For a very long time, perhaps until nowadays , the slovak literature has been considered innocent : including that one about love, particularly erotic literature – if there was any.
In 1988 when a young poet T. Lehenova published her erotic poem ‘A little nightmare’ (which was the symbol of phallus), monitoring fingers shook and the part of criticism seemed morally shocked.
Eroticism is common in vernacular/folk rhetoric. It has always, unlike the ‚artistic‘ poetry, spoke its mind. It named things as they went by in life for centuries.
The poem ‚Eva Ave‘ was published in 1942 ‚in five copies writen on Patria type writer and a draft paper‘ and its author remained hiden under the pseudonym Cavaliere senza Nome, which means A Knight without a Name. It was created as the parody of Kostra’s Ave Eva which was published in the same year. Its origin remains somewhere in taverna and its autorship was to be collective. Hence, the famous writers – poets entertained while drinking wine and fabled ‚low‘ version of ‚high‘ poetry about woman and love as it was mediated by Kostra’s Ave Eva.
Poem from Kostra was impulz without a shadow of doubt. However, if you read „the parody“ ‚Eva Ave‘, Kostra gradually disappears and another famous poem, ‚A poet and a woman‘, published a few years before Kostra in 1935, prevails.
* © Cavliere senza Nome - Elán 1942
* Illustrations © Ivan Popovič 2006
special thanks to
Eva A. & Eva A.,
P. Švec & a M. Oravec for camera,
M. Fiľa for photo studio,
Anita Gritch (es) and Maya Harmaňošová (en) for proofreading,
Spaceman M. Oravec for webhosting,
Robo Gonda for technical support,
my family and friends.
I wish nice summer to you.
Oh, what a scream from girl’s throat has got off –
it was as a slight sigh and cry which hurts,
got twinned in a garland of tunes.
Oh, Beethoven must have attended such a school
While writing the most beautiful of his symphonies
and found the key to victorious melody.
And if lord Byron had understood these sounds
he wouldn’t have made verse that advocates only agony
but would have certainly as Verlaine or Baudelaire
Praised just anguish of the moments in which a phallus got stripped
as he passed through Bosporus of vagina, tight and narrow
although ha was a snake – smooth and sleek.
