2024-03-22 11:11:30
He died tragically in 1987. At the Havlíčkobrod psychiatric clinic, where he was hospitalized, he fell down the stairs and broke his neck. He was 31 years old. Only now the Torst publishing house has published a book of his verses entitled V říši snů or Miroslav Ptáček’s Lyric, Epic and Hoe.
If the young graduate of the textile industrial school from Police nad Metují had not met Václav Havel by chance in the late 1970s, probably when he was hitchhiking on the side of the road and the playwright gave him a ride, Ptáček’s name would not have existed in Czech literature.
The paradox is that Havel no longer remembered this meeting twenty years later, during his second term as head of state. And he didn’t even remember that Ptáček gave him a typescript of his collection and he sent it to the literary theorist and samizdat editor Jan Lopatek. “I like it a lot and I have the impression that you might like it too. It’s interesting that the boy has never read Bondy or other poets from his neighborhood; he doesn’t know any writers at all,” wrote Havel about Ptáček’s collection.
This is also why the editor of the current publication, Jan Šulc, called his comprehensive editorial comment “detective”.
The discovery of Ptáček’s fate, which she embarked on and which is described in the book by publishing editor Eva Hrubá in addition to Šulka, is a small literary analogue of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man from 2012. In it, two fans of the forgotten and “lost” Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez from the The 60s and 70s are trying to find out the details of his life after a long time.
In the beginning, Hrubá had only a few piecemeal, sometimes inaccurate information about Ptáček. The determining factor was that the author lived in Polici nad Metují, so ten years ago she asked for the help of a local patriot. Thanks to him, she got to Ptáček’s mother and thus also to other information and family photos that the book contains. However, the mother claimed that her son had never written anything, let alone poems.
Miroslav Ptáček at sister Jitka’s wedding in 1979. | Photo: Torst publishing house
Miroslav Ptáček’s collection V říši snů or Lyric, Epic and Hoe was published unofficially for the first time in 1981 in the samizdat Edition of Expedition, which was supported by Ivan M. Havel and Olga Havelová, who stood in for her then-imprisoned husband Václav. The text was prepared for publication by literary critic Jan Lopatka. However, only two of the ten typewritten copies survived, the rest were seized by the StB during home searches of the Havels.
Thanks to the Expedition Edition, which published 279 titles until 1989, the complete outsider Ptáček found himself in good company without probably realizing it. Philosophers Zdeněk Neubauer, Jan Patočka and Milan Machovec, poets Bohuslav Reynek, Jaroslav Seifert and Jan Skácel came out here, the “central” underground was represented by Egon Bondy and Ivan Martin Jirous, for example.
Václav Havel came up with the idea of founding a typescript book edition in March 1975 at a meeting in the Prague wine bar U Piaristů. It was also attended by Lopatka, who then significantly shaped the editorial plan. According to Havel’s ideas, it was supposed to be a wild, pirate edition in terms of copyright. “The latter was practically meant to describe everything that the publisher deems appropriate, without asking anyone about it,” recalled Lopatka in an article from April 1989, in which he described the creation and history of the edition. He mentioned a plethora of published authors, but dedicated a separate paragraph to only one – the solitaire from Broumovsko. “Under the number 063, a book by Miroslav Ptáček, Vašk’s friend, a worker from eastern Bohemia, was published in 1981. Havel was impressed by the fact that, although this author did not know the ‘central’ authors of the underground at the time and their expressive and stylistic direction, his very basic position corresponded with their texts ,” summed up Lopatka.
Thanks to the investigation of Eva Hrubá and Jan Šulec, it is now clear that Havel was not friendly with Ptáček. On the other hand, Ptáček’s poems show her affinity with the underground. Despite the fact that Ptáček most likely had no idea about this literature, and if he remembered some poets when he wrote, it was more about the classics from the school teaching of Czech – Mácha, Erben and perhaps Jaroslav Seifert. In one poem, he immediately combined the first two: “Hynku! Vilém! Jarmilo! / Come and have sex in the silo! / And then on the poplar by the rocks / the leader of Tuzex clapped his hands.”
In the inner Seifert theme, to which the central Czech poet dedicated the entire melodic collection Maminka (“When darkness fell on things / and she still wanted to take the needle, / she didn’t have the strength to thread it. / Her hands fell along her body”), Ptáček tries in just a few verses to similarly express feelings towards one’s own mother. But it comes out to him more like Bond, as a denial of what the Czechs instilled in him. While Egon Bondy elaborated the theme in just two verses (“I spend Sundays and holidays / at the grave of my dear mother”), Ptáček writes: “You sew a long thread / a casserole on the stove / and when I’m bored, / you help willingly. / Thanks .”
