The Lesser Histories, page 1
The Lesser Histories
Jan Zábrana
Translation and afterword by Justin Quinn
* * *
KAROLINUM PRESS
Karolinum Press is a publishing department of Charles University
Ovocný trh 560/5, 116 36 Prague 1, Czech Republic
www.karolinum.cz
© Text by Jan Zábrana – heirs, 2022
© Translation by Justin Quinn, 2022
© Afterword by Justin Quinn, 2022
© Photography by Jan Reich – heirs, 2022
Photos of Jan Zábrana courtesy of Torst’s photo archive, 2022
Cover by Jiří Voves
Epub and mobi conversion Stará škola
First English edition
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of the Czech Republic.
This poetry collection was first published in Czech as Stránky z deníku by Československý spisovatel in 1968. In 2020, Host published its comprehensive Jan Zábrana: Básně a povídky; this English translation, however, was started earlier and is based on the edition of Stránky z deníku that appeared in Básně, a collection of three books of Zábrana’s poetry, published by Torst in 1993.
ISBN 978-80-246-4935-1 (epub)
ISBN 978-80-246-4934-4 (pdf)
ISBN 978-80-246-4936-8 (mobi)
ISBN 978-80-246-4933-7
Contents
Part I Summer 1944
Dead Girl Remembered
Splendid Isolation Destroyed
Khlestakov Arrives for Harvest Home, Summer 1945
Evening Trains
Sublet
Prague Fall
For a Dead Girl
Young Ovids Say Farewell
Decembrists
The Petrashevsky Circle as a Living Tradition
Childhood Bureau
Village Circus
Witch Burning I
Witch Burning II
Psalm
Journeyman Years
Part II A Sentimental Journey
Origin
Bio (Short Version)
Barbers
Midnight Monolog
Right-thinking Women
Christmas
A Grass Widower’s Evening in
TV Screen
One Day
Banners of Kings
Village 1955
The Poet V. H. at Fifty
City Life and Country Youth
A Graceful Little Bear
A Zoot Suiter’s History of the Beginning of the End
Short Circuit
Part III Memory’s Three Movements
Technical Progress
A Child Gives a Running Commentary on the Second Half
Here Should Blossom
A Borrowed Book
For Karel Černý
♀
For a Living Woman
‘Years of Youth’
42 Na Poříčí Street
Thirty
Poets, Prophets, Etc.
Jealousy
Ritual
Leave
Towerblock Estate
Black Morning Memory
Part IV Demons
Season Ticket
Aubade
Golden Scalp
Schoolmates
Offertory Affair
Vanity
That One, That I
Pigeons
Summer’s End
Encyclopedia Entry
Tabloid Reader
Ungallant Conversation
Adapted from the Author’s Notes
Zábrana Overheard (Justin Quinn)
Move then with new desires,
For where we used to build and love
Is no man’s land, and only ghosts can live
Between two fires.
Cecil Day Lewis
Poetry without junk is boring.
(Básnictví bez veteše je nuda.)
Vítězslav Nezval
Part I
Summer 1944
The season’s last horse races. They’re off!
The fall, the finish… That day a card
for him from S… A dog howls of
the war, and smells the knacker’s yard.
The Great Dictator on release.
His father honeys the tobacco.
July! A heat that’s full of ice.
Assassinations. Miracles also.
From the butcher shop of Omaha,
the SS Argonauts withdraw.
Sterbe, Erika… sterbe wohl…
The baths. Hay fever. Cyrillics stain
the surface… Now, once more, in vain:
not thus in Russian, not at all.
Dead Girl Remembered
It’s ever closer now, the star
that saw the urnfield culture passing.
Back then it shone down from afar
on the local girl, dead at the crossing.
Innocence shrives the guilt to come:
it chooses and whites out the graves
of people who will leave behind them
nothing – a few stones, scattered staves.
The future simply loses sight
of them – tossed from quick carriages,
raped by drunk uncles, crushed by trains.
