Two Versions of Ján Ondruš´s Poem A Hat of Wine (One Published in a Magazine and the Other in the Debut Book) as an Intersection of Different Types of Poetics

Abstract

By comparing two versions of Ján Ondruš´s poem A Hat of Wine and critically reading the version in his debut book, the paper arrives at the characterstics of the selected piece of writing, which is an intersection of different types of poetics relevant for interpretation of Slovak poetry written in the 1960s in general: sadness, or Baudelairesque „spleen“ and its projection into physical base being lived, a rural genre featuring characteristic details, expressivization and metaphorization of physical gestures, excessiveness of the mental state of the poetic „self“ also suggested through the magic of lunatism, employing surrealist imagery, the author´s individual poetics of fatal returnability and repetitivenss, text enigmatization as a result of abridging the text, the archetypal lyric „nox et solitudo“ situation. At the end of the paper the question that arises is what results from these findings and what it means for the impression of Ján Ondruš´s poetic writing in terms of semantics and values.

Keywords

• lyric
• poetics
• critical reading
• text versions