Abstrakt
Patrick Chamoiseau's (born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, received the Prince Claus Award in 1993) complex novels deal with the imaginary as a reservoir of topics and repeated images, as a variation of metaphors, as an unrest part of his poetic writing. The submitted publication is meant as a comprehensive monograph dealing with Chamoiseau's imaginary.
The text presents and analyzes certain important issues with which Chamoiseau has tried to cope all his life: the imaginary of Creole tales, the imaginary of slavery, the imaginary of nature and ecology. In the novels and tales Biblique des derniers gestes (2002), Un dimanche au cachot (2007), Les neuf consciences du malfini (2009), L'empreinte a Crusoé (2012), Veilles et merveilles créoles.
Contes du pays Martinique (2013), the notion of the imaginary is the central topic of Chamoiseau's work. From the theoretical standpoint, this monograph is also a reading of Ernst Robert Curtius, known for his study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages), and of the model of imaginary represented by the work of Gilbert Durand (Durand, 1996, Champs de l'imaginaire et L'imaginaire, 1997).
The publication also notices Chamoiseau's symbolic images: metaphor of the autonomous representation of the author; of the rebellious slaves; more importantly, the topos of the crossing of the Ocean; then, the images of bird, hummingbird and butterflies which become the personification of the myth of freedom and joy of living. Last but not least, the publication covers the issue of Chamoiseau's uneasy language full of deliberately obscured meanings.
The author of the study has translated many of Chamoiseau's texts into Czech (L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse, Veilles et merveilles créoles. Contes du pays Martinique).
To translate Chamoiseau from Chamoiseau's perspective is to deal with Chamoiseau's experimental poetic language and - first of all - to interpret the recent novels anew.