Closing Remarks On Ján Ondruš’ Poetry

/, Literature, Blesok no. 74/Closing Remarks On Ján Ondruš’ Poetry

Closing Remarks On Ján Ondruš’ Poetry

Hence it is undisputable that “despite all categories, in the timeless irritation of the poem, Ondruš places himself among the great twentieth-century modernists since he is able to absorb both conflicts – the modernist (the conflict between the world and the subject) and the postmodernist (the conflict between self and self) – he is postmodernist in the sense of the same extreme modernist, in the sense of the one who manages to crucify the modernist project (if such a project has ever exited) to its critical point, that is, he pushed it out in the margins, but left it standing, practically devastated, but not completely.”14F The whole poetic opus of Ján Ondruš is united by lyric subjectivity, primarily characterized by profound experience of the motif and its emotional charge. Ondruš is extremely emotional and sensitive, but not sentimental. He is an exceptionally creative individual with a sense of the important processes, of what is to come. His poetry is constructed so coherently that no image could be removed from its structure without disturbing its firm poetic architecture. But, above all, Ondruš’ poetry is characterized by a rich inner life that in turn is full of prolific poetic associativity in which the more we delve the more it spreads and appears as infinite in its deeply emotional polyphony.
The poet is taking a hard look at himself, he is in fact restlessly thinking, struggling with everything that decreases and threatens the value of human space in the human world. This may be the reason one does not find in this poetry the explicit subject of good and evil. It has been covered at a higher level at which the antagonisms create the process of reconsidering and perfecting. The Ondrušian picturesqueness wishes to stress human existence itself, to find the inner force binding things, not dividing or atomizing them. The individual metaphors in Ondruš would lose their meaning if they were not mutually related to the other metaphors. This meaning, even if its relevance is limited, represents a clipping, an excerpt from the totality of the world. Ondruš’s metaphors hence form a so-called “metaphorical network” operating as a whole and creating the mega-image of the world. The world consists of tiny little images, oftentimes mere flashes, but they functionally complement each other in the overall image of the position of things. This is also related to the problem of polysemy of Ondrušian metaphor and the problem of the reception of his poetry in general. Hence the validity Andrea Bokníková’s opinion, who claims that Ondruš is “a poet from the order of the magi, from the order of imaginative lyricists – perhaps the most original in Slovakia – who will always emphasize that it is not the beauty of the metaphor that matters, but the deep structure of the image.”15F It is a problem that the readers must resolve on their own for their reading of his poetry to be fulfilled and to accept as their own the world that the poet has created in his poems. It is so since Ondruš’ poetry forces the readers to cooperate, stimulates them, makes them form their own ideas, create their own interpretations of the observed images he offers and actively transfers into his inner world, into his version of being.
Certainly, our approach to Ján Ondruš’ poetry, which we labelled as poetry of exceptional and particular values, is not by far the only possible approach. This poetry has offered itself as one of the most interesting, as well as resulting from the most important breakthroughs of Slovak poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It has, in effect, long been the fact that only the important breakthroughs bring lasting results.

The excerpt was originally published in Slovak in: TANESKI, Zvonko: Metaforické modely obraznosti v poézii Jána Ondruša. Nitra: LOGOS E. H, 2008, pp. 159-169.

Translated into English by Kalina Janeva

#b
14. SAETERBAKKEN, S.: Exorcista – Básnické „ja“ v Ondrušových dielach. In: Krížu je člověk ľahký (Zborník statí k 65. Narozeninám básnika Jána Ondruša). Bratislava: Študňa 1997, p. 401.
15. BOKNÍKOVÁ, A.: Za mágom Jánom Ondrušom. In: Pravda, 16. Nov 2000, p. 8.

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