A Poet Was Here

Abstract

photo : antonietta kies January–February 2014 • 43 Sylva Fischerová (b. 1963) has published eight volumes of poetry in Czech, and her poems have been translated into numerous languages. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, two books of her stories, Miracle and Passage, have appeared recently as well as a “fictitious travelogue,” Europe Is Like a Thonet Chair, America Is a Right Angle. Stomach of the Soul, a new collection of her poems in translation, is forthcoming from Calypso Editions. In addition to Stomach of the Soul: Selected Poems of Sylva Fischerová (co-translated with the author and A. J. Hauner), Stuart Friebert will publish in 2014 two collections of translations from the German of Kuno Raeber and Karl Krolow as well as Floating Heart, his thirteenth book of poems. This crematory is cockeyed, they’ve built it askew. And those flames in front of it, prodding to contemplation! Mourning guests, standing askew, listening to the words of a song in English – why a daughter doesn’t step forth, that girl with a pigtail, or a family friend, to say: Here, there was a poet, a lamb of God. What he wrote down, is done. What he didn’t, remains for you. So toast the moment, just around the corner there’s a grilled lamb, and beer that covers up nerves, and provokes memories, they sail on it like paper ships on a creek: As we were sitting in that garden pub As he was divorcing and almost died of it What he wrote down, is done. What he didn’t, remains hidden. It’s up to us to find out how to go about it, how poets die. The essence of speech – the unspeakable. The essence of the apparent – the inapparent. And this all cast into the cement of grammar, the five-year plan of sentence, and twaddle – a poet pulls them down in the name of self-love and you-love and you-hush: three dots on which he steps beyond . . . Translation from the Czech By the author with Stuart Friebert A Poet Was Here Sylva Fischerová special section ...