The Wendish Research Exchange - Prunitsch, Christian: Podomk: The Poetic Household of the Late Kito Lorenc

Lětopis Abstract 2019 2: Christian: Podomk: The Poetic Household of the Late Kito Lorenc

Kito Lorenc’s late poetry in „Podomk“ (2010) and „Zymny kut“ (2016) underlines lexically as well as prosodically the vitality and creativity of current Sorbian poetry. Imbued with both melancholy and irony, Lorenc’s Sorbian poems in these two collections largely lack corresponding versions in German, thus demonstrating a tendency to expose the lyrical self and his rather metonymically coined belongings in a poetical universe as clearly defined as richly differentiated. Lorenc’s two last Sorbian-language books masterfully show the autonomy of Sorbian poetry and can be seen as a building block of a project of a bicultural poetics on equal rights with German. Lorenc pursues this goal for instance by exploring the semantical fields of water, river or ocean, allowing him to elaborate on the recurrent motif of the island which is deeply entangled in Sorbian literary history. These symbols and motifs are consequently crafted in strong reliance on rhyme.