Albert Marenčin

Biography

Marenčin spent his first years in his maternal grandfather’s mill, where all the relatives worked. He was born on 26 July 1922 in Bystré, in eastern Slovakia, into a large patriarchal family; his father had come there to marry into it, from nearby Radvanovce. Four of his father’s brothers and sisters wrote, and his maternal great-uncle Ludwig Hamza led a peasant uprising in the Zemplín region.

He attended school in Nižná Myšľa, then the Šafárik state secondary school in Prešov, graduating in 1940. In Bratislava he first enrolled in medicine, then in law, and finally graduated from the Faculty of Arts of the Slovak University, in Slovak and French. He began writing while still a student: his first radio plays and his first novel date from then. From 1940 he worked with the literary and drama department of Prešov radio, and his play “Záchranná hamovka” (“The Emergency Brake”) was broadcast in 1941 and 1942. In 1944, having finished his studies, he took part in the Slovak National Uprising against the wartime Slovak regime, in the partisan group “Chapayev”. At the start of 1945 he worked in the office of the government plenipotentiary for the liberated territories in Khust. After the war he returned to Košice and became an editor at the daily Národná obroda.

From 1945 to 1948 he studied in Paris on a scholarship, at the Sorbonne, at the École des hautes études politiques and at the film school IDHEC. At the same time he worked as an editor and announcer in the Czechoslovak section of French radio and contributed to the weekly Parallèle 50. From November 1948 he was a member of the Czechoslovak government delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, in the secretariat of the minister Vladimír Clementis.

From 1949 to 1972 he worked at the Czechoslovak state film studio in Bratislava, at Koliba, as a script reader, dramaturge, screenwriter and head of the first creative group. He took part in about forty feature films. Štefan Uher, Stanislav Barabáš, Elo Havetta, Juraj Jakubisko, Dušan Hanák and Eduard Grečner made their debuts under his dramaturgical guidance; the writers Alfonz Bednár, Dominik Tatarka and Alain Robbe-Grillet worked with him. He himself wrote the screenplays for “Zemianska česť” (1957, after a novella by Janko Kalinčiak), “Prerušená pieseň” (1959, a Slovak-Georgian production), “Polnočná omša” (1961, after a play by Peter Karvaš) and “Barnabáš Kos” (1964). The story for “Pieseň o sivom holubovi” (1958, directed by Barabáš) was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. From 1963 he taught at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, where as an associate professor he ran a seminar on modern art.

Another line of work ran alongside. In the 1960s he translated Jarry (“King Ubu”, 1964), Cocteau and Breton, and compiled an anthology of surrealist poetry, “Nečujné blesky” (“Silent Lightnings”, 1968). From 1965 he belonged to the pataphysical movement in Paris, in 1969 he was one of the founders of the journal Analogon, and from 1977 he was a member of the group of Czech and Slovak surrealists. He began making collages at the age of nineteen; he put his position this way: for him a collage “is itself a poem”.

In 1972 he was dismissed from the film studio and from the academy for political reasons and forbidden to publish. Until he retired in 1987 he worked at the Slovak National Gallery: in 1972 he was placed on the organising committee of INSITA, the triennial of naïve art, and later he headed the central register of the collections. In those years he published his prose in samizdat, that is, typed and circulated outside official channels: the satirical stories “Davidovým prakom” (“With David’s Sling”, 1979), a book of conversations with the Košice artist Július Jakoby, “Košický pustovník” (“The Hermit of Košice”, 1983, published 1988), and the essay collections “Nikdy” (“Never”) and “Návraty na Muráň” (“Returns to Muráň”).

His solo exhibitions of collages began in 1965: Prague, Bratislava, Piešťany, Budapest, Strasbourg, Silkeborg, then ten galleries in Slovakia in 1997–1999. In 2013, in Banská Štiavnica, and in 2016, in Bordeaux, the project “Thirteen to the Dozen” was shown. Among his books published after 1989 are “Okamih pravdy” (“The Moment of Truth”, 1994), the memoir “Čo nevošlo do dejín” (“What Did Not Enter History”, 2012) and the text “Dezertéri alebo ľudský faktor” (“Deserters, or the Human Factor”, 2008) about the first days of the uprising. He translated Camus, Michaux, Ionesco, Breton (“Nadja”), Derrida and Aimé Césaire.

Among his honours are the French Order of Arts and Letters (1993), the Pribina Cross, First Class (2002), an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Performing Arts (2003), the Sun in a Net award (2010) and the Zora Jesenská Prize for translation (2011). He died on 9 March 2019 in Bratislava.