Telo, materstvo, trauma, príroda – o poézii Márie Jančovej
Body, motherhood, trauma, nature – on the poetry of Mária Jančová

Summary/Abstract: Mária Jančová (1908 – 2003) has been primarily known as the author of children’s books. This paper, however, aims to focus on her – largely overlooked – poetry. After an initial mapping of the theme of motherhood in Slovak women poets from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the article takes a look at the phase of Jančová’s writing career when she authored poems. Some of these were published in her only collection of poetry, Blahoslavení ([Blessed] 1940, 1968). The article provides a close reading of several poems and comments on the flowing of energy between the movements of the body (external movements and internal processes) and nature, with reference to the notion of “lyrical gestures” as defined by the French literary scholar Dominique Rabaté. It also discusses the image of the bodily connection between the mother and her sick little son and the transmigration of the human element into meteorological phenomena and flowers. The poet’s inclination towards the country life connected to the elements and rhythms of life (in this collection) or her confessional-referential poetry of sentiment (present in other poems) may resonate with contemporary readers or inspire theory of the lyric. The essay’s theoretical framework is based on the conceptualisation of motherhood in literary studies, philosophy, and art theory, and on theories that connect aesthetics with bodily processes.

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