certainly obscures their meaning. Nevertheless, the poem’s horrifying depiction of life and politics in Europe during the Spanish Civil War cannot be ignored. “The Iberian Fly” is a major poem of the 1930s. It is Nezval’s Guernica.

  Equally present, and ultimately more optimistic than Nezval’s politics, is his belief in the creative power of the imagination and his insistence on the importance of exploring it. This is evident in the Surrealist method and the fecund creative atmosphere of these poems, where even decay is part of the process of life. It is clearest in the section “Decalcomania,” where Nezval’s furious creativity flows into his prose vignettes, which describe the poems in the section as well as the generative processes that led to the book’s conception. Nezval’s creative enthusiasm is visualized, as he includes his own decalcomanias that the corresponding poems describe. This technique, invented in the mid-18th century for transferring engravings, was taken up in the early 1930s by the Surrealists. It involves laying a dense layer of paint on a surface, then pressing it against a piece of paper or canvas, creating a textured abstract image. The fluidity of the shapes and the chance abstraction of the method are good metaphors for the processes of the entire book.

  The poems in The Absolute Gravedigger do not focus on Prague as specifically as some of Nezval’s other work, but the wayside inns, courtyards, fields, villages and towns, no matter how bizarre, are indelible to the Czech countryside. The windmill, which is a central image in the book, is a common sight throughout the Czech lands and a recurring symbol in Czech fairy tales. Despite the avant-garde nature of Nezval’s poetics, most of these poems take place in traditional rural settings. A sense of unease permeates the homegrown imagery. Even the most communal poems take place in desolation. Tables are set but deserted. The characters who do appear are strangely out of time, like the 21 sisters in a kaleidoscopic existence of eternal return in “Bizarre Town.” Jan Mukařovský, one of Nezval’s perceptive early critics, wrote in 1938 of the book’s atmosphere of “disturbingly mysterious uncertainty.” He also pointed out the connection between Nezval’s method of portraiture and the technique of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian court painter who served in Vienna and Prague in the 16th century and was known for composing portraits from fruits, vegetables, and other foods. This is especially true of “A Man Composing a Self-Portrait out of Objects,” and the aforementioned “The Iberian Fly,” as well as the title poem, where the eponymous gravedigger has, among other attributes, “hair of charred schnitzel.” The landlady, meanwhile, is portrayed thus:

  With a head of overripe cabbage

  With breasts of two tallow puddings

  With a womb of calamus

  And with legs of soaked sacks of grain

  Surely such constructions have as much to do with Arcimboldo as they do with Lautréamont’s “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”

  Nezval first met André Breton and Paul Eluard in Paris in 1933, having become acquainted — and enamored — with their work in an important Surrealist exhibition at Prague’s Mánes Gallery the previous year. In 1934, Nezval initiated the founding of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia with other Czech writers and artists including Karel Teige, Konstantin Biebl, Jindřich Honzl, Jindřich Štyrský, and Toyen. The group met regularly at Café Axa, a modest public pool with a tiny café in what was an impressive modernist building. Nezval became a prolific and vocal supporter of Surrealism in his poetry, prose, and speeches. He translated Breton’s Nadja and Communicating Vessels, and published the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in his magazine Zodiac in 1930. The creation of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia — the first Surrealist group outside France to be approved by Breton — was the result of more than a decade of engagement by the Czech avant-garde with their French counterparts.

  Nezval published his first book in 1922 (The Bridge, referenced in “Decalcomania”). The same year he joined the artistic group Devětsil, which embraced the poetry of the modern world as well as the bright optimism of a postwar decade in a country that had finally gained independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. According to Karel Teige’s 1924 text “Poetism,” poetry was to be found in “film, the circus, sport, tourism, and in life itself.” Nezval was a prolific star of Czech Poetism, producing masterpieces in several styles and genres, including Abeceda, a collection of short poems on each letter of the alphabet, lavishly designed by Teige with photographs of dancer Milča Mayerová posing each letter. The typographic attention Nezval pays in Abeceda can be seen in “The Fetishist,” where he writes of “the slightly protruding chin of the words I love you.” Beyond this, however, the images so familiar to Poetism, such as the Eiffel Tower, Egypt, cowboys and Indians, have been jettisoned.

