Praise of the Light

From the commentary by Hana Rambousková and Otakar Brůna to the original LP album 1 18 2159"Donát Šajner Chvála světla" released by Supraphon in 1977 and now released digitally for the first time: DONÁT ŠAJNER is undeniably a distinctive personality in contemporary Czech poetry, just as he is a distinctive personality in his own right. "Just not half anything! " is his life's principle, which prefigures everything he does, be it his literary work or his public activity in the Association of Czech Writers, but also his private life. He gives himself to everything fully, concentrated. They know how to discern, appreciate and enjoy. It almost unerringly "traces" the true in the pretended, separates the real from the exaggerated. He's a realist. He walks on solid ground with a firm foot. If he rises up and soars high into the sky in his poetry, then that's when, when she sings about nature, real, omnipotent, but not supernatural with the four seasons. Šajner's poetic image is concrete, the poetic language is comprehensible. He calls natural things by natural names and experiences love only against the background of nature, the South Bohemian one. A native of Soběslav (1914), he has carried all his life that piece of pensive land, with mirrors of ponds in the green frame of reeds, with the smell of water and fish, South Bohemian marshes with carpets of rowan trees. He knows them intimately His southern Bohemianism is also manifested in his love for the rural man, whose life problems are no stranger to him. He lived them himself. THE LIGHT CHAPEL The plate doesn't pick up the scent, dirt roads, the breath of the pond, nestled on the levee, The record does not replicate the atmosphere of hot, smouldering air in a violent summer, nor the restlessness of a son's blood, who's coming home after all these years. The board can't do that. Only the poet can do that with his metaphor, his sigh, his silence and his apostrophe. CHVÁLA SVĚTLA is neither a collection of poems nor a planned new title of Šajner's poetry. Praise of Light is the title of one of the evening performances at the Prague Music Theatre, which later took the form of this album. And there was a twisted table on the stage of the theater, where the narrator sat, with wood as calloused as my mother's hand, and it was a sigh of love, full of contemporary life, where they touch their hands only fleetingly, because they're allowed to, and when they're just touching eyes, how they laugh. There is a light above everything, a trickle of it, his torch, his lightning, its surprising power, just as unexpected, as powerful as human encounters. The record does not capture that longing, nor the longing, nor the sadness for man, but the poet can preserve a source of light through metaphor. It can. We wanted to praise him: Light, poet and love.