Portraits carnivores / Masožravé portréty – Linhartová Věra (2015)

The bilingual edition makes available to the Czech reader for the first time the French-written prose poetry Carnivorous Portraits (Portraits carnivores, Le Nyctalope, 1982), complemented by the author's own commentary Une langue plurielle (A Plural Language), written in 1988. Carnivorous Portraits consists of three exceptional texts: The Old Woman from the Mountain (La Vielle de la Montagne), Teacher Sagiro (Maître Sagiro), and The Captured Savage (Une barbare captive), which are three episodes of the same story unfolding in a kind of timelessness, elsewhere. The presence, and at the same time the absence, of language that aims for oblivion, for a silence so deep that it can be heard. Věra Linhartová calls these texts a myth of a failed rebellion, which returns in a kind of purifying spiral through renunciation. The reader is literally drawn into a whirlpool of speech. The text brightens as if illuminated by light from elsewhere. What seems to be outside is precisely what shines through it. The immensely pure prose of Carnivorous Portraits, with its tone of absolute necessity, confirms the rare unity of Věra Linhartová's entire work, which addresses the most fundamental experience of our presence in the world. – Published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the F. X. Šalda program of the French Institute in Prague. Věra Linhartová belongs to...