WHITE PICTURE
poems by
Jiří Orten
translated from Czech
by
Lyn Coffin
with
Zdenka Brodska, Eva Eckert, Leda Pugh
Introduction by Edward Hirsch
Published by Night Publishing, Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011, Lyn Coffin
ISBN 978-1-4659-0777-6
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All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is accidental.
To discover other books by Jiri Orten, please go to http://www.nightpublishing.com/ji345iacute-orten.html.
PREFACE
I have been born on this earth for nothing else except to bear witness, tied down by my weight, my heaviness and my lightness.
Jiří Orten
FOREWARD BY EDWARD HIRSCH
Jiří Orten is one of the key Czech poets of the 20th century. He belongs with his brilliant predecessors, František Halas, Vítězslav Nezval and Jaroslav Seifert, and with other great poets from the war-torn precincts of Eastern Europe, such as Miklós Radnoti from Hungary and Zbigniew Herbert from Poland. Thanks to the good offices of Lyn Coffin, his devoted translator, I have been reading his poems for more than twenty-five years now, and I consider him one of the necessary poets from the first half of the century just past. He is a sustaining presence.
Orten is a poet of great intensity-direct, impulsive, unflinching. "The dream I dream is the dream of longing," he declared. There is something plaintive about his work ("Come to help me, words," he called out, "Run to me!") which is wayward and swerves in unpredictable directions. He liked the animism of folklore, the associative method of the Surrealists. He structured his poems using the logic of association and feeling ("My lips are extremely dry today, and yet/It's the blinding dark that sponsors my regret") rather than of calculated thought.
Orten spoke tellingly about both the heaviness and lightness of being. He was influenced by early Pasternak and late Rilke, who gave him license to speak directly to things. The prayerful opening of his Rilkean "Elegy Number Two" is characteristic of Orten's immediacy:
Come back, things, which helped to carry the cross of day, suspended between the breasts of queenly
blue-blooded night, bloodthirsty night.
My paperweights, come back to me again.
It's hard not having you firm and steady,
it's hard to call you without burning one's throat.
From the beginning, Orten trusted his intuitions. He loved poetic spontaneity and did not shrink from his own subjectivity, belonging to a generation of poets who took Czech verse in a more inward direction. These writers (Kamil Bednář, Zdeněk Urbánek, Ivan Blatný) experienced the overthrow of Czechoslovakia, the cataclysm of the Second World War. They distrusted grand ideas and general truths, the all-encompassing ideologies of both the Right and the Left. They read the existentialists and clung to personal truths.
Orten's poetry in particular operates on a decidedly human scale. It is sometimes jubilant, sometimes filled with existential dread, a fearsome angst. It shakes a fist at God, "you bully, who took so much." It loses itself in dreams and memories, voluntary and involuntary. It summons up the mysteries of childhood. It is intimate and presents an inner tenderness-a dream life-confronting a harsh and unforgiving historical world.
Jiří Orten was born Jiří Ohrenstein on August 30, 1919, in Kutná Hora, an ancient small town near Prague. He grew up in an assimilated middle-class Jewish family that would still be recognizable to us today. His father was a businessman, his mother an actress in a local theater. He modeled himself on his older brother, who wrote poetry and became a theatrical director and dramaturge (Ota Ornest), and served in turn as a model for his younger brother, who in turn became a well-known actor after World War One (Zdeněk Ornest). Orten traveled to Paris for an influential month-long visit-his sole trip abroad-and joined a circle of young poets in Prague. He might have become a playwright or an actor as well as a poet-he wrote plays and acted in experimental theater groups as a teenager-if only he had lived into his full maturity.
I wish Orten had followed his older sibling into exile in Great Britain, as he had earlier followed him to Prague, but he decided not to emigrate, perhaps because he was afraid of abandoning and thus being abandoned by his native language; thereafter the door to exile slammed shut. After the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, Jews were no longer allowed to travel, and, like so many others, Orten's fate was sealed. He would become a poet of lamentation, the singer-and the victim-of his tragic predicament.
The noose tightened around Orten's neck during the war. He was expelled from the conservatory and took a series of odd jobs, such as shoveling snow, to make ends meet. He felt betrayed by his lover, deserted by friends, abandoned by God. Lonely and isolated, he continued to write feverishly until the end of his short life. He suspected that he would not survive the war, and predicted his own end. "I am sowing grain on the headland," he declared in "A Small Elegy," a beautiful and nearly unbearable short lyric. "I will not live long."
