The Absolute Gravedigger
Page 1
Vítězslav Nezval
THE ABSOLUTE GRAVEDIGGER
Translated from the Czech by
Stephan Delbos & Tereza Novická
Twisted Spoon Press
Prague
Copyright
Copyright © 1937, 2016 Vítězslav Nezval – Heirs, c/o DILIA
English translation © 2016 Stephan Delbos, Tereza Novická
This edition © 2016 Twisted Spoon Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form, save for the purposes of review, without the written permission of the Publisher.
This translation was made possible by grants from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Contents
A MAN COMPOSING A SELF-PORTRAIT OUT OF OBJECTS
THE WINDMILL
The Fording Horses
The Roofer
The Sunflower
The Reapers
The Grape Harvest
In the Courtyard
The Library
The Dry Goods Shop
The Wayside Inn
The Bowling Alley
THE ABSOLUTE GRAVEDIGGER
The Absolute Gravedigger
The Fetishist
Milking
The Blacksmith
The Plowman
SHADOWPLAYS
Dusk
The Flypaper
The Snare
The Cask
The Tuffet
The Spool
The Anthill
The Gloves
The Lamp
The Swarm
BIZARRE TOWN
DECALCOMANIA
Idol of a Woman
Owl Man
Monkey Man
Waves
After the Cyclone
Magical Evening Landscape
THE IBERIAN FLY
Afterword
Text Notes
About the Author
About the Translators
Colophon
A MAN COMPOSING A SELF-PORTRAIT OUT OF OBJECTS
A man composing a self-portrait out of objects
Walks
And sits
Walks
His coarse skeleton a chair
With moveable legs
A chair accustomed to mechanically measuring paces
Down unforeseen paths
These paths are bold brushstrokes
That intensify
His incomplete self-portrait
And lead
Alongside things
He is part of
In the morning he strolls through a deep sleep
Reluctant to wake
Because
Down
There
Dwell the robust women of his deepest thoughts
They surrender to him
With hips resting against the footboard
As he thinks
In the form of these plastic bodies
That take on
Familiar faces
His obsession
Is stairs
And sometimes takes the form
Of a sloping wall
Or a bowler hat
A fur coat
Is thrown over the back of a plump armchair
He enjoys strolling through the city
At the close of afternoon
Staring at the ground
Staring ahead
He imagines encountering a few of his nocturnal thoughts
He wants to greet them
To place in their hands the blossom of dusk
He turns after them
As if a stubborn reminder
His incomplete self-portrait awaits
The tiniest detail
Without which the whole thing is dead
Now his ear is bugging him
A cricket
Sits in the laundry room droning
The incomprehensible tune
Of a partially deaf eardrum
A great horizontal partial deafness
Composes the poignant flagging sounds of field work
The shepherd’s bell chimes on the horizon
The blades of a windmill are the cricket
One day he fixed his gaze on a false window
In a lovely secluded villa
On the coast
Of a country with a name forever terrifying
A funeral processed from the villa
On the black coffin a white stork cowering
An ugly runt mule hitched to the hand-cart
Carrying off the dead body
He will never know who claimed those last respects
But from that moment
He searched eagerly
For a hat in the shape of a small coffin
Finding one later
In a junk shop window
Sometimes he places it upon his head
To doff it reverently
To fifteen-year-old girls selling watermelons
Who thank him kindly for this gesture and are saddened
They approach him
And take him by the hand
To express their condolences with a quick kiss
Another time on a dusky day
In a street of rain
He bowed his head over a dingy windowsill
His head
A cactus
Covered in spines
Of agonizing thoughts
The more quickly evening came the more certain
He would never find the peace
Of a well-lathed duck egg
The last potato beetle flew from his head
In the form of a seven-spotted tear
A tear jabbed by seven stingers
One time
At the dentist’s
He discovered
Two millstones in his mouth
Grinding the glass eye
Of his cannibal desires
He dared not move his mole-shaped
Tongue
And cringed in fear
Incapable of saying yes or no
When the anesthesia wore off
He glimpsed his head
In ten windows across the street
Spitting
A cloud of quails
That settled on the platform of the stagecoach
He was leaving in
Curiously dismantled
Like a bed being transported
In those days
A bundle of Havana cigars
Bound
By a plain tight high collar
With large points
Formed his throat
Instead of a necktie he would fasten
A tamed swallow
That kept its nest in a perfumery
Where all summer he stored
His typewriter
On his breast
Covered by a linoleum shirt-front
Inlaid with Swiss watches
Slumbered the flaxen head
Of a siren
Whose mythological tail was attached
To his abdomen
And who
At times dreamlike
Raised up like a snake
Searching
For his lips
Covered in cellophane
There were days
Of premature aging
So his hair
Looked
Like white wood shavings
And fell
Under the merciless impact of the plane
Of great self-torment
That never for a moment ceased grinding
His bump-covered scalp
And grated
The head of cabbage
stuffed with pain
Until finally the fingers of slumber
Pushed away that terrible hairbrush
He also suffered from
Troubling mental states
During which he changed
Into two rams
Treacherously butting head against head
And striving
To destroy his every joy
For a while he believed
He was a horse
Condemned by his offspring
To gallop
And crash headfirst into walls
Transform them into tunnels
And flee through them
Past bedrooms
Where people indulged
In blissful sleep
He also took
To dismantling
A very intricate clock
Assembling from its gears
A seahorse
That could represent him before a tribunal
Where he would be tried
By five uniformed men from the funeral home
For his pathological absent-mindedness
Today he is cured of these corporeal phantasmagorias
His
Slightly bowed
Or slightly twisted
Head
Is screwed on straight
Aging
And getting younger
Proportionately
