Poetry
Nedeľa
Not translated into English
Laco Novomeský · 1927
Synopsis
The poet's first collection, in which a restrained, concrete and disillusioned voice speaks of the grey city and the ordinary week, set against the childhood dream of Sunday. The prostitute and the maidservant, the train, the journey and failure recur from poem to poem, and the poet, in a form close to the ballad, takes his place at the side of the humiliated of the great city. From the opening poem, he observes that the boy's song has not changed the face of the world.
Context
The author's first book, published in 1927 with drawings by Mikuláš Galanda, who had drawn the cover of DAV. The collection takes as its motto the first stanza of a poem of 1925, Poézia. According to Michal Habaj, the author has already given up utopia, revolution and illusory love: where the poetry of Ján Smrek rests on an excess of desire, this one rests on an economy of lack, and Stanislav Šmatlák speaks of its restrained sobriety. Habaj places it between the intimate pole of Smrek and the social pole of Poničan. The book was reissued in 1935 with Romboid, in Bratislava and Prague.
Who it is for
A short collection, with concrete and restrained verse, which reads like a series of tableaux of an unremarkable town.
Prizes and reception
The first book of a poet counted among the great voices of Slovak poetic modernism.