Staging language: Milca Mayerova and the Czech book Alphabet

"Alphabet" evolves as a series of collagelike juxtapositions, telegraphic formulations, and childhood associations, together with evocations of exotic journeys and modern metropolitan life. Concise and programmatic, it constitutes a manifesto in verse and a badge of affiliation for its author, a newly minted avant-gardist; unlike most members of Devetsil, Nezval had not grown up in Prague and joined the group only in mid-1922, nearly two years after its initial meetings. The seemingly untutored innocence of his authorial voice is a facade for great ambitions, as the penultimate quatrain reveals. Developing an analogy with the biblical hero David, Nezval conjures the legendary deeds to be accomplished when one recognizes the power contained in simple things:

  Y
  Dnes jsi jen hrackou pro deti
  Za strojnich pusek vyrostly pohadky nase
  a prece v davnem stoleti
  zabil prakem David Goliase

  (Today you're just an arm for kids / Machine guns made our tales as
  tots / But in an age as old as pyramids / David killed Goliath with
  a slingshot)

Nezval never declared war on the classic masters of Czech verse, but he certainly saw his schoolboy rhymes as a revolutionary point of departure. The scope of his vision comes through in his manifesto "Poetry," one of the essays collected in Cheating at Whist (Falesny marias, 1925). "[A poem is] a game that suggests new worlds," Nezval wrote, then added in a distinctly Mallarmean vein, "[it] is a game of chance whose stakes are life and death." (9) In an author's statement from October 1926, published as he was readying Alphabet for publication, Nezval defined the rules of this elemental game. The poetic imagination, he claimed, operated by making a "bridge" to juxtapose things that ordinarily do not coexist: "the basis for imagistic thinking is a desire to combine uncombinable things." (10) The "things" in question are real objects or experiences, and the "bridge" is both a metaphor and a tangible connection between fantasy and physical reality. In the same statement, Nezval tellingly explained the mechanism of a child's first perceptions: "We are born like a sensitive emulsion, with particular organic tendencies. We hear our first sound, see the first window, the first flower, the first song, the first smell. The emulsion is imprinted." (11) The words that come later stimulate a prior physical impression, and Nezval's phrase, "The emulsion is imprinted [emulse je popisovana]," with its allusion to photography, suggests the conflation of writing and imagery at an originary level. The world inscribes itself on each of us, and the poet--who can read the signs--then rewrites the world.

Nezval deliberately refrained from organizing his alphabet according to a personal system of correspondences, in the Symbolist tradition. He explicitly distanced himself from Arthur Rimbaud, author of the "Sonnet of Vowels" (1870-71), in which letters were correlated with states of feeling. (12) Nor did Nezval take the path chosen by Paul Valery in a cycle of prose poems begun in 1924, also called Alphabet, most of which remained unknown during Valery's lifetime. (13) Valery classed his poems into sections based on mood and sentiment, and in addition provided them with a doubly layered, overarching progression based on the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. These comparisons underscore by contrast the parameters that Nezval imposed on himself, not only in meter and format but in motivation as well.