Back in the 2000s, I lived in Prague, where I did a lot of writing for a magazine called Think Again—sort of the city’s English-language Time Out of that period. Among the books I reviewed was this volume by the dissident musician and poet Pavel Zajíček. I didn’t know him personally, but just learned that he passed away from pneumonia in March of this year. This gave me occasion to re-visit his book, and the review I wrote of it, below.
TIME IS A MID-NIGHT SCREAM by Pavel Z.
Translated from the Czech by Marek Tomin
Twisted Spoon Press
Poet, dreamer, musician, artist, and revolutionary, Pavel Zajíček is one of the undisputable living icons of Czech culture. As a founder of the band DG 307 – its name an allusion to the medical diagnosis for the clinically insane – he became a fixture on the underground Czechoslovak scene in the 1970s and a thorn in the side of the previous regime. Alongside his friends the Plastic People of the Universe, with whom he was arrested in 1976 and sentenced to a year in prison on counts of “state subversion” (a charge the authorities immediately had to back away from after receiving worldwide condemnation), Zajíček was one of the leading figures behind the emergence of the Charter 77 declaration and human rights movement. He was eventually exiled in 1980, living first in Sweden then in New York City, before returning to Prague in the mid-1990s, where he continues making music with DG 307 to this day.
He has also published several volumes of poetry. Twisted Spoon recently published a translation of one of these volumes, Time is a Mid-Night Scream. To be precise, it is a collection of numbered “fragments from the 1990s,” each rarely spanning more than a page, most just a few lines. The book is a speculative journey across a decade that found the exile returning home to a place that had changed beyond measure; the feeling of placelessness lingers throughout, even when specific places are named – they don’t seem to exist outside the universe presented on the page. They are only names, casual reference points for the journeyman made rootless by fate:
he was born in P.
the river the smell of incense
mirrors and candelabras
he was an altar boy
dreaming long
mea culpa mea maxima culpa!
i wrote the tale of 3 cities
a tale of death and silence
a tale of chaos and a tale of celebrations
i burnt the tale i wrote
[…]
New York Praha Paris
It is this sense of placelessness that ties these fragments together. If you had to give this placelessness a name, it would be the alcohol-burned nighttime haze of Bohemia, a faint neon glow emerging somewhere from behind a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. A writer friend of mine recently speculated that it is not us who make decisions; it is the decisions that make us. Reading these lines by Pavel Z., I wonder if he feels the same:
i stood too long
in one place
and expected that something
would change
I also wonder where that place is, and if it can be found on any map.