The Czech writer Milena Štráfeldová, who included this short story in her collection Přepisovačka (Prague, 2001), allowed us to publish it in poet Suzanne Renaud’s mother tongue. Unable to lay eyes on her beloved Grenoble mountains ever again, the Czech engraver Bohuslav Reynek’s wife crafted her poems in French throughout her life in exile.
The moving presence of the woman who wrote Victimae laudes (1939) emerges in this short story, whose tones ring truer than a biography. Renaud, alone on the stage of her life, in the familiar backdrop of the “strange and terrible” events of her time or in the privacy of her thoughts turned towards the country of her childhood, comes back and sits down next to us, in a visitation.
Annick Auzimour
30 June 2013
Milena Štráfeldová
Zde se záhy zšeří – Ici l’obscurité tombe de bonne heure (flipbook)