Orten knew that his life had been slit. He died in a bizarre accident in Prague in the late summer of 1941. He stepped off the curb to buy cigarettes from a local kiosk; a moment later, he was hit and dragged along the street by a speeding German car. Orten was refused admission to a nearby hospital because he was Jewish. Another admitted him, but by then it was too late. He died a few days later. He was twenty-two years old.
White Picture gives us a generous range of Orten's work. It is usefully arranged in chronological order. His own chronology was foreshortened but nonetheless important. He published three books of poems in his lifetime. The first, Reader of Spring (1939), appeared under his own name. The other two, The Journey Toward Frost (1940) and Charlock (1941), were printed under pseudonyms. He also prepared two more collections that were published after his death. I consider his "Elegies," which appeared posthumously, his largest and most enduring achievement.
From 1938, Orten kept a series of diaries in which he copied down all his poems. He also recorded his dreams, premonitions, letters, conversations, daily encounters. He excerpted his reading. He scribbled his thoughts about poetry. He penned aphorisms. He tracked the ups and downs of his stormy relationship with "Vera," the actress Vera Fingerová. He quarreled with himself as well as with others. These rapid-fire diaries-notations of inner and outer experience-were published in three expansive volumes after his death. The poems are the red-hot core of this comprehensive text of life, which show how desperately he wanted to live. "Shall I say what I want, what I really want?" he asked, and then he answered his own question:
I want to live. Who is smiling? I know nothing else, I learned nothing else. If I believe in God, if I believe only in myself, if I believe in crowds, if I believe in death, if I believe in justice, if I believe in poetry, if I do not believe in anything, still I am living. That is life.
Here was a young poet whose faith in life was repeatedly tested. He was sustained by poetry and threw himself headlong into his craft. He was equally gifted at metrical and free-verse poems. Some of his rhyming lyrics aspire to the condition of song, while others grieve in long-lined speech. The poet Lyn Coffin, working with three native speakers (Eva Eckert, Leda Pugh, and Zdenka Brodska), has daringly captured Orten's different modes, the characteristic rhythm and movement-the rhyming action-of his poems, which became harsher and more dissonant over time. She has worked in his spirit and captured his lyrical directness, delivering Orten to us with passionate exactitude, exacting passion. Ota Ornest described her translations as "the poems Jiří would have written if he'd written in English."
Orten greatest influences are Shakespeare's tragedies and the Hebrew Bible. He loved the poetry of the prophets. Three of his most telling poems are "Jeremiah's Lament," "Job's Closing Words," and "Exodus of the Drama." There is a prophetic element in his work, premonitions of death, a sense of the world plummeting to an end. "On his final bed/the poet is resting," he wrote. "His mouth is alive-/the only part of him to completely survive." He then goes on to catalogue the things the poet loved the most, which include aching light and aching dark, aching vanity and aching love, "which continues to sting," aching grief and aching pride, aching freedom, "perhaps the greatest ache that exists." He lists his poverty and his hair, "his long fingers curled in fists," letters from friends, "tearful letters to read during eternity's season," notes from music.
He puts down his poems, his life from which a steady rain of tenderness falls-through soil to the bedrock of home. He puts down a puzzle. No one will ever explain his poem, an aching puzzle that has no solution.
He sings of his world "that he loved" and his death "that provides no answers." Orten was prematurely old, a poet of tragic joy. Because he knew his world was coming to an end, he was always writing his last poem, determined "to sing, to sing until he drops!" ("Lost") As he wrote in his final elegy, a farewell poem:
Now I am walking out of my elegies,
it's hard to tell them goodbye, as hard as if
I were saying goodbye to you, to everything that abandoned me,
but still I can feel, that I am full
of the things that deserted me, nothing's disappeared,
touch me, if you like, and you'll discover
that all kinds of horror and all kinds of joy remain.
Jiří Orten was a poet of fatefulness and spiritual longing, of deep God hunger. He longed for something beyond the human. He was one of the twentieth century's martyrs, a fantastic dreamer, a religious poet of a high order. In the end, he embraced "consciousness of the end, because it's ending." As the poet František Halas wrote about him: "Terribly thirsty for spirit/He grew into the Psalms.”
