The City as a 'Miraculous Notebook': Walks in Rome by Milada Součková. Towards an Aesthetics and Poetics of the Poetic Image.
Abstract
In April 1960, Milada Součková left her exile in America on a trip to Rome, a trip that would inspire the poems collected in her fourth book, Alla Romana, published in exile by a Roman publisher (1966). Součková's time in Rome had a special significance for the poet - the poet in exile and the poet of exile - representing not only a return to Europe, but more importantly, a revitalizing return to the world-city of cultural memory.
While the city's architecture plays a leading role in Alla Romana, the city (and Italy as a whole) is also evoked by references to painters (Poussin, Angelika Kauffmann, Bronzino, Canaletto, etc.), direct intertextual quotes (Goethe, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Byron, etc.), and indirect allusions (Ovid, Virgil, Dante, etc.). Součková's 'Roman' poems thus fuse together past and present, real with imagined pictures, and actual sensory experience with aesthetic reflections in mirror-like complementarity.
Sense impressions evoke memories, or set in motion aesthetic reflections and intertextual and intermedial relations, in dialogue with foreign texts and images. The city becomes a kind of 'palimpsest' and a Freudian 'Mystic Writing Pad' (Wunderblock), inscribed with experiences, impressions and memories.
The actual architecture of the city, combined with other traces of past epochs, literary works and paintings, and transfigured into poetic images, is again made legible by an aesthetic staging within the poetic text. This poetic strategy is thematically exemplified by two poems: Torquato Tasso and U Via Appia.