The hospital and the poet: God the linguist teaches us to breathe

We have spoken about the poet Ivan Blatný many times on Radio Prague, most
recently when Martin Reiner published his award-winning novel about the
poet in 2014. Blatný had an extraordinary life. At the age of twenty-nine
and already a rising literary star in Czechoslovakia, he took refuge in
Britain, just a few weeks after the communists came to power in February
1948. Not long afterwards he had a complete nervous breakdown and he spent
most of the next four decades in various hospital and psychiatric
institutions in southern England, where he died in 1990. It was while he
was in Saint Clement’s Psychiatric Hospital in Ipswich in the late 1970s
and early 1980s that his poetic career saw a remarkable second flowering,
with the publication of two influential and highly original collections.
The hospital’s link to Ivan Blatný had been all but forgotten in
Britain, but this has changed thanks to the writer Julie Garton. We find
out why in Czech Books as she talks to David Vaughan and the translator Eva
Kalivodová about her award-winning literary essay devoted to Ivan Blatný.