Edward Hirsch
Translator’s Note:
I love Jiří Orten. I love the convincing, improbable way he zigzags between the tenderly domestic and the searingly abstract. I love his unstable enthusiasm and his irrepressible courage. I love the liberties desperation inspires him to take with his God and his language. In October, 1940, he made a list of all he was not allowed to do…. Fortunately for the world, he was not prohibited from writing poetry.
What is Prohibited
I'm not allowed to leave the house after eight in the
evening.
I'm not allowed to rent an apartment.
I'm not allowed
to move to any section of Prague other than I or V., and that only as
a subletter.
I'm not allowed to go to the movies, to any bar,
coffee shop, restaurant, theater, or for a concert, except for one or
two coffee shops, specifically marked for me.
I'm not allowed to
go to parks or orchards.
I'm not allowed to go to the city
woods.
I'm not allowed to travel outside of Prague.
I'm not
allowed (therefore) to go home, to Kutna Hora, or anywhere else,
except with the express permission of the Gestapo.
I'm not allowed
to ride in the motorcar of a streetcar, only in the last passenger
car, and if this car has a door in the middle, I'm only allowed to
ride in the back half of the car.
I'm not allowed to buy things in
any shop except between 11 am to1 pm and 3 to 5 p.m.
I'm not
allowed to act in the theatre or to do anything else of a public
nature.
I'm not allowed to be a member of any club or
association.
I'm not allowed to attend any sort of school.
I'm
not allowed to socialize with members of the Národní souruzenství,
and they are not allowed to have contact with me, to greet me, to
stop and talk about anything other than is absolutely necessary (as,
for example, shopkeepers when I am buying something, etc.)
27-10-40* (Dates indicate day/month/year)
Jiří Orten, Deniky (further Deniky) Československý spisovatel, Praha, 1958, p. 303-304
I thank and celebrate the extraordinary people who were my co-creators in this book: Ed Hirsch, Zdenka Brodska, Eva Eckert and Leda Pugh.
Lyn Coffin
Some of these poems won first prize in International Poetry Review’s Translation Competition, judged by William Meredith, in the spring of 1980; some of them were published along with Ed Hirsch’s Introduction in The Virginia Quarterly Review, summer 2007; some of them were published online in qaartsiluni, May, 2011. Orten’s Elegies and other of his poems translated by Lyn Coffin with Eva Eckert were published in 1981 by CVU Press.
WHITE PICTURE
About Little Children
About little children cooled by morning dew
little children for whom birds sing yes
how they catch them how each of their smiles is new
we’d sing about all that in our hopelessness
And little children sleep having hidden their fond
eyes like angels who turned to tears— you who talk
of sadness, how will you respond
when they pass by you in their dancing walk
wise little daughters and wise little sons— in white
beds of dreams a game began, in the places
where little children sleep and a ray of moonlight
springing from the heart drifts along their faces
19-03-38
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Jiří Orten, Knihy veršů, (further Knihy veršů) Československý spisovatel,
Praha 1995, p. 16
What’s A Poem
What’s a poem, when done?
Do you want to write one?
to sob over whatnot,
to love someone a lot
Hear that? It’s ticking but
strikes a sorry note
What’s
a poem, when done?
Do you want to write one?
Maybe you’ve
found out
words lie more than not—
God locks mouths but God
can’t give more than you’ve got
What’s
a poem, when done?
Do you want to write one?
7-12-38
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Jiří Orten, Tisíc malých trápeni, Československý spisovatel, Praha, 1985, p. 26 (further referred to as Orten)
Knihy veršů, p. 41
Closed Eyes
for Ivan Blatný
Oh, to tell him I’m lying down
in my tongue-tied way to repeat
that I’m falling as a smile can fall
Lord I haven’t gotten up at all
Oh, to tell him I’m lying down
like the other things that don’t count, to say I’m
falling down like words if I
could tell him I’m lying down
and tiredness is a beautiful fall
The vanity of speech the vanity of a fall
I know an angel with wings that’s why
he always lags behind when I call
the vanity of speech the vanity of a fall
and when I look he’s only a doll
he stands as straight as a forward glance
I peer at him through the slot in my eye
it’s a wonder he stays I’m saying nothing
I know an angel an angel on the wing
Enough Lord now I repent what I said
I forgot how it is with you
but so do my eyes when they’re closed forget
enough Lord now I repent what I said
you’ll forgive me I’ve lived a long time
behind a dead window and the lamps in homes
behind the table one carries on the way
to heaven and small evanescent poems
and behind the love you’ll take away
9-2-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Knihy veršů, p. 21
Lost in Dreams
The curious shards, opaque pieces of glass
through which the past that quickly rises
can look, and see en masse
the distances it despises
like love, they’re ambiguous, true
A second of coolness— they’re overcome
a moment of seeing will cut them through
it whistles in silence and is struck dumb
when he whistles, his hands always hide
in his pockets, he doesn’t want to look back, he’s wary
His suffering is like the carnival ride
that’s you, whose name you have to carry
and even if you picked another
name for yourself, a name’s more than a habit—
your name hid its sister somewhere, it’s a younger brother.
