Žena v množném čísle

by Vítězslav Nezval

In the summer of 1935, Vítězslav Nezval, already one of the most celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde. Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the paranoiac-critical method).

As the title suggests, Woman in the Plural is an extended poetic meditation on the female form, the images of which Nezval spins zoetrope-like to produce hallucinatory and novel representations of idealized, mythic, and creative feminine power. Part and parcel of the interwar era’s internationalized avant-garde, the collection addresses the social and political instability of the 1930s while also displaying Nezval’s prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres. Alongside the madcap, profound free-verse poetry in couplets, litanies, and stanzas of varying lengths, the volume also includes pages from Nezval’s dream journal, an exuberant set of Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with “a woman like any other.” Never before translated into English, Woman in the Plural is a vibrant, volatile collection, a true tour de force from one of the greatest European artists of the 20th century.

Genres: Poetry, Czech Literature

206 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1936

About the author

One of the most prolific avant-garde Czech writers in the first half of the twentieth century and a co-founder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published in 1936, Woman in the Plural is a collection of surrealist poems and prose by Vítezslav Nezval, a founding member of surrealism in Czechoslovakia, which perhaps is second only to France in its embrace and production of surrealist works in all media. Thus, Woman in the Plural, translated now for the first time in English, is a key contribution to the development of European surrealism.

Fans of surrealism enjoy its effects on readers’ imaginations by juxtaposing concrete words that don’t usually appear together, as in Nezval’s poem “Shopwindows”:

O women the shape of tobacco pipes
Slim robust the gently curving back
Women with the mechanism of the most delicate instruments
With the chattering tongue of a watch
With breasts of magnifying glasses
Poised like pince-nez
With eyes giving the opaque impression of moonstones with the tongue of a baby bottle. . .

Woman in the Plural collects a range of surrealist expression in writing: A play, poetry, automatic writing, and diary entries, many focused on a woman or women in general. The play “The Bird of Doom” is a nonstop, absurdist romp that amount a tour-de-farce exemplum of surrealism. But the poem “Merlin” deviates from the book’s overall devotion to surrealism by being fantasy-based (a musing on King Arthur’s magician, Merlin, who haunts the town squares of contemporary Europe), and much of “Between the Teeth of Days” sounds like a premonition of Alan Ginsberg’s verses (“I see a generation coming that will act on no timetable / But according to the color of the sky / Like I write my poems”).

Highly recommended for devotees of surrealism.

[Colin Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The maestro, the godfather of czech poetic surrealism. Easily my favorite czech poet, with imagination and verses far ahead of his (not very pleasant) time. Especially "Most kolotoče" is a must read, as a poem and as a collection itself.