On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle

Postcolonial reflections on Indonesias influence upon the avant-garde poetry of a non-colonial European. In 1926, the Communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (18981951) traveled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In the writings from his journaltexts simultaneously poetic and comicboth landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen in disorienting new perspectives, like mirrors looking at themselves in each other. Jan Mrzeks On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes us on a journey of our own, crisscrossing Biebls life and workwith particular attention to his travel writingas they mirror Mrzeks own experiences as a multinational academic: a Prague conservatory graduate, educated at Michigan and Cornell, and now a scholar of Indonesia living in Singapore. Biebls writings are also the books point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, issues of colonial and social injustice, and the representation of otherness in the Czech literary and visual imagination. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, Mrzeks book elevates scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new level.