Who used kerosene spurting from small tin cans
To baptize their hairless children
Tied with pink ribbon
To copper crosses suspended from their alabaster necks
The generals' medals were smeared with honey
Swarming with ants
In their mounds buried
The husbands of these bigoted flagellants
Who dug through the anthill with calloused hands
And lit dynamite
Blowing up their limbs maimed in the anthill shafts
Spewing needles
That formed long monstrous mustaches under their noses
On the other generals' medals
Machines
And strapping athletic lads
Jumped into them as if swimming pools
Their limbs propelled by cogwheels
Transforming them into rubber
And into ship's ropes
Quickly coiling
Into their wonderfully sturdy rib cages
The edge of the Iberian fly's left wing was lined with wire barriers
Spiked with
The swelling heads
Of bulldogs
From whose mouths
Peered bullet-ridden helmets
Bent over the cut glass of binoculars
There were also
A great many burning haystacks
Where horribly bloated in the heat
And gnawing into beggar's bags lice
With prickly claws multiplied the wire hedge
Its innumerable retractable legs touching
The generals' medals and the big gilded cross
As it crawled along the left wing of the Iberian fly
A poisonous caterpillar
On whose soft back
On putrefied horses
Cavalrymen lay clad in bloodstained pants
And dug into the soft meat
A deep trench protected by caterpillar hairs
This entire wing
Blindingly dazzling
And iridescent
Tried
Set sidelong on the vertical rays
Of red dusk
Like a landing airplane
To change
Its ornamental inlay
Into a deceptive image
That would appear alluring
So
In place of the cross
The all-powerful illusion created
In the terrain of fine ash
Two wide
Intersecting
Golden rivers
In those rivers
Chaste girls' bodies
Borrowed from the paintings of old Italian masters
Measured their elegance
With the rhythmic ebb and flow of waves
Whose curves formed
A multitude of gigantic spiny shells
While on the napes
Of racing water nymphs
In carefully hollowed seashells
Chubby children were kissing
Lifting their pink heels like cherubim
To the lips of their plump mothers lounging in an afternoon bath
Instead of generals' medals
Glittering on the deceptive image
Of the left wing of the Iberian fly
Were round shields of Achilles
Depicting gigantic forefathers
Standing victorious with legs astride
Fattened herds
Of fleas hitched to baby strollers
Doing field work
Carrying timber
And building Renaissance palaces for these demigods
Who gazed upon them while playing the flute
Other generals' medals
Falsely represented
The flexibility of adolescent lads
Coiled up
Into elastic wheels
And hurtling
Against immense mounds
Their peaks adorned with stars
Transformed into silver machines
That cast
From above
Into the valley
Thousands of chairs hats and vases
The deceptive outline
Of the left wing of the Iberian fly
Represented the tattered lace
Of a magnificent petticoat
That hid fifteen-year-old romantics reading
Cards
Their content mainly
Tender familial love
And who simultaneously unraveled the braids
Of their slyly posing sisters
Who tamed on their virginal breasts
Snuggly sunbathing potato beetles
Instead of the caterpillar
Overarching the individual parts of this deceptive image
A rainbow
Covered
In beefsteaks
Garnished
With an egg
A Christmas tree
Thrust into its center
Golden needles
Falling
Like snowflakes
On this entire deceptive image
The right wing of the Iberian fly
Was outstretched
Across from the left wing
Processions
Treading over it
Observing
A single
Grandiose auto-da-fé
The center of this auto-da-fé
Formed
A spacious roasting pan
Sizzling with lard
Where
People on breaking wheels
Erected on a terraced balustrade
Watched
The deadlocked struggle
Between
A man with a tiara
And a bull
This man
Armored in asbestos
Hypnotized the bull
Which waded through
The sizzling lard
And stiffened with horror
Shifting
Its bloodshot eyes
From
The master
Of illusion
To the bulging eyes
Of the tortured heretics
With stars of pitch
Falling on their faces
From the artificially constructed starry night
Yet these spectators