Your name is a little rabbit
and the day at which you’re looking, which you’ve seen
from underneath, when turning inside
out, won’t recall your little queen
Ashamed, she’ll turn away and hide
she’s blushing, ah that’s a treat you had
before when a tender word that was rushing
past hurt her— she looks a little sad
and all the while she’s only blushing
Our curious little shard broke the other day
halving the distance but old houses weren’t made
to be seen, they’re too far away
the houses where you blew your whistle and played
new things are still pushing up to the top, they squeeze
themselves higher and higher getting stronger
like rain which makes such verses as these
wet so you can’t see the poem any longer
Then let rain fall, set floods clawing
the land, let all the drainways clog
until we see dreams gnawing
the whole length of the log!
9-4-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Knihy veršů, p. 23
Whispered
Blood only blood is able to beat to strike the right note
And hands are useless you can tell at a glance
Here’s the cloakroom Please leave your coat
Enter softly As though you were two-legged moss
And look about you the way a shadow looks about
glancing sideways here and there as if by chance
Become the soul of lamps whose light is almost out
And stop on every grave you come across
Music reaches up here through a crack of light
it’s as if we were waiting for a concert to start
And the dead are astonished by the sight
of the green miracle of grass growing on them not to mention
all the grave-bugs making fast
work of everything—the dead whisper to us as if half in
jest—sparkling words are scattered on the vast
silence of the graves’ comprehension
And Oh you that are dead I am also there I too
touch only the blank internal side of things from where
I lie I too give up when confronted with singular despair
Perhaps only the wind that blows on me is new
it alone marks me as different as one of those
That the well of my life is full is true
here’s my cover which You’ve almost managed to close
only it stays slightly askew
2-5-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Orten, p. 39
My Hand is Trembling
When one is in pain, one weeps— but why
help will arrive and then
you’ll be yourself again
what kind of happiness comes from the moisture in one’s eye
ah, well, it’s probably true that only the happy cry
And really you would like to cry sometimes
Rain on the window ledge—that’s the right tone to take,
like how can you bring this day to a close
when you open the window the cold makes you shake
and you don’t know the blessings warmth brings
what is rain for, what does it tell you
Oh, feeling tired is what it means to be warm
and though for the poet the rain is a violin
there’s not much sense in playing
if nobody comes to hear you perform
and somebody’s voice in the silence is saying
it’s time to renounce such things
13-5-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Orten, p. 41
What Longing Knows About
In the interval between life and that
on the bottom of a fishpond a cat with a stone sits still
and slowly swallows the miniscule angels who kill
and that doesn’t come, that always has plenty of time
Can you see that small tomcat? he thinks he’ll return
What they tied around his neck is called a weight
and the moon he liked so much is gazing
into the water and seems to find it amazing
that he can no longer meow at her
because his eyes are turned the other way
And he drinks, drinks slowly as if to make plain
he feels sorry for all the finches he ate, never mind how
for all the gutters on which he ran with the rain
for all the female cats he’s started to forget now
in the interval between life and that
which proceeds as slowly as you go to bed
when the night is over and you yearn
to sleep forever without thought of return
14-6-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Orten, p. 40
Regret
My lips are extremely dry today and yet
It’s the blinding dark that sponsors my regret
(such a sweet regret, such a nice gloom
it’s as if a pretty girl asleep in her room
is smiling and sighing gently and doesn’t know whom
she’ll love when she starts to dream)
And I regret pleasure that lied and could still seem
truthful (but now I feel a slight chill I’m starting to shiver
such is strong young winter’s gift to me
winter who always arrives in the company
of anguish that started many
years ago and grew in the heart of more than one young mother)
Oh, my regret for the unborn is greater than any other
because they never knew the sadness of birth
they weren’t disillusioned, betrayed or forced to hide
they never stumbled on a large chunk of earth
and they flew into heaven without an angel guide
My lips are extremely dry today and yet
it’s the blinding dark that sponsors my regret
21-7-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Orten, p. 28
Parable
You want to befriend lovers in pain
you think whenever you spend
hours asleep or hours awake
that a thousand claws rend
a thousand claws rake
(however many our lives contain)
A rock might feel similarly grim
when hit with a cane non-stop
by a man with no miraculous words—
beaten like the hearts of captured birds
it wouldn’t produce a single drop
of water for someone who asked on a whim
8-8-39
(translated with Leda Pugh)
Knihy veršů, p. 45
A Small Elegy
My friends have left. Far away, my darling is asleep.
