Publisher Description

The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is generally considered the greatest poetic achievement of Vit zslav Nezval, the most prolific of interwar Czech avant-garde writers. Nezval s imagination here is completely free-wheeling, untethered to any specific location. Along with his previous collection, Prague with Fingers of Rain, this is one of the most important volumes of interwar Surrealist poetry. Nezval displays here his facility in a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images). His wild yet restrained combination of absolute freedom and formal perfection lend his poetry musicality and stunning imagery, while the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slice the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. The content of the poems goes in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve. Like electron clouds, these poems have a form within which seemingly chaotic energy reigns.The chaos is only an illusion Nezval s language is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the colorful clouds of surrealist uncertainty and to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope."

Author Biography

Va-tÄ>zslav Nezval (1900-1958), an original member of the avant-garde artists group DevÄ>tsil and a leading figure in the Poetist movement, was perhaps the most prolific Czech writer of the interwar period. His output consists of a number of poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays, and translations. His best work is from the interwar period. He frequently visited Paris, engaging with the French surrealists. Forging a friendship with Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, he was instrumental in founding The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934.

Review

The Absolute Gravedigger is an appealing little volume, with many striking pieces, with some context and useful background provided in the Afterword, where the translators also discuss some of their translation choices and approaches (as, unsurprisingly, some of this is hard to translated directly). It is also an impressively varied collection: while certainly of Nezval's surrealist-period, this manifests itself in a variety of ways and approaches - welcome shifts of poetic strangeness from section to section. - Complete Review

Long Description

The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Vatzslav Nezval's work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier work and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political concerns in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And while a number of salient political issues emerge from the Surrealist ommatidia, Nezval's imagination here is completely free-wheeling and untethered to any specific locale as he displays mastery of a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images). Together with his previous two collections, The Absolute Gravedigger forms one of the most important corpora of interwar Surrealist poetry. Yet here Nezval's wild albeit restrained mix of absolute freedom and formal perfection has shifted its focus to explore the darker imagery of putrefaction and entropy, the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slicing the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. Inspired by Salvador Dala's paranoiac-critical method, the poems go in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve like electron clouds, they have a form within which a seemingly chaotic energy reigns. Nezval's language, however, is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the polychromatic clouds of Surrealist uncertainty to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope.

Review Quote

The Absolute Gravedigger represents the moment when the paranoiac-critical method first broke through to Czech poetry. And Nezval got so carried away by his initial excitement that he didn't hesitate to draw the curtain over his entire oeuvre up till then, declaring that the first movement of his work had ended. Yet The Absolute Gravedigger turned out to be both the beginning and the ending of the promised second movement. - Jarom

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