Katarina Kucbelova

- Slovakia -

Katarína Kucbelová (1979) is a Slovak poet and prose writer. She has published five books of poetry and the novella Čepiec (Slovart Publishing House 2019), which was nominated for several literary awards and won the Panta Rhei Awards, the Book of the Year title in the Pravda daily's poll, and the Tatra banka Foundation Award. Polish translation of her book was also shortlisted on Angelus Award.

The first three of her poetry collections, Duals (Drewo a srd 2019), Sport (Ars Poetica 2006), and Little Big City (Ars Poetica 2008), were reissued by Drewo a srd in 2020. Her most recent book, the poetic composition "k bielej" (Skalná ruža, 2022) won Zlatá vlna Award and the Václav Burian Prize and is nominated on Tatra banka Foundation Award. 

Recently she wrote her second prose, novel Blueblindness (Slovart Publishing House 2023). 

Her books, especially the novella Čepiec, have been published in several languages and her poems regularly appear in various foreign anthologies. She worked as a cultural manager, she co-founded the literary prize Anasoft litera and was its director until 2012. She was born in Banská Bystrica and has lived in Bratislava since her studies at the Academy of Performing Arts.

 

Books

2003                Duals (poetry), Drewo a srd
2006                Sport (poetry), Ars Poetica
2008                Little Big City (poetry), Ars Poetica
2013                He knows what he’ll do (poetry), Artforum 
2019                The Bonnet (novel), Slovart
2022               To White (poetry), Skalná ruža
2023               Blueblindness(novel), Slovart

Awards

2019                Pravda, Book of the year: The Bonnet
2020                Tatra Banka Foundation Award: The Bonnet
2020                Panta Rhei Awards: Literary academy award: The Bonnet 
2023               Václava Burian Award: To White
2023               Zlatá Vlna Award: To White 
2023               Angelus shortlist: The Bonnet

Translations, adaptations and reeditions:

2018                Malé veľké mesto, Spanish, Olifante
2020                Duals. Sport. Little Big City., Drewo a Srd
2021                The Bonnet, Czech, Akropolis
2021                The Bonnet, Hungarian, Phoénix Polgári Társulás
2021                The Bonnet, theatre adaptation, Divadlo J. G. Tajovského
2022                The Bonnet, Polish, Ha!rt
2023               The Bonnet, German, Ink Press


A Greenhouse Poem (from the collection: He knows, what he’ll do)

Viliam Nadaskay

 

Detached, anesthetic, and ironic poetics that eschews lyrical subject, drawing largely on postmodern situation of literature and society, played surprisingly crucial role in re-establishment of socially engaged poetry in Slovakia. Katarína has written four collections of poetry, Duály (Duals, 2003), Šport (Sport, 2006), Malé veľké mesto (Little Big City, 2008), and Vie, čo urobí (He knows what he´ll do, 2013). Kucbelová developed style that stemmed from the experimental poetics fully explored in the 1990s.

Her last collection of poems arrives at explicit social engagement, with topics such as xenophobia, sexism, nationalism, intergenerational and interpersonal conflicts, ecology, consumerism, intolerance, institutional violence, destructive collective mentality and at the same time extreme individualism. Let's take as an example a fittingly entitled poem which best demonstrates Kucbelová's voice, her detached and often sardonic tone, and one of her most prevalent motifs of uncontrollable growth: 

 

A Greenhouse Poem

 

flowers do well in that mouldy house

it has the right tropical humidity

 

exotic plants are in bloom all the time

their big poisonous flowers

change colours all of a sudden

 

environments on the huge screen mingle

and fill the house with tropical perfumes and flavours

contrasts are dulled, trust grows, windows mist up

colours have lost their ability to signify

tones cease to exist in the home rapid montage

 

the indoor vegetation rises into the heights and creeps

up the heaps of useless things

like cooking steam

it softens the corners, effaces the contrasts, builds barriers and

unexpected hiding places

to play in

 

a scream of a baboon can be heard from the staircase

in the next room, a liana has flung the lighting to the ground

 

outside, the dry land blends with the grey-brown roughcast

but only for a little less than a second

 

There are several noticeable contrasts and shifts in imagery. The title refers to the well-known greenhouse effect, responsible for rising temperature on Earth's surface; it also refers to a house itself, a home. It is apparent from the wild, colorful imagery and humid, tropical atmosphere that it takes the term greenhouse quite literally[1]. Juxtaposing greenhouse and home is the first example of blurring lines between natural and civilizational environment, between strong sense of control in every aspect of life and complete helplessness in the face of uncontrollable mechanisms of nature. The spaces of the poem shift—from a greenhouse, through a literal (green) house, to virtual reality represented by a “huge screen”, and finally to a bleak vision of the “outside” world.

