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Poetry written by Jidi Majia feels so understandable it is actually not at all simple to understand. It is easily forgotten that understandability does not always equal facileness – at times it can be so uncompromising it becomes almost unbearable. This happens whenever we realise we are addressed too directly, too fatefully, without any decencies or roundabouts. Just as in the age of the oldest artworks, behind which it would seem stands eternity itself, revealing to humans with terrible clarity what they were born into and what they cannot escape.

This reference to antiquity will only be valid on the condition that Jidi Majia is read as a poet of our age, of poems essentially modern. 

It is not out of sheer sentiment that his poetry turns to the traditions of the Nuosu, nor does it seek to add a rarity item to the collections of the world culture literary museum.

It is this high jump across times that Jidi Majia attempts in his poetry, a jump that was the prime cause of creating what in the West is considered modern art. Although today this art is oftentimes considered too complex and incomprehensible, no one can deny it the original ambition to be barbaric, savage, and direct, dismantling everything it thought not alive enough. Which is why it refused to pay any attention to empty rhetorical exercises and preferred to listen to the coarse voice of primal myths. 

I think any truly modern author never ceases to gravitate towards such art even in this day and age. Towards an art that is again simple, unmarked, immediately comprehensible, renewing the undistorted sense of words, sense of shapes, sense of gestures.

This is probably the reason Jidi Majia is unafraid to clutter his poems by worn-out words, feelings named a thousand times, and long-heard stories. He exposes his readers (and translators) to them as if they were to encounter them for the very first time. In so doing he is unexpectedly understandable. The stress must however remain on the word – unexpectedly.

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February 2016 – Afterword to Words of Fire

Photo © Jaromír Typlt
Translated by David Vichnar