Kolenič and His Inspirations

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Kolenič and His Inspirations

A few years ago I was asked to translate an extract from Ivan Kolenič’s new novel Say Goodbye to Poetry. I realised instantly that I was up against the peculiar literary being known as the Accursed Poet. Taken as a type, in English-speaking countries the Accursed Poet is one of the most popular poets of all. The largest poetic gathering I have ever seen was in the RDS Main Hall in Dublin, a huge auditorium otherwise used for conferences of major political parties, Tina Turner concerts and the like; on this unique occasion it was packed to the doors for a poetry reading by the Most Accursed American, Allen Ginsberg. It is paradoxical that, while the Accursed Poet despises conventional society, conventional society, which normally despises poetry, treats the Accursed Poet with something like respect. To a certain extent it recognises his calling. As if representing society he publicly drinks himself into a stupor, takes exotic drugs, has scandalous relationships, lives on the brink of lunacy, suffers excruciating torment, and in the end hopefully gathers the flowers of his evils, poetry. Respectable society at the very least takes an interest. Ultimately perhaps it is even grateful – not counting those respectable people who happen to be the Accursed Poet’s relations.
But what sort of mind does he have, this Accursed Poet? Does he have a sense of humour? And if so, what kind? – There’s a continuing argument over whether these poets have any humour at all. Many readers think that they don’t – they can’t, since they take their mission too seriously. In some individual cases the evidence is compelling. Taking Ginsberg for example, I would fully agree that humour wasn’t his strong point.
But Kolenič resurrects the Accursed Poet with unpredictable humour as well as imaginative energy. Right at the beginning, Kolenič gives him the ideal girlfriend, who wants nothing else but to have her share of poetic suffering: She told me she loved me as a verse-creating object, as something with an enormous shaggy tail, something absurdly spectacular and at the same time hopelessly primitive, old-fashioned, prehistoric; I love you as a most magnificently versifying object, Klárika would murmur through kiss-curved lips before everyone had fallen asleep and let nothingness alight upon the earth, till then unended, I love you as an object of poetry, as a swarm of animate corpuscles, as a race of irredeemable tramps… while all were not yet sleeping Klárika was in her element, she raved into the blue sky like a crossed-out conscience, she spat out her ice-cream over bastards and roared laughing, she did handstands and cartwheels, she stripped off her T-shirt in the public squares, ripping the hearts out of old men, she was splendid and beautiful, she would dream with open eyes of inaugurating the reign of folly, then immediately fall into gloom and vicious cursing – the chaff to death, the cornucopia for life!
Kolenič begins with a high measure of confidence; he willingly, even arrogantly takes risks. Amidst the flood of lyric association, when there’s scarcely room on a page for as many as two full stops, he is not afraid to throw a banal little midget-sentence into the torrent and thus deliberately provoke comic bathos. For example, when the narrative turns abruptly from Klárika to the poet: … when the bus inspector was coming she thrust lighted cigarettes into her pockets, she flung about dog-eared banknotes, she swigged stout from the bottle like a dipso, she bought half-pints of vodka and poured it in transports of feeling behind her collar, she gripped me powerfully by the hand till it took my breath away, and whispered that she loved me, she loved me catastrophically… I love you, poet of mine, it’s beautiful with you, everything with you is about love and frightful suffering!
She’d hit the nail on the head. Because the poet is an inexplicably mysterious creature, delicately concealed, the poet is a being without time and space, the angels of blasphemy are roving in his veins and craning out as far as his devil’s hooves, hence the poet is an oddity of creation, eccentric, non-sterotypical, an ethereal, astrophysical, jaded figure, he conceals within himself armies of woe and dreadful pain, which are all the time exploding in him like summer storms, and simultaneously he dispatches into the world regiments of unlimited bliss, the poet is scorned, spat upon, buried underground, made a saint of, chopped in little bits, he’s an instinctive predator, hated and loved, hating and loving, och! how a poet can love…

That much will do to give the flavour. To my mind, it’s a successful experiment with language and an interesting original variation on the old theme of the Accursed Poet. I had to translate the first ten pages and translate them I did, with frightful translator’s suffering, because Kolenič has an amazingly wide vocabulary of the high and low Slovak tongue. And then I went out to buy the book. I was anxious to read the rest. And I wanted to know if he could hold this pace to the end.

AuthorJohn Minahane
2018-08-21T17:22:53+00:00 September 8th, 2010|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 74|0 Comments