The unknown young North Bohemian poet Miroslav Ptáček lived from 1956 to 1987. | Photo: Torst publishing house
It’s art brut. Poetry in the raw. There are frequent erotic motifs or a bit of rural manure in it. But Ptáček gets into basically any topic. He writes how “Two little boys behind the goal / were throwing Tatanka. / How Tatanka was thrown / it soon fell to the boys’ ground”, and then he addresses the relationship of the Czechs to the martyr Hus: “In order to celebrate you / we built a monument to you. / First the heat on the border / and now they’re shitting on your stick. / Pigeons, pigeons, pigeons, / each brags about hitting the other. / So actually, Jen Goose / now you’re talking to people from a pile of dung.”
Miroslav Ptáček is stronger in a shorthand, in a slogan, than when he rhymes in long verses about “his” fifteen aunts, for example – although his poetic joking in places cannot be resisted. It recalls the humor of Emanuel Frynta’s nonsense poetry for eternal children. About one of the aunts, Ptáček says: “The thirteenth lives in Díl / sometimes she whitewashes her apartment / and she brought lice on her head / when she visited Bangladesh.”
Fryntovsky also pedals Ptáčk’s cyclist Novák, who bought a turtleneck: “How are you Novák / doing in the new turtleneck? / ‘It’s not worth talking about, / I’ve already been bitten by a moth…'”
Perhaps it was the pronounced irony, typical of the Czech underground, that attracted both Havel and Lopatka to Ptáček above all. In 1980, Jan Lopatka wrote to Havel that Ptáček’s lyrics and puns reminded him of the capriciousness of the decadent joking allowed by the regime. “Unlike them, however, they lament the compulsive poetic idea to the end, regardless of the unspoken personal censorship barrier,” he said.
The farthest Ptáček went beyond the limit of what was permitted was perhaps only in the poem Ukrutnej pořeb: “I will cut out the goons on the stands from the state / I will shoot a lens at them, games. / And then I will say – dear people, / we were wrong again / and what about Husák and who else / they’ll root for Reagan.” Here the kinship with the sarcasm of Karel Havlíček Borovský, who was held in the talons by a black double-headed eagle in the Tyrolean Elegies, and then again the sarcasm of Egon Bondy: “If my heart beats / I am interested in poetry / If I am young / I like Stalin.”
Jan Lopatka appreciated the diversity of Ptáček’s poems, their wit and “plebeian realistic starting point”. And also playful improvisation – sometimes such that Ptáček’s text gives the impression of a scenario or something open, which can only be improvised in other possible variations.
After all, the young poet Jáchym Topol also decided to complete Ptáček’s verses in the 1980s, when he created the text of one of her most famous songs, Sbohem a četán, for Psí vojáky, his brother Filip’s band. In it, piratedly, without the author’s knowledge, he used parts of three of Ptáček’s poems, added three of his own verses and changed some of Ptáček’s – for example, Topol rewrote “locked mouth” to “unlocked” or “seemed to be a circulation of beer” edited to “seems to be a circulation of beer “.
Ptáček’s texts could even serve as material for literary DJs, who would mix new ones from the most deranged poems. And they would create a new Bird. Purified of literary naivety, yet often so charming. Similar to Jáchym Topol, they would cut out the most figurative verses or the loudest slogans from Ptáček’s poetry, in which the goats of the oil king sing loudly or the thread in the head of a neighbor is torn off, and put them together in new orders.
Miroslav Ptáček with a group of friends, undated. | Photo: Torst publishing house
When Miroslav Ptáček broke away from the rhyme-like style, he absolutely fulfilled the premise of the accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on the operating table. In his verses, we find the bell of a spread, a willing agitator of a confectionary nail under a bridge, in one poem a demolisher comes to scatter the mantles, in another a juggler boos a complex old woman or a Paladin sprinkles the delusions of the clearing.
Here we can already ask ourselves the classic school question, what did the poet mean by this. Maybe just that his verses are sometimes more hoe than lyric. And that their meaning is nonsense.
Miroslav Ptáček: In the realm of dreams, or Miroslav Ptáček’s Lyric, Epic and Hoe
Torst Publishing House 2023, 194 pages, 278 crowns