SMÚTOK JE TELESNÝ (ZOBRAZOVANIE NEVERBÁLNEJ KOMUNIKÁCIE V POÉZII ŠTEFANA STRÁŽAYA)

Štefan Strážay´s poetry is analysed in this paper from the point of view of nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is a subject of growing interest to scholars in many disciplines, also in literary studies. Spanish-Canadian leading scholar Fernando Poyatos, after systematizing the conceptual, terminological and methodological apparatus of this interdisciplinary science, has applied it to the analysis of literary texts of prose fiction and theatre. This paper is inspired by the findings of Poyatos, but tries to go further, testing the applicability of this new discipline to lyrical poetry. The representation of nonverbal communication in lyrical text is usually less explicit than in the other literary genres, but thanks to the realistic nature of Strážay’s poetry it is possible to find some good examples. Due to the mainly visual nature of the poetic image, the paper focuses on the representation of kinesics –and one of its parts, proxemics– in Strážay’s poetry. The texts are selected from his representative books Wormwood, Sister, and 96 Malinovský Street. Particularly interesting are those poems in which there is a communicative interaction between two persons, the most often a man and a woman; one of them can be the lyrical subject, otherwise acting as an observer. The representation of body language in Strážay’s poems is mostly implicit, but it is important as a sign of nonverbal feelings of the characters.