With limbs braided into electric-powered wheels
Displayed a cynical insensitivity to their own pain
And writhed
With pleasure
At the sight
Of the wheezing bull
Its harpoon-pierced body
A beaming sun
As their pleasure climaxed at the sight of the animal
With aching eyes
The great toreador
Threw
Wild bees
Nettled by torches into
Approaching
The people being tortured
A little man with a Chaplin mustache
Tore
With red-hot pliers
From their shaved skulls
Burnt skin
Until these martyrs
Devastated
The moment
The bull fell
To the bottom of the roasting pan
In frenzied delight
Died
Garnering
The crowd's applause
Which released
Rockets resembling peacock feathers
This image
Despite all the efforts of the Iberian fly
Starved by half-sleep
To subject it to appropriate revision
Was impossible
In any way
To alter its allegorical panel
Gazed upon
By beguiling bathing women
As if a historical film
And genuine
Ladies of Sorrows
Writhing in the embrace of maggots
Baptizing
Their children before a gilded cross
As the archetype
For the infernal vestibule
That is
Merely the gateway
To social hell
Whose blinding reflection
Glittered
At the end of the Iberian fly's proboscis
This proboscis
Was gradually
Immersed
Into several drops of blood
Squeezed out
Of different races
And subjected these drops
To analytical chicanery
Whose fraudulent result manifested
As diagrams
Once these drops
Of blood
Hardened into a crust resembling sealing wax
As the drop
Of drying Aryan blood
Turned into a faux jewel
Spectrally depicting
Absolute nobility
In the form
Of Ionic columns
Under which reflected in miniature
The beguiling image of bathing women
On the sparkling left wing of the Iberian fly
The other drops
Drying
Transformed
Under the touch of the dirty finger
Of the little man with the Chaplin mustache
Into this pictorial relief
Two halves of a nose
Typically Oriental
Placed together
Loosely
Like two halves of a sliced bread roll
Forming
A sandwich
Covered
The mummified body
Of a translucent angel
Of pure Nordic race
That trumpeted
The way to the glade
Of ideal Nibelungs
Under this nose
Were fastened
Two Negro lips
Formed
From two blutwursts
Stuffed
With barley
And covered
By a tumor
While in the teeth
Resembling a rickety spine
And bared
Between these Negro lips
Writhed
A Bavarian farmer
Above this nose
Smiling bloodthirstily
Two slanted Asian eyes
Their pupils
Reflecting the scene
Of the tsar's family's murder
And the rays
Coming from these slanted eyes
Formed a sector
Covering three-fifths of the globe
Drenched in blood
The visage
Thus formed
From the fingerprint
Of the dirty thumb
Of the little man with the Chaplin mustache
Had
A broad
Slavic face
In whose furrows
The Herculean figures
Of ancient Teutons
Transformed into galley slaves
Tottered
This whole face was edged
By the thick beard
Of Karl Marx
In whose clumps
Were stuck
Like pieces of broken eggshells
Papier-mâché towers
Of the most illustrious parliaments and cathedrals
Transformed into ruins
These pictorial reliefs
Of drying drops of blood
Having barely settled
The proboscis
Of the Iberian fly
Dipped
Deep into them
Activating
The clotted blood
Thus forming
Another
Even more plastic
Image
Of a vile kiss
Between the snout
Of a mustached codfish
And two paralytic generals
While the Iberian fly
Refreshed with old blood
Its torpor
Its many legs
Shifted
To reveal
A new spectacle
Hidden until now
Like Chinese blossoms
Under the belly of the phantom
Slowly regaining consciousness
On these legs
Covered with thick hairs
Was a secret warehouse
Of airplanes resembling crane flies
And of lethal
Flyspeck
Bombs
Inadvertently exploding
And casting
Flashes
Of light
Short and blinding
Revealing
Quite definitely
A contoured
Shadow play
Of heads
Huddled like conspirators
Under the belly
Of the colossal Iberian fly
These heads
Covered with gas masks
So unrecognizable
Clenched
In their teeth
Long reins
Of human intestines
Fastened
To the golden bridles
Of a herd of horses
Quartering
A precisely designed
Military map
Of the world
Those human intestines
Clenched
In the teeth
Of cannibals
Who chewed them
Got longer and longer
Until they finally changed
