This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you four poems by one of the most widely acclaimed Czech poets of the twentieth century. These poems by Jan Skácel, recipient of the Petrarch Prize for Poetry, rendered in Daniela Kukrechtová’s translation, achieve a stunning potency in their brevity, evoking the beauty of the Moravian landscape that cycles through the seasons and its landscapes. In the short space of the poem, Skácel’s poems revel in the incongruity of his images and often unravel in their conclusions to a surprising revelation.
South Moravia
Let whoever wants to poke about in our blames;
marvelous are the nights on the plains,
when apricots sweeten
and rye hardens in the fields.
When night is tall, when from the night gallows
a man hangs,
by the road he stole
love from someone and he is hanging for theft.
Autumn in the City
Here is a city, squares and houses,
and also girls with chignons on their heads,
in which wind, a mouse, and desire dwell.
And also there is autumn.
And somewhere high above, there is the sun.
Dug in a cloud like a claw in a horse’s heart.
The Smeared
The wind ate snow by fistfuls,
it was strong,
it tossed the lights,
and shadows of houses suddenly started
some sort of asphalt dance.
The wind threw our bodies into the whirl, too,
it changed us into giants,
beautiful smiths,
meanwhile the hedges poured
dampness, the black smell of spring.
Fragile and More Fragile
For the old superstition and for having such smart little ears
for the radar of summer nights under linden trees,
for the ugliness of their own face people
in the old days would nail a bat to the front gate.
With a nail they punctured the thin film of the wings,
the corpse hung there crumpled in the silence
and the pubic horror, smooth like silk,
swished for a long time on the bells’ parachutes.
Why do I carry this tortured picture inside
and why, before I ask to spend a night
in a strange house, do I examine the doorframes
thoroughly and for a long time
looking for nail holes in the wood?
I am only a poet, the radar under linden trees.
I am not to be answered. I ask.
Translated from the Czech by Daniela Kukrechtová
Jan Skácel was a Czech poet who was born in 1922 in the small Moravian village of Vnorovy. He moved to Brno to study and spent the rest of his life there. Between 1957 and 1969, he published several collections and became the editor-in-chief of a monthly journal Welcome, Guest. After the Soviet occupation of 1969, the communist regime prevented him from publishing in Czechoslovakia. Some of his work was published in samizdat and abroad. The loosening of restrictions in the 1980s allowed him to publish several books of older and new poems. Skácel received the Petrarch Prize for Poetry in the spring of 1989; in the fall of the same year, he received the Prize for Central European Literature. Skácel died in the same year, just ten days before the November 1989 revolution that overthrew the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Daniela Kukrechtová is a Czech/US binational. She is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Hollins Critic, Circumference: Poetry in Translation, Plamen Press: Where Words Ignite, and The Sunlight Press. Her nonfiction has appeared in Persephone’s Daughters and Indiana Review. Her scholarly work has been published in the CEA Critic and African American Review where she received the 2011 Joe Weixlmann Award for best essay on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. She holds a PhD from Brandeis University and teaches literature and poetry at Emerson College.
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