Let us first consider the poem from the ecocritical point of view, which is very clearly one that Kucbelová herself uses all throughout the book. Consider one of the principles of ecology: “If we can't know everything, if we can't control the effects of our actions, if even the smallest human interference can cause massive natural destruction, then the only way to keep something important is to preserve it” (Campbell 1996: 131). As if in conjunction with modern ecocritical view that removes humans from the center of environmental hierarchy, the poem features no readily discernible subject—it simply relates certain sensual stimuli. Those would normally imply presence of a subject; however, it is not mentioned in any way, creating a detached, impersonal, and somewhat generalized voice.

There is a rather ironic stance towards natural conservation in the poem: the nature, its colors, noise, smells, flavor, and vigorous activity, all that is traditionally seen as noble, worthy, and even untouchable, shifts to a very vivid representation in a “different” reality, possibly on TV. Television, or any such technological medium, thus becomes a means of conservation of stereotypical exotic images, far removed from real experiences of a Slovak (or European and simply Western) citizen. They are in fact too vivid for human senses to handle and lose its meaning—while the outside world is implied to be as barren as roughcast, as if reality flashing through for a second. Such desensitization was far too common in Slovak poetry of the 1990s, signaling retreat to intellectual literary experiment after decades of controlled emotional exaltation. Kucbelová, however, reacts with detachment and loss of senses to wholly different phenomena: excess of stimuli and alternative and augmented realities. Isolation, fear for one's safety and loss of contact with other people, nature, and even reality, are prevalent motifs of the book, often aiming to criticize overly individualistic and egotistical thinking. Hers is in essence criticism of identities, or their lack thereof, superficial identification with emotionally charged nationalist concepts, or substituting personal identity with any one provided by consumerist lifestyle. The analyzed poem sees the “non-subject” with no sense of self, it is a mere “viewer” of the scene, hardly living it and identifying its place within it.

The non-subject passively receives all kinds of stimuli, but does not react to it in any way, not even intellectually. It is subject to nature's conscious influence, taking on the active role and, as if being aware, reshaping the environment and even attempting to play. The language is sterile—apart from “heaps of useless things” and “unexpected hiding places” there is virtually no indication of human, subjective view. The environment is on the one hand dramatically altered as opposed to what is expected of a home, or of nature in European climate, on the other hand the passive stance of the “viewer” implies resignation against the uncontrollable force of nature and at the same time certain fascination with its exotic character. It is presented as a “rapid home montage”, a device usually used to connect and juxtapose unrelated components. This implies loss of unity in favor of discontinuous life and experience—just as the home itself is a montage, an amalgamation of “useless things”, the natural order becomes grotesque, out of joint, dangerous, with the image of a baboon and liana inside the house. But there is one mention of a trait one might call humane (and that humans still share with animals, but not with flora), although described impersonally and rather abruptly: the growing trust. It is not an expression of positive influence—it merely eases the non-subject into numbness.

The poem features a rather apocalyptic vision, flashing for a second through hallucinogenic images that border on simulation. Expansion of nature that overwhelms humankind and forces it into disarray is also a recurring theme in Kucbelová's book. The civilizational conflicts and chaos contrast with individual turmoil that is being numbed. Her poems epitomize the famous quote of Fredric Jameson that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (Jameson 2003). She readily embraces the notion and begins to imagine it in a way that seems to be apolitical. Once more we turn to ecocriticism: “In ecology, the replacement of centers with networks is closely connected to [...] the complicity of the human observer. We can't do anything without causing lots of side effects because everything is connected, nothing is isolated” (Campbell 1996: 132). In this vein, Kucbelová criticizes human activity and attempts to remedy its destructive effects at the same time—the struggle for survival leads to conservation that leads to inactivity, allowing for the roles to reverse and nature to take over. It is not an entirely hopeless vision, but it is certainly not a hopeful one.

 

[1] This is true for English—in Slovak, the original word is “skleník”, which would literally translate as “glass house”. Nevertheless, the connotations of humidity, heat, and enclosed space are still valid, though subtler.

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. All the Trees / VŠETKY STROMY

  2. She Can Scream and Fly / VIE ŠKRIEKAŤ A LIETAŤ

  3. A Greenhouse Poem / SKLENÍKOVÁ BÁSEŇ

  4. They Lived Next to Each Other / ŽILI VEDĽA SEBA

  5. The Forest Sucks Everything In / LES VŠETKO VSIAKNE