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0 (hodnocen0 x )

EB

EB

ONLINE

Praha : Karolinum, 2022

1 online zdroj (324 stran)

ISBN 978-80-246-5126-2 (online ; pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-5112-5 (print)

“I love Christmas, that Muslim holiday.”(K. Biebl) In 1926, the communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) travelled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In his texts, poetic and often comic, both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen disorientingly anew, like “mirrors looking at themselves in each other.” On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes the reader on a journey crisscrossing the poet’s life and work, with particular attention to his travel writing and his dreams and memories of travel, as they mirror the book author’s own life experience as a Czech scholar of Indonesia living in island Southeast Asia. Biebl’s poetry and travels are also the book’s point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, the attitudes to colonial/social injustice, and the representation of otherness in Czech literary and visual imagination, beyond Biebl’s times. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, the book moves scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new ground.Jan Mrázek grew up in Czechoslovakia and lives on an island in the Malay Archipelago. He is Associate Professor in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and has published widely on Indonesia, seafaring, and Czech travel writing..

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List of figures // Acknowledgments // Preamble // Part One | The Mirror of time // Parrots and monkeys // The first palm // Where grenades fall, there green palms grow // First Excursion | Parrots on motorcycles: exoticisms of the Czech // avant-garde in the 1920s // Metaphors, dreams, travel // Workers ... Indians’ // Through the train window-Don’t worry, I am not going to Paris // Second Excursion | His head that watches us over the century’s edge: // poetic travels in the nineteenth century // The notebook that he lost somewhere on the ship // With the ship that carries tea and coffee // Half-black, you understand? Here you have to be careful! // New Icarus and the mestiza My Beautiful Arsiti // Again some Malay landscape // The jungle around us // Sailors of all seas unite! // Your longest and most adventurous journey // Again and again man is proving that he has no wings // Part Two I A hundred rose petals, on the // II // no words // Silences // Sounds, smells, tastes // Typography-optic configurations // Photographs, cinema, and the magazine Home and the World // Picture postcards // Snapshots and reflections: poetry | travel | photography | death // Author’s note on translations and sources // Bibliography // Index