There’s just some pubic bones, picked white
in clay, in ditches where dogs piss,
on throughways with the stink of foreskins.
Splendid Isolation Destroyed
Alone. At sea. It seemed to lie on
the waters like a dream that drew you,
an island that was called Jan Mayen.
Europe and war meant nothing to you.
You loved it, wandering up the steps.
White peas go clattering in the bath.
Then Germans from the Eastern steppes –
two lines along the muddy path.
And in the kitchen Georgian girls
horsed round and whipped up ice-cream curls.
The dead draped on a van, a car.
Jan Mayen Island gradually
went floating off, lost in the sea,
and lost among those days of war.
Khlestakov Arrives for Harvest Home,
Summer 1945
Lots of new widows to go round.
They scrubbed until the floors were shiney.
And in the woods a keeper found
a shred of letter: Lieber Heini!
A cousin called: ‘Come on back home!
The cellar!’ Villages stank of spirit.
He jingled in his pocket some
gold teeth (German), and near it,
on the green, music set the mood:
The big shot’s here! His driver’s curse.
Warm greetings, cheers, some honest food,
the national costume (somewhat worse
for wear). All heard him softly soughing:
‘The first free harvest is now in.’
Evening Trains
The evening trains went hooting by
the factories and the fields of wheat.
Harmonicas would lilt and sigh
songs such as ‘Путъ далек лежит’…
in the year of nineteen forty-five,
in that year of first cigarettes,
when farms without a soul alive
gave hope – like red sunsets.
The evening trains made their way fast
to Prague and to new dizziness.
The weekend gone, I jumped a carriage
and left, the landscape rolling past.
Along the line of that express
youth fell away – a head of cabbage.
Sublet
That evening he returned and all
was as he’d left it. The ceiling white…
But something in it now was bright
and empty. He even failed to fall
or trip as usual on the way
inside. Stripped off his clothes. Then aired
the rooms. She was out. His coat shared
the same hook as hers yesterday.
Some books (not his). And smokes. Forsake her?
Her children all gone to their Maker.
And then? He’d nowhere else to go.
The radio next door. No takers
but him, surprised to finally know.
He’d walked long miles through mud and snow.
Prague Fall
The fogs came wandering in and covered
the still warm sleeper in the morning.
Fogs round the chimney, and on its warning
signs the butterflies lit and shivered.
Fair days toward evening, another mart:
tremor of lashes and kohled ridges,
and calls of ‘Such shy partridges!’
that got the dance off to a start.
Like a doctor, the alarm clock on the pulse.
Saturday. The city loud with bells
for weddings. Taxis whipped by wind.
Was itching to get dressed. I saw
the serious drinkers, waiting, raw,
outside the pubs, for their first pint.
For a Dead Girl
The clink of streetcars fades and dies.
Who went into that darkness later
for good, like grief? The perpetrator.
She’d long gone to paradise.
Her mother to this day still plinks
piano keys – ‘Who did for her?’ –
in some big villa. Logs of fir
and oak hauled into its precincts.
Her hair bright cilia: that jaunt
outside the town, alive it flashed,
when love led to her nemesis.
When every day the ‘old world’ crashed
and burned, a world she didn’t want,
that couldn’t have interested her less…
Young Ovids Say Farewell
And autumn again. The women’s limbs
departed here beautifully bronzed,
and just the lifeguard’s fish-hook swims
off from the deck across the pond.
These last few weeks the sound of jazz.
In shops, pink nylons are displayed,
fragrant and flashing, like music played
through parks, like a river through a sluice.
And still these young men hear those strains.
And horses race on Chuchle Downs.
And still the motor drowns them out.
Cologne behind her ears. She pouts
and prinks through these weeks’ aimless drift.
It’s halted by the general draft.
For Jiří Kolář
Decembrists
Like us they dreamed their dreams of pastures new
but had to find a path through rough earthwork.
