Yesterday a sunny day, a gift from the gods,
the grape harvest, like back then, I drank and I
cursed, I poured out all of my rage—yesterday,
yesterday, as you know, yesterday it was two
years, two years back, since we met in Suché mýto,
in the capital city of our captive/embraced Tatrania-
Slovakland, since then I’ve been writing to you, I write
these Jottings for the Beloved Lutécia, which I will never
send you, which they will certainly later seize and scatter.
You don’t know, dear Lutécia—Leticia Parisiorum, Leticia to your Parisian friends, why I write you these jottings—for you, which I know in advance, that I’ll never send to you. Other than that, meanwhile, I write you letters, which I regularly send to you by air mail, that don’t fly from Prague, although, although they are innocent, at least from a political standpoint, as lilies.
You don’t know, dear Lutécia—Leticia Parisiorum, Leticia to your Parisian friends, why I write you these jottings—for you, which I know in advance, that I’ll never send to you. Other than that, meanwhile, I write you letters, which I regularly send to you by air mail, that don’t fly from Prague, although, although they are innocent, at least from a political standpoint, as lilies.
In the jottings that I won’t send you, I injure you, I verbally claw at you
as if you are a bird of prey, a forest buzzard, a sacerdotal
czarist griffin, I explain in the letters, that also don’t fly
to you, I’m grazing on you with the big gentle muzzle
of an elk or a horse, I’m fumbling with the elk’s muzzle,
I’m groping the rounded, endlessly gentle shapes of
your body, of our soul, fumbling with the gentle elk’s
muzzle all over you, from afar, inaccessible because of
the invented borders, I the captive animal, captive and
starving like you, I’m finding in myself, in the expanding
eternal memory, my animal devotion before you with the
mystery which in the grasp of pleasure and pain excreted
me into the world of the cosmos like a blind ray and was
licked all over, completely, like a fresh wet calf. I am
embraced by the felicity and grace of the language of
my mother and my lover, who give birth to me, throwing me out of themselves, placate me, reconcile me with the
cosmos, with their language, breath, words...
(1913—1989)
was one of the
most significant
Slovak prose
writers, essayists
and publicists of the 20th
century. He
studied French
and translated
also from the
French literature.
In August 1968
he opposed the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia and later he signed the Charter 77.
Because of these political attitudes his works stopped
being published and were disseminated only in the form
of samizdats or editions appearing abroad. In 1986 he was awarded Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his trilogy
Jottings. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of
Tatarka’s birth his Jottings for Beloved Lutécia (Písačky
pre milovanú Lutéciu, 2013) and his life confession,
Recordings (Navrávačky, 2013), based on the
interviews with Eva Štolbová, have been published. ( my father admired him too)
Dominik Tatarka
Dominik Tatarka
