features

The body is running down

The body is running down, drum beats
behind a dozen curtains
the clash of shield on shield
from time to time even lancers appear

I don't keep a look out for heavily-pleated robes

Mounted messengers, porters, gate-keepers?
Why this urgent rhythm?
Why this dull thudding?
Why this desertion
from rabbit-hutch to a passage
wide enough for a team of four?

Little hope of answers
but the spirit is defiant

(2003)



From Pre-Departure

And this is the time of utter solitude. The lava is cold, new night devoid of dream.

Beneath the window, the chanting herd is on the march. A threatening sign of autumn! Heads filled with barbed wire are swaying, there's no need for them, the idea is turning into a place for monsters. (The old woman in the fairy-tale, with her cane and bent back, is collecting leaves into a balloon-like basket; at noon she flies off and the colour of the sky didn't find a more peaceful hue. At the edge of the impressionistic forest were left a number of bulky sacks reeking of decay and lime.)

It's lunchtime and suddenly I know: it wasn't a night without a dream. The dream was called "Theatre of Pus", and was long and simple. It's my first encounter with these symbols:

"A friend (I can't say which one, perhaps rather: all of them in one person) stands on the dais and displays his innumerable suppurating wounds. With utter cynicism, he tears off the filthy bandages and bloody scabs. The pus runs. Smiling, he squeezes a big ulcer on his chest. We're fascinated and await something frightful."

It seems a lot of shouting is building up right now, which wants to promote a new ox-cart. "It's the year 1943. Take yourselves off in droves to Switzerland! Don't forget your poems and your paintings! The folding harmonium! Take an active part in the building of new DADA! Long live tragic Dadaism! The year 1943 is for its founder! Long live the year 1943! We cheer civilization, whose sole unrecognized peak we are! The vital sensation named tragic dada grows from day to day! To a man, we'll all be there on the big evening of tragic dadaism, when new theory and practice will be clarified! Knight-bearers of the chivalrous cross have vowed to take part! Long live the year 1943! Long live new tragic dada!" Yes, it was right now that the floodgates opened, the girl with the blond hair eventually came and it wasn't difficult to leave this fractured scene barely taking shape from the glowing core. Even if this didn't become a mere farewell gesture, even if there was need to cross over frost-bound ground, the password of tragic dadaism, overheard from an uncertain distance, from a dream, from loneliness, from longing or disillusion, it did enable me to blow up this awkward bridge. (And at that moment the dynamite is already in place on one's chest.) Goodbye, my three blue days that stick out in my mind, I'm going to seek softer and more erotic hues, more luminous shades ...

(7-31.10.1943)                                                      (Napospas (1999))



Thoughts up the chimney

... Surveyor K. and confidential clerk Josef K., whether we like or not, gc with a gang of assistants like variants of Hamlet in this century and ask irritating questions without even pressing for a firm reply. And we need only repeat, with the salesman, what was said to confidential clerk Josef K.: "Youi trial is six months old, isn't it? Yes, I've heard about it. It's still early days!"

What would happen to a person if he wouldn't fight his nation whose language he was given to speak, and who wouldn't swear at it and seek to shed its skin. Everyone probably says to himself: "What if I were born, for instance, an Eskimo or a Patagonian, I wonder what it would be like?" Fantasy goes full stretch. And nostalgia too and profound sadness and woes, because cries are such as to be already supra-national.

But we also have the taste for mocking, a longing to do grotesque things, a desire to play the fool or do something crazy, who knows how it all fits in, we have the taste for mixing trivia with a tongue-lashing, a longing to shock, a desire to entertain, even to scare, who knows how it fits in ...

(1965)
(Napospas)



At the end of summer

I come across a tortoise
Cold sandy
Darkness

I see the horizon
A spider's thread couch-grass a hair

I hear a thin menacing whistling
Razor dagger knife

Does the tortoise see the horizon?
Does the tortoise hear a menacing whistling?

Sand shifts
Spiders weave
Couch-grass rustles

Hair, knife?

I hear autumn
The tortoise senses the darkness

(1968)



Winter solstice

They asked the morello
when it most felt the cold,
to which it replied:
"On the night of the solstice."

They asked the rose
what crushed its root,
and it whispered:
"The day before Adam and Eve."

They asked the wolf
when the winter was at its hardest,
and it said:
"When the sun is born."

(1979)



Translated by Ian Hilton