Zátišie s chlebom v básni Jána Ondruša Sobota
Still life with bread: Notes on a poem by Ján Ondruš “Sobota [Saturday]”

Summary/Abstract: Early poems of Ján Ondruš (1932 – 2000) published in literary magazines in the late 1950s contain fragments of imagery that can be grasped through the notion of still life and also of what can be thought of as “pre-still-life situations”. Literary still life built from words, lines, and images can also be understood as a staging of an eternally repeating event – a celebration or a feast –, as a renewed vivification of the inanimate nature, a setting in motion of a still image, adding sound to the mute visual artefact or also as a defiance of the chaos, entropy, and transience. The poem “Sobota [Saturday]” (1956) for which the motif of bread is central, offers suitable material for the tackling of the modelling of space in the poetry of Ján Ondruš. In the poet’s staging of the process of baking bread, the event becomes a magnificent secret rite in which elements of fire and earth meet in archetypal and monumental fashion. Moreover, the text can be said to contain a poem in a poem (“Hľaďme, chlieb [Behold, bread]). The result of an ordinary activity of baking bread is presented as an outcome of a magic process. The procedure, in sharp contrast with most poems by the same author that tend to slow down phenomena and events, unwinds in front of the reader as a quick retrospective.

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