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New Series No. 17 - 2001
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| Stephen Watts |
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| Ivan Blatny |
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Stephen Watts writes: Ivan Blatny´ was born in Brno in 1919 and established a name as a poet rapidly in the late 1930s and war years. He was associated with ‘Group 42’, together with Jir˘í Kolar, Kamil Lhoták and others, and was also close at this time to poets such as Jaroslav Seifert and Víte˘zslav Nezval (with whom he later fell out). He left Czechoslovakia in 1948 and came to London, spending the rest of his life in London, Suffolk and Essex and died in Clacton in 1991. The curve of his life is sadly exemplary: declared a non-person in Prague after ’48 – due largely to an anti-communist broadcast he made from London – he also became in effect a non-poet in England. Breakdowns of his emotional and mental health led to long-term stays in wards and closed hospitals and a complete silence from writing between the mid-1950s and about 1970. Thereafter he began writing again, often experimenting with English in what can only be described as playful and seemingly simple but complex Blatny´isms, and also creating a synthetic poetry in Czech and English. This is most clearly seen in his last book Pomocná s˘kola Bixley (literally Bixley Remedial School) a manuscript of which was taken back to Prague in 1981, first actually published in Toronto in 1987 and republished a number of times with variant readings of its text. However he remained entirely unknown in Britain to the extent that his manuscripts and writings were destroyed within the hospital and asylum he lived in during the 1970s, as worthless jottings, since his (accurate) claims that he was a major Czech poet were regarded as delusions of illness. It was only when Frances Meacham recognised the glint of real poetry – or the reality of poetry glinting – within him that his texts were not thrown away and much of the preservation, if not publication, of the texts of his late books is down to her. That he is a major Czech poet – and moreover one of immense interest – is becoming recognised and editions of his early and late poems, of his letters and manuscripts have during the 1990s been published in editions of five, six and seven hundred pages in the Czech Republic. That he is still largely unknown in Britain, and particularly in England is perhaps comment on the fate of non-English poetry in this country and surely also a reflection on English poetry. Beautiful if it could be changed : but as yet he is hardly translated at all in the country he lived in for over forty years. To our knowledge Edwin Morgan is the only poet who has translated any Blatny´ of note: publishing seven short poems from Stará bydlis˘te˘ (1979, with new editions in the 1990s and written in East Anglia and London) Blatny in the Scottish Slavonic Review in 1986. At least two books have appeared of French translations of his work. Ivan Blatny´ at the time of his death was becoming known again among Czech readers: he remained and still remains almost unknown here. |
page(s) 60-61
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