Elegy

Jiří Orten's poetic testament Elegie

The poet Jiří Orten (1919-1941) has addressed many generations of readers with his lyrics. A few weeks before his tragic death in occupied Prague in 1941, he completed a set of nine elegies, a strange poetic testament with which he said goodbye to his life. Orten's Elegies are not an expression of fear or terror of what is to come, although in every verse there is a sadness of the knowledge of the end and the inevitability of the last things of a man, in his case barely twenty-two years old.

Mirek Kovářík encountered Orten's poetry as early as 1963, repeatedly lectured on it, and after more than half a century finally recorded his setting of the Elegies with musical accompaniment by Jiří Pertl. His haunting delivery fulfils Orten's message, in which he transforms the image of Death into the Beauty of Utterance and the consolation that nothing ends, which in every word of these poems is directed to the heart of anyone who feels the need to accept the poet's message. Thus Kovářík is now passing on Orten's "Endless Story" to the audience.