And hardly going gray
A priest walked by the window
It began to rain
And a nuthouse is hurtling down the street
Disguised as a big moving van
Cigars with charming labels
Are better
Than graveside candles
Lightning combing the hair
Of a country girl
Seems to be a necessary evil
That can be confronted
Death
Is almost always
Banal
A fatal convulsive coincidence
Love
A grand art
That must be studied
One’s whole life
Its opposites are phantasmagorias
Gourmet mackerel
Irritating anemic and noble dropsical creatures
That defy with billiard misgivings
The experience of love
Which is the negation of the phantasmagoric
By the very fact
That one has to assume the phantasmagoric
As one assumes
Naked women in cages
Suspended in air shafts
And blackboards
In strawberry groves
Because without these naked women in wire
It is not possible
In the rain
Which has a malignant effect on neurasthenia
For men
To throw themselves in the street
Into women’s arms
The same way that without blackboards
In strawberry groves
It is not possible
For a woman
Feeling an immense need for love
To lift
In the window of a restaurant
Her legs
Into the air
Nor for the man composing a self-portrait out of objects
To fall madly in love
At first sight
With the woman
Who came out
Of the wine bar
Into the courtyard
Where he met her
Purely by chance
And so suddenly
He had to take her hand
Embrace
And passionately kiss her
THE WINDMILL
The Fording Horses
Evening approaches
At the pond
Horses ford
From the whole village
Stable boys
Returning to herd
The horses to the stables
Gaze north
Water splashes
Horses neigh
At glades overgrown with clover
Crickets sit atop their auricles
Vineyards recede on the horizon
The white horse looks like a drying pillow
A woman is fluffing
Crane flies
And mosquitoes
Shrilly say their names
Right by the ears
Of those beautiful heads
Glued to the horizon
Emitting a galloping herd of cows
A child sank down on a basket
Gaze fixed on the silhouettes of those strange creatures
With magical powers
He yawns
The black pond overflows and oozes down the lane
Someone has placed a candle
On a distant plain
But night has already fallen
The Roofer
The roofer is a lightning-lacerated man
On legs of rags
Already
At dawn
Pacing rooftops
His speech blunt
A terse yes mostly
Hair never combed
You would think look a baker
Who bakes roof tiles
His arms mimic a tight-rope walker’s and the flight of dragonflies
The sun his daily doctor
He moves
Hovering
Like a red wasp
Never gets far
Quick to perspire
Reddened sweat
Dewdrops
All day he hands orange envelopes to the sky
The Sunflower
The sunflower
Rain-soaked since noon
Obscures the head of a woman
With a cold compress on her brow
Observing the aphids
She shifts her eyes
To a spot on the opposite wall
Where a frame is affixed
With a glass panel
Two people live there
They never cry
An enormous propeller spins on the horizon
It is a solitary vehicle
Moving farther away
It is a blue-tainted cloud
The evening star on a sunken cliff
Getting ready to rise
Circled by a bird
From somewhere wafts
The odor of an open chapel
The woman dozes
Stovepipe hats begin to glimmer
Evening piles coal
A curl falls into the sleeping woman’s face
The sunflower
Nods its head
Like the woman reminiscing
Her hands strangely rigid
The tower
Suddenly vanished
Vague drone of a dam in the distance
The Reapers
The reapers
Shuffle on their knees through the field
As it dwindles
Ravenously chewing their bread slices
No longer bothering with salt
They bob up and down like men overboard
Grasshoppers dive into milk and beer
Then vanish on the horizon
Where a hare sits up
The field grows bare
Changing into prickly thistles
And glinting granite gneiss and isinglass
The birds have flown off
Everything on the verge of tears
Huge carts haul off bales of straw
A cock crows
And wheels squeak
The landscape changes
Brown pitchers peak from under gladiolas
And confusion seizes the horses
The mills clatter
From afar
As a signal
Like an imminent declaration of war
And suddenly the whole place is holiday empty
The Grape Harvest
From vineyards
At the
end of an autumn day
In procession
Men and women
Broad baskets of grapes on their heads
Women with vines in their hair are mysterious
As their lanterns
Hair coiled into serpents
No one is weary tonight
Lightning flashes
And the cisterns are here somewhere
As is a lady in a red dress
Vintners happy for the harvest
Lift their hip flasks high
Men and women long for one another
The vintners' song billows the maiden’s skirt
Lantern after lantern grows dim
A meteor falls
And beyond the vineyards are faraway towns
Immersed in shadow
Will-o’-the-wisps of pools light up
Rotten stumps of lost paths
Listen to the far-off music
Kisses mimic the ticking of clocks
Only one in a hundred is headed home
The starry night crowns the ceaseless distant grape harvest
In the Courtyard
In the courtyard
An old coach crumpled from ages past
Serves as sanctuary for a black pup
Who catches the scent
Of a nearby funeral
The corpse in the coffin kicks up its feet
And the dog bares its teeth at a polecat
Out back wide rivers flow
And a windmill in a windless late afternoon
Casts its shadow
No sound
The hens tend to their petty needs
Wild geese descend on the villages
The scent of peppermint candy
Betrays cracked shelves
Grass waits
To be trampled
Another mill starts far in the valley
Ghostly flour pours into sacks
And dung glistens in the fields
Wind enchanted in the mill
Someone sings
Owls with craven heads
Sleep in the ancient tower
On the steps a tin liter mug
Of unfinished beer
The people suddenly gone
The clock chimes
The half hour
Much will be stolen
It is Monday
Like somewhere in Italy
In the courtyard swallows roost on a set table