Red Flower
Behind the dark window, in a grey pot,
a woolen and spiny cactus glowered.
One morning
a hectic calyx burst from the stalk:
a red flower.
It was our poet—who else had eyes—
who would enjoy a sweet and lovely rose.
His heroic couplet
commended the rose and arrogantly condemned
the red flower.
They are rugged souls who went to dwell
in them hills suffused by spikes and spines.
And what in their chests,
where once blossomed each day and every night
the lost red flower?
Kyjov
Ho, you lad spruced up in alpine boots!
Oh! young girl in pleats of crimson, see!
Fill up your Kyjov with hollering hoots,
and good times in Kyjov shall always be.
Like a swig from the fragrant vine,
like the boiling of my verses;
so burns the blood of Slovaks' veins,
so the flickering tongue rehearses.
Who could beat us, who insult us?
We don't know no master:
we live so frolicsome and joyous,
and drink 'til we fall in the pasture.
The Miner
I dig, I dig beneath the ground.
I dig boulders that shimmer like snake skin.
I dig beneath Ostrava above.
My lamp is blown out, and my hair has fallen
sweaty and matted across my forehead.
Bitterness wells up in my eyes.
The veins in my skull fill with smoke,
and from under my fingernails red blood flows.
I dig, I dig beneath the ground.
Hefting a massive hammer in the pits,
I dig at Salmovec.
I dig at Rychvald and at Petřvald.
While my wife, at Godula, freezes and whimpers
hungry whelps weep in her lap,
and I dig, I dig beneath the ground.
Sparks shoot from the tunnel and my eyes,
as I dig at Dombrová, and at Orlová,
at Poremba and beneath Lazy.
Above me, overhead, the rumble of hooves,
the count riding through the village. His dainty lady,
rosy cheeked and smiling, urges the horses on.
I dig, I wield the pickaxe.
My ashen wife begs at the castle
wanting bread as her own breast is dry of milk.
Such a kind-hearted master,
with a castle made of yellow stone, while
under lock and key Ostravice groans and breaks.
Before the gate two black curs growl.
Why did she go to beg and scrounge at the castle?
Does rye grow in the manor fields for miners' mouths?
I dig at Hrušov and at Michálkovice.
What of my sons, what of my daughters,
when they pull me dead from the pit?
My sons will go on digging and digging,
digging at Karviná, and my daughters—
what fate awaits the daughters of miners?
What if one day I flung this accursed lamp into the pit,
straightened up my crooked neck?
Made a fist of my left hand and strode intently.
Traced an arc from the ground to the sky,
my hammer raised and my eyes a-flash.
There, beneath the sun of god.
from Silesian Songs
Petr Bezruč
translated from the Czech by Jacob A. Bennett
Listen to the poems read in the original Czech by Vendula Linhartova:
In his 1966 selected translations of Petr Bezruč's poetry, to date the most extensive collection in English, Ian Milner explains in a note that "Červený květ" ("Red flower") alludes to a poem by František Ladislav Čelakovský, in which the poet "contrasted the splendour of the rose with the miserable cactus." In a more romantic mode, Karel Hynek Mácha, in a preface to his long poem "Máj" (as translated by Marcela Sulak for Twisted Spoon Press), makes clear that his own poem, in which the rose twice sighs along to a nightingale's love-song, "is intended primarily to celebrate the beauty of nature in May," and facilitates this intention by taking a capital-R Romantic view of "the hills upon which sit the castles of Bezdĕz, Pernštejn, Houska, and in the distance, Roll, pointing East, West, North, and South." Whichever of the two poetic predecessors we take in comparison, it is certain, in any case, that Bezruč does not subscribe so earnestly to this kind of sentimental notion, and that his view of the hills of Silesia, of its castles, mines, and farms, is not so rosy. Instead of anguished lovers seeking love, Bezruč writes of the tension between peasants and landlords, the rustics and city folk, "rugged souls" and their "masters" (and their "dainty ladies"). His view is of a landscape that provides for some, but takes from many.
Petr Bezruč (pen name for Vladimír Vašek, 1867-1958) grew up during a Czech cultural revival near the end of the nineteenth century, when writing in Czech and not German was a stand against Austro-Hungarian imperialism. Specifically, though, his, bailiwick was Silesia, a region now partly in the Czech Republic, partly in Poland, and partly in the German Sudetenland. His themes include the plight of the miners in the region, and the farmers, "simple folk" who struggle under Viennese control (and, not to gloss: there is, as well, a strain of anti-Semitism in his work). These poems are from his collection Slezské Písně (Silesian Songs or Songs of Silesia), the bulk of which he wrote between 1898-1900.
Jacob A. Bennett studied English literature at Wesleyan University (B.A. 2003), and poetry at Goddard College (M.F.A. 2009). He currently teaches courses in composition and literature for the English Department at La Salle University. Many of Bennett's poems and reviews can be found online in the publication archives at ::AntiGloss::.