The Summer Garden was their preferred purlieu,
for its leaf canopies above the Kronverk.
There they took poison beneath the statuary’s lime,
and shadowed by the trees built in a blur
their airy castles – this for the final time
when Nayabur ceded to Dekabur.
Jack-in-the-Box. Strike a match and blow.
As feelings like panaches skyward beat.
You voices in apartments, home you go,
the long way round down dark side-streets.
The empties strewn about – Château Lafite,
and even here and there some Veuve-Clicquot.
The Petrashevsky Circle as a Living Tradition
All goes well for the person who
wishes well… House heat exchanged
for snow, he leaves as after curfew
to meet with friends as they’ve arranged.
Below, shoemakers earn their bread.
The image of the Petrashevskys
is glued and hammered in the head –
betrayed, convicted, sent to freeze.
While in the disciplinary distance
they’ve been forgiven long ago.
They’re still admired for their persistence.
And like a threat to their resistance,
the moon sends moonshine down and snow
to hide the truth of their existence.
Childhood Bureau
If you shed tears for a fine topboot
found moulding in an oubliette,
if castles make you catch your breath,
always hopeless, boding death,
if books like The Volcano’s Crater
scare you more than some dull critter,
if you work childhood like a job,
annoyed each day by its fey charms,
you’ll miss the chickens’ song, its throb
from women’s palms along their arms.
Toward evening delirium could
touch even you… But you feel good
the moment that the ears of corn
from green to gold begin to turn.
Village Circus
And the big old bear is shedding hairs.
The horses spavined, zebras too.
A lad in rags begs at the doors
for honey, herbs or what have you.
Like members rise for love, the tent
goes up beyond the village, new
for those who from all parts descend
when they make out the hullabaloo –
buffoons who beat their belly flitch,
and dogs unmuzzled chase a bitch.
At night it’s full. Some hulking swain
blows on a shining bugle – the pitch
like that of frogs in field and lane,
or the canvas flapping in the rain.
Witch Burning I
The April night… Will the groom come?
Shame as the resined broomsticks thresh
in wheels of flame. And further shame
as on a thread. Shame in the flesh.
Mystery in all. As twilight loomed
the barren spells of magic fled.
And green oh green the clover bloomed,
the purple not yet through it spread.
The girls cleave to the shades of trees,
‘can stay up late, just as they please.’
The small kids run up hangman’s hill.
And thighs of women blazing past.
Firebrands for children! Innocents will
destroy such comely idols best.
Witch Burning II
The chilled-through cruelty still awaits
the first shout, as for a fine silk shawl,
like those old ones for rain like rods.
So flame came whipping from them all.
Like that time, flesh is broiled alive,
the reek still here today – flesh burns,
sweet body’s flesh that can’t survive
the torment, cooled then by lucernes.
They still believe that death shrives sin,
that monks know most about women.
I stood there. Watched the flames retouch
the sky with signs of youth, all new.
And you who I loved oh so much –
who were they burning there but you!
Psalm
A psalm about the ways wind blows,
a psalm of lick-spit bend and scrape,
a psalm for the disappeared, for those
who are ‘shot while trying to escape,’
about how horses, broken, pull,
about how barbed wire like a forest
grew round the house, and that hard pearl
in conscience – the day you felt it first,
a psalm of cruelty in utopians,
sung to pistons’ closings and openings,
a psalm for the silent and their tears,
and owl song drowned by asses’ cheers,
a psalm that maybe from their snare
flies like a bird into the air.
For Bedřich Fučík
Journeyman Years
An unknown town. The hot day done.
As for lodgings, around here none.
On roadsides lie the golden days
of dreams and sweat-soaked tennis shoes,
while June is cradling in itself
July with something like resolve.
Old poems mere shadows of themselves –
they’d like new clothes, oh something else!
But how those poems still go for gold!
And in that summer he recalled
the springtime, full of bright and clear
