How the Romantic Orientation of My Poems Had Been Sealed and Set

 

I. Fifty Years Later from Another Continent

 

A funny thing or—to be

more reverent—it’s fair

now to say, after half

a century—how one

sentence of a mere two

or three small words

set the compass

of my life and poems—

 

it must have been in 1976 or 75

in the history class I enjoyed much

till we came to where our current

world and age began and our book

and what we were made to learn

suddenly became all too shallow

and way too grey and hollow

to my mind and innate taste—

 

II. The Classroom at the Ostrov School on the Hill

And by the Street That Used to Be “Of the May Uprising”

But, after 1989, Was Changed Simply into “May Street”

 

But that, at that moment,

had happened yet

when we, little whelps and ducks,

were sitting in a study

generally assigned to botany

with skeletons and samples

of long-dead animals

and our teacher asked:

 

“Could you tell me, guys,

what the Romantic is,

what means and what it does?”

 

III. A Schoolgirl’s Defining Answer: The Annunciation

 

Admittedly, back then I was,

as we say in Czech,

I was still "unkissed"—

that is,

completely innocent of the matter,

 

and yet, naively ambitious,

I raised my hand, hoping

to concoct something smart

 

but before I was called,

my class-fellow Jitka Železná,

“She of Iron Will Be Praised,”

was picked up first—

 

and so she spoke

those fatal words:

“Something very beautiful.”

A Fable of a Necklace of Luminous Pearls, To Which They Lay a Naturally Rightful Claim / Bajka o náhrdelníku ze zářivých perel, na něž si uplatňují přirozeně oprávněný nárok

 

Inside a shell, whose gleaming heart
Is smoother than
The finest porcelain,
A grain, swallowed out of nowhere,

Torments and chafes
The tender flesh;
And that soft living grace,
Made roughened
By the intruder and its weight,

Spins and weaves
A pearl around it,
With mother-of-pearl
Quietly hardening
Like a drop of dew
Overtaken by the frost.

Thus hidden beauty too
Grows from within—
The everlasting witness of a touch,
And with it,
The small enduring trace
Of an age-old struggle.

 

Bajka o náhrdelníku ze zářivých perel,

na něž si uplatňují přirozeně oprávněný nárok

 

V lastuře, v nitru blyštící

a neskonale hladivé

co nejlepší porcelán,

zrnko zčista jasna pozřené

 

trýzní, jitří choulostivý sval,

a ta jemnost tím vetřelcem

i tíhou svojí zdrsněna

perlu přede si a tká

 

s mlíčím tiše tuhnoucím

jak krůpěj rosám chycená,

když překvapí je mráz.

 

A tak i zevnitř roste ukryt

půvab, již věčný svědek doteku,

a tím i malá stopa odvěkého zápasu.