Bohumil Hrabal (new translation) The Long Sentence....

[Mark Kohut]

OK, Ish,I did go to my local university library
and they had one Hrabal. The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (and other stories),
1975 Dday [Czech 1966]
with a nice intro by a friend and fellow writer Daniel Miritz who describes
meeting him when they were both young and unpublished--Miritz worked
in a publishing company and had to throw away unused proofs and galleys
and one day he met a guy who got them out to the dumpster, said they were
interesting when they chatted, then they met with other unpublished writers
to read and discuss work, reminding me of that group of poets in Bolano's
Savage Detectives except they called themselves Visceral Realists but in
Hrabal's Czechoslovakia they had to push realism out for their style of
surrealism,
or whatever we call it or reminding of any young group of writers such as
the Beats
.......but all of this is just a bonus I throw in because all I wanted
to post was this line from the* author's* intro *Handbook for the
Apprentice Palaverer [nice, yes?] *

"I do not see myself myself as a rosary but as a broken chain of laughter,
the most fragile bead
determines the limits of my prodigal imagination, something in me has been
castrated, something that
both exists here and now and is retreating into the past, so as to be
catapulted arclike into a future
that keeps shrinking away from my hungry lips and eyes, which then makes me
squint
*and look at things with the double vision of the Icelandic limestone,
today is yesterday and*
*the day before yesterday is the day after tomorrow.     [emphasis mine]*

*ICELANDIC SPAR! here, as a metaphor in 1966!  Wonderful. *

PS HRABAL'S friend recounts delightfully how, when he got a bit famous--his
Closely Watched Trains got
made into a movie--his bar buddies stopped talking to him, he claimed,
saying, he listens to all our
stories then goes and writes them and gets rich and we get nothing..."i'm
ruined, Hrabal claimed at the time.

Closely Watched Trains I remember as a warm wonderful movie which I MUST
see again. Now.


On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 7:32 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> as is Prague
>
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 8:38 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> His imagery is astounding,  strange and absurd and beautiful.
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
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