  This is not the optimistic poetry of the 1920s. In contrast, as Karel Teige would write in his 1937 essay “From Artificialism to Surrealism:” “when the city clocks chime the approaching midnight of the old order, poetry cannot be the song of a bird, the intoxication of the summer sun; it is a mouth spewing blood, a crater overflowing with lava in which the Pompeii of luxury and banditry will perish, a geyser of forces against which the censor of social morality will be powerless.” 1 This dramatic shift is evident in the way The Absolute Gravedigger fuses the strangest elements of light-hearted Poetism with the darker Surrealism Nezval would embrace in the early 1930s. As he writes in “Decalcomania,” “The Absolute Gravedigger [is] the beginning of the second movement of my work, a conscious beginning that ‘strives to spontaneously and systematically objectify and concretize irrationally subjective images springing from associative automatism.’ ” In this sense, there was another burial taking place in this collection, namely of Nezval’s earlier methods of creating poetry.

  By 1937, Nezval was deeply immersed in Surrealism, having published two such poetic masterpieces the year before: Woman in the Plural and Prague with Fingers of Rain.2 But by 1938, he would attempt to disband the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, alienating himself both from Breton and many of his Czech peers. Nonetheless, Nezval did send Breton a copy of The Absolute Gravedigger in November 1937 immediately after it was published with a frontispiece and layout by his friend and fellow Surrealist Jindřich Štyrský. According to the opening of A Prague Flâneur, which came out the following year, Nezval handed in the manuscript of The Absolute Gravedigger on June 9, 1937, at the offices of publisher František Borový, where his friend and editor Julius Fürth was supportive of even the poet’s most experimental work.

  In Breton’s copy of the book, Nezval wrote: “To my wonderful friend André Breton, whose star illuminates poets’ nights, Forever his friend, Vítězslav Nezval.” Just a year later Nezval would be trying to reconcile with Breton about the dissolution of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia. A year after that, Hitler would pose for a portrait looking out a window at Prague Castle. The ensuing repression of the Czechoslovak avant-garde would persist until 1989, largely divorcing the country’s vibrant and significant literary and artistic contributions from international appreciation. Nezval would come to embrace the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, relinquishing his avant-garde artistic pursuits in favor of official government posts in the 1950s. Considering the social, artistic, and political context in which The Absolute Gravedigger was written, and the future that lay ahead for Nezval and for the Europea
n avant-garde, it would seem that the poet was tuning into more than his own associative automatism while composing the volume.

  We have sought, as all translators must, fidelity to both sound and sense. This proved particularly challenging with the tight rhymes and twisted syntax of “Shadowplays.” In certain poems, like “The Tuffet” or “The Cask,” liberties were taken with the imagery in order to convey the tone of the piece in concert with its musical form. In the longer poems, Nezval’s telescoping syntax, where sentences are continuously elaborated upon with clauses intertwining in a way that is more elegant in Czech than in literal English translation, in some cases could have necessitated revisions of line order, but we have generally tried to maintain the dynamism of the original. There is a shifting sense of imagery throughout the collection, not only as objects and characters are set in unlikely places, but as those unlikely places are set atop objects and characters. A sense of uncertainty and surprise pervades, as each line leads, or perhaps doesn’t lead, to something completely unexpected. For readers — and even more so translators — nothing can be taken for granted.

  At times, the end-rhymes in these poems seem to have been chosen for the sound rather than the meaning, but in contrast to a poet like Marina Tsvetaeva, who suggested that translators secure her metaphors rather than her rhymes, Nezval’s poetry is musical to a degree that sacrificing the rhymes seemed to us an irredeemable loss. While some of Nezval’s rhymes are surely a result of free association, his poems are always intimately in tune to the syntactical, musical, and homophonic possibilities of the Czech language. We have attempted to remain faithful to what we believe was Nezval’s intention, changing words or stretching the limits of meaning only when necessary and — to our minds — aesthetically permissible.

  The Absolute Gravedigger is previously untranslated into English. And yet it is one of the finest examples of Czech Surrealism, which should be considered just as groundbreaking as the French incarnation. The book’s political concerns make it an invaluable document of the avant-garde response to the crisis looming in Europe in the 1930s. It might be the most significant — the greatest — book of avant-garde poetry concerning the onset of World War II. It is also likely the earliest. The politics may be oblique, but the poetry is undeniably direct. We have tried our best to transfer the poems into English, privileging neither eye nor ear, but utilizing both.

  Stephan Delbos & Tereza Novická

  Prague, 2016

  Text Notes

  ^ seven-spotted tear: “Seven-spotted” refers to the ladybug (the seven-spotted variety is the one most commonly found in Europe), an association Nezval is making with the potato beetle.

  ^ the great tooth of time: The Czech zub času literally translates as “tooth of time” but idiomatically means the ravages of time, as it does in English, so the association here is between the shape of the spade and a tooth and time’s decay. Cf. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act V, Scene 1: “A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time / And razure of oblivion.”

  ^ Afflicted with a corn: The Czech for a “corn” is the compound noun kuří oko, literally a “hen’s eye,” thus the association with “eye” in the next line.

