{"id":16,"date":"2018-10-16T14:29:14","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T14:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephandelbos.com\/?page_id=16"},"modified":"2023-01-07T14:32:08","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T14:32:08","slug":"the-absolute-gravedigger","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephandelbos.com\/index.php\/translations\/the-absolute-gravedigger\/","title":{"rendered":"The Absolute Gravedigger"},"content":{"rendered":"

(buy the book)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

“Nezval\u2019s translators have done an excellent job of embodying in English the slippery act of cobbling together what can never entirely cohere\u2014a self.” –Aditi Machado, Asymptote<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
Twisted Spoon Press, 2016 \/ 175 pages \/ $22<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

About the book<\/h4>\n

Translated by Stephan Delbos
\nand Tereza Novick\u00e1
\n<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Absolute Gravedigger<\/em>, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of V\u00edt\u011bzslav Nezval\u2019s 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 surrealistic ommatidia, Nezval\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

Reviews<\/h2>\n

The assertion that politics somehow degrades art is a false premise. This assumes political art is inherently derivative. What happens when it is done well? Nezval is a political poet like William Blake, subsuming his fury and despair into a wild cosmology.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Karl Wolff,\u00a0New York Journal of Books<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Nezval\u2019s grim and prescient view of politics is balanced by his belief in the creative power of the imagination and his insistence on the importance of exploring it.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Marcela Sulak,\u00a0Boston Review<\/i><\/p>\n

The book is a multifarious beast, difficult to sum up briefly, and there will be something in it for anyone with an interest in poetry, the European avant-garde, Surrealism, history or politics. The timing of the translation\u2019s publication could not have been more appropriate, given the ongoing resurgence of the far right in Europe and the USA; some of the material in the book, notably the long poem \u201cThe Iberian Fly\u201d, written in response to Fascism, has a renewed resonance now.<\/p>\n

\u2014 James Knight,\u00a0Minor Literature[s]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0is, as Delbos notes in his afterword to the collection, a nod to Marx\u2019s notion that the bourgeoisie are their own gravediggers. But it is also an apt title for a continent on the verge of total war \u2013 riven by increasingly entrenched domestic political struggles, xenophobic nativism, utopian (or totalitarian) internationalism, localised class struggle, and appeasement rather than compromise to the extent that, ultimately, the centre could not hold. Lessons of history. History of lessons.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Benjamin Tallis,\u00a0New Perspectives<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

First published in 1937,\u00a0The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0is a masterfully lunatic work that showcases the powers of surrealism amidst a violently changing world. In his poems, all is manipulated, mutated and corrupted. Steeped in Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s paranoic-critical method, Nezval\u2019s works revel in a distrust of both form and state, fiendishly unveiling weaknesses in word and world. [\u2026] Not just a poet, but a portent. Nezval\u2019s surreal palette wrestles with the grotesqueries of the world, pressing together fantasy and truth to create an unsettling tableau.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Jeff Alford,\u00a0New Orleans Review<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

It marks, so to speak, a transcendence of the earlier urban limitations of Surrealism. But what seems even more significant is that the collection puts a definitive end to Poetism\u2019s programmatic joyfulness and optimism. Sinister atmospheres and dark, eerie images abound; metaphors are often nauseating and downright repelling.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Glasgow Review of Books<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0is 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\u2019s surrealist-period, this manifests itself in a variety of ways and approaches \u2013 welcome shifts of poetic strangeness from section to section.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Complete Review<\/a><\/p>\n

Upon my first read-through of this newly translated collection of poetry by prominent Czech Surrealist, V\u00edt\u011bslav Nezval, I was struck by an eerie sense that the poet was speaking to the present moment. Published in 1937, the poems gathered in\u00a0The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0form a gallery of darkening, disturbing, and frequently grotesque images that capture the mood of the shifting landscape of the years leading up to the Second World War.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0roughghosts<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s something of Bosch or Goya in the spare poems\u2014somehow simultaneously bleak but vivid, morose but witty. The cityscapes, the entropy, the impressionistic details [\u2026] broken bits of civilization twitching into new combinations of reality.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Biblioklept<\/a><\/p>\n

In this,\u00a0The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0is a valuable example of the avant-garde\u2019s response to the tumult of the 1930s \u2014 but that is far from its only merit.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Benjamin Cunningham,\u00a0L.A. Review of Books<\/a><\/p>\n

All of this seemingly abstract, matter-less \u200bmatter turns into an ungainly body of odd parts that keeps connecting and breaking off and turning into other, still odder, parts.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Aditi Machado,\u00a0Asymptote<\/a><\/p>\n

The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0represents 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\u2019t hesitate to draw the curtain over his entire oeuvre up till then, declaring that the first movement of his work was over. Yet\u00a0The Absolute Gravedigger<\/i>\u00a0turned out to be both the beginning and the end of the promised second movement.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Jarom\u00edr Typlt<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(buy the book) “Nezval\u2019s translators have done an excellent job of embodying in English the slippery act of cobbling together what can never entirely cohere\u2014a self.” –Aditi Machado, Asymptote About the book Translated by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novick\u00e1 The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of V\u00edt\u011bzslav Nezval\u2019s work … Continue reading The Absolute Gravedigger<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":323,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-16","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t