On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry

Description

Postcolonial reflections on Indonesia's influence upon the avant-garde poetry of a non-colonial European. In 1926, the Communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898-1951) traveled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In the writings from his journal--texts simultaneously poetic and comic--both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen in disorienting new perspectives, like "mirrors looking at themselves in each other." ​ Jan Mrázek's On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes us on a journey of our own, crisscrossing Biebl's life and work--with particular attention to his travel writing--as they mirror Mrázek's own experiences as a multinational academic: a Prague conservatory graduate, educated at Michigan and Cornell, and now a scholar of Indonesia living in Singapore. Biebl's writings are also the book's point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, issues of colonial and social injustice, and the representation of otherness in the Czech literary and visual imagination. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, Mrázek's book elevates scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new level. Cover Table of contents List of figures Acknowledgments Preamble Part One | The mirror of time Parrots and monkeys The first palm Where grenades fall, there green palms grow First Excursion | Parrots on motorcycles: exoticisms of the Czech avant-garde in the 1920s Metaphors, dreams, travel Workers . . . Indians! Through the train window—Don’t worry, I am not going to Paris Second Excursion | His head that watches us over the century’s edge: poetic travels in the nineteenth century The notebook that he lost somewhere on the ship With the ship that carries tea and coffee Half-black, you understand? Here you have to be careful! New Icarus and the mestiza My Beautiful Arsiti Again some Malay landscape The jungle around us Sailors of all seas unite! Your longest and most adventurous journey Again and again man is proving that he has no wings Part Two | A hundred rose petals, on them no words Silences Sounds, smells, tastes Typography—optic configurations Photographs, cinema, and the magazine Home and the World Picture postcards Snapshots and reflections: poetry | travel | photography | death Author’s note on translations and sources Bibliography Index