Danilo Kis article by Irish author Paul R. Hyde. Danilo Kis: Garden Ashes. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

Danilo Kiš

"Do not believe in statistics, figures or public statements: reality is what the naked eye cannot see." Danilo Kis.

"Kis is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century ... Danilo Kis preserves the honor of literature..." Susan Sontag.

Kiš's Garden, Ashes is a minor masterpiece à la Schulz, of mad fathers and madder undertakings which defy sense and logic but which are introverted and parabolic metaphors of the intricate mechanism of consciousness and yes, of that other trick - existence. Originally published in 1965, Garden, Ashes opens with an elaborate evocation of an old tray which is yet an object of lost beauty held in the fragile web of memory redolent of all the days and worlds that have perished. Like Rembrandt, Kiš was able to reveal the latent beauty of the ordinary by the miracle of artistic transubstantiation so that a mere kitchen artefact becomes an enchantment of the spirit. Kiš's prose is therefore true poetry where the term means póesis - a creative making.

But here is Kiš on the insane stirrings of poetry in his own eleven-year-old soul: "One autumn evening ... one ordinary autumn evening when I was eleven years old, without any preparation, without any prior announcement, without any portents in the heavens, Euterpe - muse of lyric poetry - made her astonishingly simple entrance into our house. That was the only big event of the season ... I was ... desperately determined to sleep through the autumn tedium and to overcome hunger by stoic mediation on the future, on love ... I blinked my eyes shut ... Under the eyelids the heavens opened up for just an instant, the fanfares started up, and I caught sight of bare-bottomed cherubs fluttering about the bright reddish focus of paradise ... A marvellous, all-embracing rhythm quivered inside me, and the words came out of my mouth as if I were a medium ... Not until the first wave of feverish excitement had passed, did I allow myself to decipher their meaning. Under the billowing surface of the music and rhythm, I discovered words that were quite ordinary ... I beg the reader to take note of the elements they contain, the components from which they evolved, which may prove that they had truly existed in some former time. Here you are: this lyrical and fantastical ballad, this authentic masterwork of inspiration consisted of the following words arranged in an ideal and unrepeatable sequence: coral reef, eternity, and leaf. Plus a totally incomprehensible and enigmatic word: plumaseria.

Panic stricken, I sat hunched on the chest for a while longer and then told my mother, in a voice cracking with excitement: "I have written a poem." *

From the larvae of those five ordinary words in their ideal sequence there later evolved a handful of extraordinary books rich in incandescent colour and emotion. Upon his death in 1989, Danilo Kiš joined the ranks of both The Good & The Dead.

*(Text abridged from Garden, Ashes translated by William J. Hannaher, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY 1975)

Further reading:

The Prose Fiction of Danilo Kis by Ivana Vuletic. Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.