Into long strings
Among which flitted
A funereal condor
Emitting a cry
To the music
Of this illusory instrument
This illusory instrument
Out of tune
Constantly changing its appearance
Played
Under the touch
Of the condor's wings
The favorite
Patriotic songs
Of all nations
During which
Those attending the secret conference
Bared their teeth
And threw into the air
Gold tokens
That landed
On the left wing of the Iberian fly
Where they transformed into generals' medals
The belly of the Iberian fly
Was a gigantic airship
Furnished
To comfortably
House
Five hundred
Families
Inside
On Art Nouveau divans
Lay
Five hundred
Heavily mummified
Nearly motionless
Old women
Bone-dry
And on their
Ashen
Breasts
Like flaccid paper cones
Grinned
Imbecile sons
Panting heavily
On the fattened
Breasts
Of their foot-and-mouth-diseased
Sisters
Their fathers
Dug
With diamond trowels
Looking like curettes
From the womb
Of their conserved
Utterly bare
Old shrimps
Suffering spinal cord desiccation
Golden omelets
And shoved them into the mouths
Of their imbecile offspring
Who defecated
Into diapers
Made of the scalped heads
Of old nannies
When
These five hundred imbeciles
Abandoned
The maternal cones
Their band of pygmies tore into
Cannibalistically
A roasted rooster
That crowed over the ocean
Announcing the arrival of an imbecilic dawn
The eyes of the Iberian fly
With rotted brain
Formed intricate translucent prisms where
A hundred thousand times
In the flickering
Glow of the sun
Sparkled
The menacingly coiled spider
That to the whine of factory sirens
Cast a fishing net over dimming Gibraltar
The spider whose fate is to swallow the Iberian fly
The spider
Nestled
Among the colonnades of three buildings at continent's end
Across from a tiny margarine factory
Workers were just exiting
Afterword
The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Vítězslav Nezval’s work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier period and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political beliefs in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And yet, emerging from the surrealistic ommatidia are a number of pressing political concerns.
Nezval composed the book in the summer of 1936, two years before the infamous Munich Agreement would open the gates of Bohemia to Nazi Germany. Nezval’s politics are apparent even in the title of the collection, which alludes to the gravedigger of the bourgeoisie, a concept from The Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers” wrote Karl Marx. In this sense, Nezval is not only writing about death, but about class and the specters haunting Europe in the ghastly decade of the 1930s. The figure of the absolute gravedigger appears in the title poem as a source of sublime putrefaction, a force that will overpower not just one social class, but all life. The poem “The Blacksmith” evinces an even more fervent revolutionary bent, as the protagonist hammers “a dissonant revolutionary anthem ... dished out by vengeance,” which demolishes the church roof, transforms the prison, and clears out the storerooms of “gold accumulated by entire generations.” This is radical politics wed to radical poetics.
Revolution is less present in other poems in the book, and The Absolute Gravedigger is not completely — or not only — a collection of political poems. But, even more than Nezval’s craft, imagination and outlandish artistry, the political poems elevate the book to international importance as literature not only of witness, but revelation. The collection’s most significant poem in this regard is “The Iberian Fly,” a hellish portrait of Europe, the Spanish Civil War, and a brutal sadist with “a Chaplin mustache.” It is a prescient description, given that Charlie Chaplin would satirize Hitler in The Great Dictator in 1940. In fact, early drafts did refer to a “Hitler mustache,” but Nezval emended the poem for book publication in line with the increasing censorship of inflammatory statements against the Führer and his Reich. For example, the printed poem contains the relatively innocuous lines:
The Absolute Gravedigger Page 7
