From Milan Blahynka's commentary to the original LP album 1118 2664"František Branislav - Portrait of a Poet" released by Supraphon in 1980
and now being released digitally for the first time: A work of beauty in its simplicity and simplicity, brave even there, where it sounds the softest, the quietest, the most sing-songy, ...convincing in its chaste spontaneity, unobtrusive, but almost writing itself into the memory of the readers, that is the legacy of Francis Branislav, a poet with ancient Czech musician's blood in his veins and tradition in his heart. Perhaps it is this that has always protected him from the vagaries of literary fashions, from directional one-sidedness and seasonal fluctuations, to the extent that it could sometimes seem as if this poet was working outside the main currents of Czech poetry. After a while, it always turned out that he neither stood out nor lagged behind the development. He went slower than others, but he was always timely at crucial moments in national and literary development: in the distress of the Protectorate and in the heat of the building years...
The portrait of the poet that our album attempts is composed of four sentences in the manner of a corresponding musical composition. The first sentence consists of poems of the author's fascination with the European North. In this Branislav was most conspicuously his own. While Czech poetry regularly turned to the sunny south and, from October 1917, to the Soviet east, Branislav found the landscape of his heart in the land of frozen lakes, northern rivers, skagerrack fishermen and the blue eyes of fisherwomen on the island of Kӓringön. Branislav really got to know Scandinavia thoroughly, translated from Swedish and even wrote a guidebook in Swedish for travelling (1939). However, his love for the north did not prevent him from poetically depicting "a spring evening in ancient Tbilisi", the landing in Moscow and the old Greece.
The second movement is Branislav's love poetry; the poem "The Wedding" is deliberately chosen for its beginning. Branislav's love affection does not flow, he lives love "for eternity". "Love will last" is the key word of Branislav's declaration of love. Yet a poet's song about a woman (and about women when the poet is not just speaking for himself! ) flows seamlessly into a song about the mother. The basic motif of Branislav's love poetry is the ring motif. The poet called one of his collections The Ring for the Journey, but one could call his love poetry all of it.
A third love, besides the European North and women, was music in its myriad forms; hence the third sentence of our portrait. Perhaps it is with this sentence that Branislav may be closest to today's reader. It is certainly closest to the Czech poetry of the seventies, poetry returning to its musical basis, to a melody previously hastily put aside, supposedly unfit for deeper thought.
And finally, the fourth sentence, in which the poet's love gets all his other loves merging, complementing, the sentence about home. It can't be but at the very end, where everything is heading, the knowledge of the North, family happiness and the music of old Czech Sundays. This is what makes Branislav's song about home unmistakable. After all, the poet was thinking of home when he remembered Bedřich Smetana in Goteborg; But Smetana is not only home, it is also music. Although written in four sentences, Branislav's poetry of love's fascination with life is indivisible.