  ^ Looking like an enormous mace: As a reference to the mace-cum-scepter carried by Hussite commanders, most notably Jan Žižka, it also serves as a symbol of revolution.

  ^ Penis: The Czech word úd can mean a limb or the male member, and given the context, it is clearly the latter here.

  ^ exquisite virginal pea pod: Here the Czech word lusk means a “hull” or “husk,” but it is also a play on the idiom děvče jako lusk (a pretty girl). Likewise, in Surrealist imagery the pea pod evokes a vagina.

  ^ Is not a tooth: The pun here is on the word stolička, which means a stool (tuffet) or a molar (which has the shape of a stool).

  ^ TODAY AN EXPLOSION: The Czech phrase here Dnes se udá výbuch forms a phonetic pun with Dnes se udáví Bůh: “Today God chokes to death.”

  ^ all my extremities were utilized: See note above for úd. Nezval uses the plural here, which in almost all cases means “limbs,” but qualifies it with “all of them” so is including his member as well. Indeed, there is every indication that his penis was utilized in some manner in the process of creating at least some of the decalcomanias. More of Nezval’s decalcomanias are housed at the Museum of Czech Literature.

  ^ Woman in the Plural: Žena v množném čísle, frontispiece and cover by Karel Teige (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1936).

  ^ Prague with Fingers of Rain: Praha s prsty deště, frontispiece and cover by Karel Teige (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1936).

  ^ The Bridge: Most: Poems 1919–1920, Devětsil Editions (Brno: St. Kočí, 1922); 2nd ed., foreword by Vítězslav Nezval, frontispiece by Karel Teige (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1937).

  ^ paranoiac thought process: On the paranoiac-critical method see Salvador Dalí, La Femme Visible (Paris: Editions Surréalistes, 1930), Nezval’s copy of which came from and was inscribed by Dalí himself. In the section “L’ne pourri,” Dalí states at the outset: “I believe that the moment is near when, by a thought process that is paranoiac and active in nature, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and to contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality. [...] It is by a distinctly paranoiac process that it has been possible to obtain a double image: in other words, a representation of an object that is also, without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, the representation of another entirely different object ...” Quoted with slight modification from “The Rotting Donkey,” The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, edited and translated by Haim Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223-226. “L’ne pourri” also appeared separately in Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, 1 (July 1930), 9-12. See as well the later The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942).

  About the Author

  Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958) was the leading Czech avant-garde writer of the first half of the 20th century. A founding member of both Devětsil in 1920 and the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 (the first such group outside of France), his output consists of numerous poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays, and translations. In addition to The Absolute Gravedigger, his most important work includes Alphabet, Prague with Fingers of Rain, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and A Prague Flâneur. Along with Karel Teige, Jindřich Štyrský, and Toyen, Nezval frequently visited Paris, engaging with the French Surrealists and forging a friendship with André Breton and Paul Eluard. He served as editor of the Prague group’s journal Surrealismus.

  About the Translators

  Stephan Delbos is a New England-born writer living in Prague. His poetry, essays, and translations have been published internationally. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (2011) and the author of a poetry chapbook, In Memory of Fire (2016). His collection of visual poems, “Bagatelles for Typewriter,” was exhibited at Prague’s ArtSpace Gallery in 2012. His play, Chetty’s Lullaby, about trumpeter Chet Baker, was produced in San Francisco. A Founding Editor of the literary journal B O D Y, he teaches at Charles University and Anglo-American University in Prague.

  A native of San Francisco, Tereza Novická moved to the Czech Republic in 2000. Currently a student in the American Literature graduate program at Charles University in Prague, she has translated a number of Czech and Slovak poets into English, including Ondřej Buddeus, Jan Těsnohlídek, Sylva Fischerová, Lenka Daňhelová, Pavel Novotný , Nóra Ružičková, and Ondřej Škrabal.

  Colophon

  The Absolute Gravedigger by Vítězslav Nezval is translated by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická from the original Czech Absolutní hrobař, first published in 1937 by Fr. Borový in Prague with a frontispiece by Jindřich Štyrský and six decalcomanias by the author. The cover is designed by Silk Mountain.

  We are indebted t
o Bruno Solařík for his invaluable comments on the translation and grateful to the editors of Asymptote, B O D Y, The Ilanot Review, and Plume, where earlier versions of the poems appeared.

  First published in English in hardcover in 2016 by

  Twisted Spoon Press

  P.O. Box 21, 150 21 Prague 5, Czech Republic

  www.twistedspoon.com

  ISBN: 978-80-86264-49-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-80-86264-76-9 (e-book)

  1 Quoted in Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 242.

  2 See note above to “Decalcomania.”