On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle (Ukázka, strana 99)

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and mostly light-hearted, full of the tastes and smells of homely food, village gossip, memories of school, and an unromantic but exuberant enjoyment of free nature. Prague is evoked only by the image of a friend left behind in the city on a “creaky bed,” “with cold salami in the stomach” (what a cruel juxtaposition with the warm dinner cooked by mother!). Slavětín is not romanticized, but for the student, the village home does appear like an exotic Island of the Blessed.

“One Day at Home” (along with Wolker’s “Svatý kopeček” [Little holy hill], also from 1921) is one of the first Czech responses to Karel Čapek’s 1919 translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone,” which inspired a new poetic form in Czech poetry. Biebl’s later New Icarus would become one of the greatest Czech poems written in that form. But the juxtaposition of “One Day at Home” and “Zone,” and of Biebl’s Slavětín with Apollinaire’s Paris in their poems, is a bit like the juxtaposition of the “softest moss” and holy Rome in Biebl’s poem.

One suspects, also from the light tone of “One Day at Home,” that if one can speak of inspiration, it was taken up with a smile, rather like when the poet depicted himself, “our little citizen,” next to tougher travelers more at home at sea.

The following poem, published in 1923 in a periodical and then in 1924 in Biebl’s first single-authored collection, is titled “Motýl” (The butterfly).

On the waves of flower stems and on the waves of grass Into the distance a little boat drifts with white sails.

Propelled by the sun like by fair wind.

To red blossoms she sails, to coral islands.

Over vast seas to sail and sail, in faraway lands silently to come to rest, and to sail, farther to sail!

Above green waters a bird soars— In a storm the little boat rocks.

I could still glimpse the sinking wreck.

The sea gives nothing back.211

Snowflakes are apple blossoms; poplars, minarets; and here, a homely meadow is the faraway sea, red flowers are coral islands, and the butterfly, a boat. They are and they are not. In the landlocked country, the sea (and

211 Biebl, Věrný hlas, 24.

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Metaphors, dreams, travel

Figure 12. Title page image

by Cyril Bouda in K. Biebl, Věrný hlas (Faithful voice), 1924.

especially tropical sea, with coral reefs) epitomizes vast distances and open space, the otherest Other of Czech landscape. Biebl tests poetry’s power to bring home and the faraway together. We see a Czech meadow more richly as the faraway sea, “like on the first day”; a little red flower more intensely as a coral island.

However, the sailboat is not simply a metaphor serving to elaborate an original image, the butterfly. In fact, a draft of this poem is titled “Plachetnice” (Sailboat), and it mentions no butterfly or meadow.212 In the published version above, the title “Butterfly” does not establish the original image, but upsets origins, originality and hierarchy. The poem is less about a single place, but it instigates movement and mirroring between apparently distant worlds.

The double poetic image of the butterfly | sailboat is, to use Nezval’s term, “unanchored”213—precariously so, like the butterfly, like the sailboat. In this, and in the widening distances between the worlds juxtaposed in the poem— compared to snowflakes and apple blossoms—one senses an increasing freedom and spatial openness of poetic imagination, like a ship that leaves from the safety of the harbor “over vast seas to sail.” (Figure 12) Less than a year before his journey to Java, Biebl published a brief prose piece “Moře” (The sea), where he wrote: The sea, too, has its comrades and friends. They are sown fields, meadows and clouds. It is the cloth on a billiard table, uniforms of Italian legionaries and the emerald that our teacher wore on his tie.214 212 Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature.

213 Vítězslav Nezval, Moderní básnické směry (Prague: Dědictví Komenského, 1937), 9–25.

214 Biebl, Dílo, 5:189.

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Here poetry begins to liberate, break down boundaries, and establish camaraderie and friendships across apparently disparate realms and vast distances.

The alchemy of poetic metaphors involves an intercourse between dreaming and actuality. Biebl writes: I love actuality but also dreaming, and thus I like to move on the border between the two worlds, where actuality overflows into dream and dream into actuality, where beauty is born from a beautiful sight and resonates for a long time behind closed eyes.

I am a traveler of all eras and the most various dreams.215

One finds this movement of consciousness in Biebl’s texts in many variations: the movement from seeing to (day)dreaming, in which memories, fantasies, desires, distant places and bygone times overflow into actuality, and actuality explodes into fantasy—such as when the boy sees an artificial palm and gets lost in the jungle, or when a butterfly fluttering above the grass awakens a desire to “sail, farther to sail” across vast seas.

It was in primary school, in the first grade, that I first saw the sea. The old parish priest was unrolling something. One end slipped out of his hand, and the Holy Land unrolled down all the way to his shoes. He hung it on the blackboard. A map. . . .

“This is the sea,” said the vicar and sailed with his fat hand across the large green plane, and because the sea was then all dusty, he wiped his hand with a handkerchief. . . . when someone came in, he had to walk under the sea.

Whole days I was looking at the map. Koudský was the worst reader in the whole class and he was breaking words apart with difficulty as if they were wagons. The teacher looked out of the window at the chestnut trees, blooming and fragrant. . . .

The map began to overflow onto the green wall and soon the whole classroom was surrounded by sea. We were on an island, little Robinsons, and we hunted giraffes and elephants on postage stamps. The teacher had red eyes and from his cane we made an Indian bow.216

The text could be read as a comic phenomenology of the movement from seeing to dreaming, a description of daydreaming in its actuality. The sea, tropical islands, novels such as Robinson Crusoe, fantasies of being an Indian, images on postage stamps—all are drawn into a maelstrom of imagination by a dusty map, so much like the artificial palm. The travels in the imagination would not be the same, the achievement and futility of poetry so ecstatic, the

215 Biebl, Cesta na Jávu, 78–79.

216 Biebl, Dílo, 5:188–89.

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