THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE POET:
IVAN LAUČIK 1944-2004




















Ivan Laučík , who was born a month before the unsuccessful Slovak National Uprising against the Nazi puppet regime of the wartime Slovak republic and who died in the month that Slovakia joined the European Union, was the least national of poets. To a certain extent he was an exemplar of how the parochial (to steal an idea) evades the limitations of the provincial through a concentration on local particulars. In Laučík's case the parochial furnished a landscape and a prehistory which enabled him to remain true to and refine ideas formed at the beginning of his poetic career.
Laučík may have been forced back on to his local resources, although he does not seem to have regretted a life lived in a small town beneath the High Tatras. The well-worn path for a poet, established between the wars, to Bratislava and perhaps to Prague and a living from editing and publishing was closed to him. In 1963 he was one of the three ' Osamelí bež ci ' (Solitary Runners) with his friends Ivan Štrpka and Peter Repka. They published a manifesto with the title Return of the Angels . Ivan Štrpka writes in his essay Oh Children Smeared with Honey and with Blood "What was fundamental, wholly determining, stimulating, and overriding for us was the radical, unreconciled conflict between sequestration and openness ..... We thought about cultivating perception and sensibility. We invoked strong experiences, sincerity, authenticity, also irony, an open derangement. We said in down to earth fashion that we came from the pure countries of our childhood -- not from a filthy history that they liked to call revolutionary practice." A central metaphor for them was running "... the open poem. It is like solitary running -- the supreme act of the present in the present, an always moving open form that endures until it runs on." Naturally, sentiments such as these could not be disseminated even in the o slightly more liberal conditions of the 1960's. Laučík was able to publish his first two collections of poetry, In Motion within Motion (1968) and We Are Akin at the Beginning (1970). However, official files have long memories and in the period of 'normalisation' following the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia Laučík was unable to publish for almost twenty years. Štrpka eked out a living in Bratislava writing under pseudonyms, Repka departed for Germany and Laučík remained in his birthplace of Liptovský Mikul áš and spent more or less the rest of his life teaching. Not until 1988 did Laučík publish a third collection, On the Threshhold of Audibility . Two further collections followed On a Flight Path (1991) and what he considered to be his masterpiece , Havránok (1998 , a long poem based on the major archaeological site in the Liptov region. At the end of 2003 his collected poems appeared, but contained no poems subsequent to Havránok.
A professional educator as well as a poet Laučík occupied important local political positions after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 becoming a member of the regional parliament in 1990 and the Director of the regional educational board, before returning to his life as a teacher. Unlike Štrpka and Repka there was no post-revolutionary opening of the floodgates of work, which had accumulated in secret over the years, but rather poems containing a distillation of perception and experience. Critics have praised the clarity of his imagery, but at the same time his poetry resists easy interpretation. There are recurring motifs from the Liptov landscape; the mountain of Krivan, ice, snow , glaciers and crevasses, the movement of water. There is a sense of the ecological vulnerability of the earth although this is not a programmatic element in his work. Laučík could cast a compassionate eye , but it was a bird-like gaze able to make out not only the detail of a landscape, but also its magnetic field. ''Alive you've seen magnificent stirrings. / In the cloudiness of evening / the iridium spike of Krivan / has glowed."
Despite being prevented from publishing for many years Laučík was a poet remarkably free from self-pity. He was proud of having written in a poem just before the Warsaw Pact invasion the lines ''I listen to a cricket under the first snow / how he rakes himself out of the white war -- his voice / will only get weaker". Yet he did not dwell on his subsequent years of enforced silence. Later in the same poem he wrote "The burnings have no end I have much to do / not to draw comparisons ... / I rock to and fro from relief / when water washes out their shining dust in Spring."
Despite the parochial elements in his poems Laučík remained true to the early ideals of the Solitary Runners. In his essay Štrpka writes "Simply, a step perishes, the action lasts. You can continue to try. It is open. What lasts without a firm place is writing. Within it every fixed point perishes." Laučík in Havránok wrote ''... a bird / over the snows! Would it could help me / find a path in the trembling fields / where a footprint will not be fixed.''
Ivan Laučík , alas, arrived at a fixed point on 12th May this year at 5:00 a.m. in his study. He died when his work was beginning to appear in substantial form in the major languages of the world, but before he had gained the international acclaim he undoutedly deserved . A number of us also lost a kind and generous friend.
James Sutherland-Smith

References
Cranberry In Ice: Selected Poems of Ivan Laucík translated by Viera and James Sutherland-Smith, 2001 Modry Peter, Canada

''Oh Children Smeared with Honey and with Blood'' Ivan Štrpka translated by James Sutherland-Smith in Writing Europe edited byUrsula Keller and Ilma Rakusa , 2004, CEU Press, Budapest and New York