Outside, it’s as dark as pitch.
I’m saying words to myself, words that are white
in the lamplight and when I’m half-asleep, I begin
to think about my mother. Autumnal recollection.
Really, under the cover of winter, it’s as if I know
everything- even what my mother is doing now,
She’s at home, in the kitchen. She has a small child’s stove
toward which the wooden rocking horse can trot,
she has a small child’s stove, the sort nobody uses today, but
she basks in its heat. Mother. My little mom.
She sits quietly, hands folded, and thinks about
my father, who died years ago
And then she is skinning fruit for me. I am in
the room. Sitting right next to her. You’ve got to see us,
God, you bully, who took so much. How
dark
it is outside! What was I going to say?
Oh, yes, now I remember.
Because
of all those hours I slept soundly, through calm
nights, because of all the loved ones who are deep
in dreams- Now, when everything’s running short,
I can’t stand being here by myself. The lamplight’s too strong.
I sowed millet on the headland.
I will not live long.
21-9-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Orten, p. 50
Knihy veršů, p. 57
The Last Poem
Darkness stares from everywhere and no one’s here.
Now all is as it was—Suddenly
when I look crookedly around again, it’s clear
my burning heart has turned to freezing me.
I hold my head in my hand. A sob escapes me. Just
the same, no screams escape my throat but, at most, a kind
of shade—the shadow of a past voice like a meadow with a crust
of frost, the shade I was made to unwind.
—Over the hill, the river, the acrid heather, day after day
at first he persevered. Now he’s untricked, forced to understand
in what kind of catacombs his future’s been bricked away.
He longs for a peach like a boy with a peach in his hand.
God, do you know how longing is? how the soul can long
for endless tenderness which all of a sudden burns low
and he’s guilty!
--I am guilty for the nice aroma,
for the vain longing for my father, I know,
for verses, yes, for love that’s lost to me,
for shame, for silence and a land full of those who yearn
to be without pain, for heaven, for God who shortened my days
and gave me a dead paradise in return—
and still! Do you believe me? In places I won’t try to mention,
deep in my wounds, I keep finding a country, a small nation
of little songs to which only winter pays attention—
I ask and ask these songs for information!
24-9-39
(translated with Eva Eckert)
Knihy veršů, p. 183
The Throat of a Song
Look— breath on the window,
you forgot it, you know
When looking at fall, you were
breathing winter.
What did you see?
Smoke, doves flying away,
you were sleepy.
Look— breath on the window,
nobody’s taking it away,
you must miss it,
it’s with me, all alone.
You have to return,
take your breath back,
you have to return,
your eyes are begging,
they want back
the look you gave
to the wings of doves
when you flew away with them
to where smoke is eternal,
to a paradise of rain and dew
15-11-39
(translated with Leda Pugh)
Knihy veršů, p 61
It’s Warm Next to You
It’s warm next to you, that’s where I’d like to be sleeping,
I’d like to sink into dust, then all the plain
nakedness of my body, that impoverished thing,
would be washed away in sorrow’s heavy rain.
To go blind in the light, in the song that keeps fading away!
Already I feel on my palate the velvet fact
of loneliness making me drunk—It has this to say
to hesitation: Don’t worry, get into the act.
To be dead, not to be owned by anyone, daddy,
not to hear shoes stomping, never to think, never
to feel, to be dead, to lie alone, to be
inexpressive, complete, to have what I have forever.