THIS SERIES was created in West Bohemia, Czech Rep., Central Europe in September 2020 on the cusp of the pandemic’s second wave. It is a document of its moment – I was in the middle of writing an essay on urban cycling and had just escaped from the city for a few days. The landscape there is peaceful – spectacular, but not bombastically so. There’s no use in counting the passing kilometers and minutes, but instead, horizons. The initiating parameter was me realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape (or even vice versa, it being a relative system). To me, environmental poetics as part of the white cube of a page seems rigid, and it begins to make more sense within the intermediality of movement (cycling is a physical performance for one spectator), within photography and its spatiality and the written word. Keywords for further contemplation: #literaturelandart #dialogicstructures #postromanticism
ONDŘEJ BUDDEUS is a Czech writer, translator from German and Norwegian, poet, organizer, editor, and essayist. He has published several books in a variety of genres including poetry, prose, multimedia experimentation, and literature for children. He is a former editor of the literary journal for contemporary poetry Psí víno where he served as editor-in-chief from 2011 to 2014. From 2017 to 2019, he worked as the head of the Czech Literary Centre. He is currently working at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Photo of Ondřej Buddeus by Tomáš Vodňanský
About the Translator:
TEREZA VEVERKA NOVICKÁ is a Czech California-born literary translator whose translations of Czech and Slovak poets into English, such as Ondřej Buddeus, Sylva Fischerová, Nóra Ružičková, Olga Pek, and Jan Škrob, have appeared in a number of periodicals. Her most recent translations include The Absolute Gravedigger (2016) by Vítězslav Nezval, translated with Stephan Delbos, Aviaries (2019) by Zuzana Brabcová, and the monograph Ludvík Šváb: Tidy Up After I Die (2019).
Further Reading:
Three poems in November 2015 issue
Four poems in June 2013 issue
Poem in September 2012 issue