Writers' Festival: Finding inspiration in transformation

Róbert Gál writes philosophy, prose, poetry and aphorisms, sometimes a bit of each in the same text.

"Is it necessary to label everything?" he asks. "Writing is either good or not good."

Gál, one of the featured guests at this year's Prague Writers' Festival, began writing seriously at the age of 25, while studying in New York City.

"I like the question of borders and the question of metamorphosis," says Gál, a Bratislava native. "This maybe has some political connotations. I started writing in the 1990s."

Just after the Velvet Revolution, he and a group of friends started a magazine in Bratislava.

"It was something like Respekt," he says of the contemporary Czech-language weekly, "but before Respekt."

Pressure from Slovakia's post-communist regime led by Vladimír Mečiar forced the magazine to "stop publishing after a few months," Gál says, sipping a coffee in Lucerna Café.

After stops in Brno, Jerusalem and Berlin, he has settled in Prague. He writes mostly in his native Slovak, but in recent years has begun experimenting with Czech.

"They have a different melody and a different soul," he says of the two languages.  

Gál says his recent work has been heavily influenced by the American avant-garde composer John Zorn and the Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard, but is quick to add, "I am not writing about reading or listening to music, but my own experience."

Gál's own experience of course includes living and working in the Czech Republic, and he is in fact a Czech citizen. If the tectonic shifts of the early 1990s helped stoke his literary passions, the fire still draws fuel from Gál's contemporary surroundings.  

"Society is still in the process of transformation," he says. "It's a never-ending source of inspiration for an artist."

Gál's latest work is a novel, Agnomia, recently published in Czech, and excerpts of which appear in English translation in the recently published The Return of Kral Majales, Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, An Anthology.

But perhaps his most intriguing work is in the genre of aphorisms, brief but insightful statements that are written in an almost lyrical manner.

George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," is among the genre's better-known examples.

"Aphoristic expression connects philosophy and immediate inspiration," Gál says.

One such aphorism from his collection Signs and Symptoms reads: "Life advice. Though giving ourselves up to one another means devouring one another, go ahead and give yourself to others, but bearing this in mind: Your bottom is yours alone..."

The advent of English - in the past 20 years - as the singular international language has given rise to much debate within literary circles, with many asking whether it dilutes the literary output produced in other languages.  

Gál embraces English-language translations of his own work.

"It's a paradox that the most important thing in writing is the language itself, but the best possibilities are in English," he says. "Everything is translatable. Translation is a form of interpretation, and interpretation is communication."

Works originally written in Slovak can reach a wider audience, Gál says.

"My books are quite difficult," he adds.

Asked what his expectations are for the upcoming Writers' Festival, Gál pauses and then notes that three Nobel Prize winners will be in attendance. He is unsure of what to expect, he says, but is relishing the opportunity to take to the stage.

"I have a showman side. I like to perform," Gál says. "I experience the texts again at each reading."

The poet and novelist Andrei Codrescu has called Gál the "Czech Cioran," a reference to the 20th-century Romanian post-Nietzschean philosopher and essayist Emil Cioran. But that, it seems, falls under the category of labeling, for which Gál has already expressed his distaste.

"It's a great compliment, but I am not the Czech Cioran," he says. "I am Gál."

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com