Maša Haľamová

We hold Maša Haľamová dear for another reason, too. Her view of things is not an exaggerated sentimentality. From every word there shines pain triumphed over, reconciliation, a heroism of faith, a child-like fidelity to life and its distress. She was accused of being in thrall to Wolker. It is true that Maša Haľamová was fond of Wolker, but she never expressed an experience other than her own. Her verse is completely her own and it is rooted through its content in her nature and her life. It has a universal value and can be read as easily by a child as an adult. In her tendency to avoid being too artificial Maša Haľamová didn't even employ rhyme so that her verse would not sound too brief, and yet these quietly intoned moods and declarations with incidental rhyme sound sweet.

What is important is not how many books a poet wrote, but what he said in them and with what art he expressed it. Thus we willingly forgo quantity and reach instead for slim volumes where - as Ivan Krasko said - "every word has blood drying on it". Maša Haľamová is one such poet. The extent of her work is balanced by the intensity of experience, the ability of concentration only on the questions and events that she felt and experienced internally. This is probably why her work did not expand and did not take more thematic directions. Although the poetry of Maša Haľamová is existentially bound to her human and artistic subject and draws mainly on her own emotional sources it would not be correct to limit the core of her meaning and art to this subjective sense of the word. The world of Maša Haľamova's poetic work is also the world of many other people and in spite of its unequivocal personal tone it has objective validity. Haľamová knows very well that poetry should neither teach nor moralise. But it can accompany a person as the voice of his conscience and refine his senses for the perception of things, which he had long forgotten amid his daily mechanised life, or whose victim he has become.

The poetry of this author went so much its own way, so much out of the way of changing literary tastes and so independent from them that their enumeration and characteristics in fact loses any significance (perhaps with the exception of certain faint echoes of proletarian poetry and the poetist movement). With the decisive part of its existence her work lived and lives outside the cockfighting guard of literary manifestos. Just as its author lived alone for decades far from the milieu and bustle of littérateurs, and even of civilisation. And yet the readers' demand for new editions of her work has always come according to some star clock slowly and regularly like Spring in the Tatras. So what do I wish to speak about? About an exciting secret, about the profound treacherousness of her so-called simplicity. About the fact that we shall need much more information in order to at least properly survey what we today call simplicity, let alone to comprehend its secret. So far, it has been the poet rather than the scholar who has intuited the depths of simplicity, its immensely complex connection to things as yet unspoken. It was a poet who said that if man needs something above all, it is wisdom of this kind, although complexity is understood more readily than simplicity (as he added with a trace of irony). That simplicity, which is an unmediated expression, the sound of being itself, something which isn't dependent on complex interconnections of human brain cells because the message has already occurred in the body, even the body of one's ancestors.

 

Maša Haľamová did not achieve the miraculous simplicity and ordinariness of her words easily. Modest, seemingly at the edge of literary and life events, she shone without experiment and bohemianism, without any visible inclination towards any art movement. Her defence was only the sincerity with which she spoke about unhealed wounds, the unfalsified emotional experience of a girl's heart and the later maturity of an experienced woman and human being: "I'll not reach / the end of a distance / which grows in the heart".