SELECTED WRITING
by
Jan Litvák
Translated by Viera and James Sutherland-Smith
ME
It’s Me who’ll crush your tears to a grain of salt.
I’ll turn on the lamp silently.
You’ll see the wild shadows, which touched your darkness.
I’ll put your hurt in chains. Let it go.
I’ll take out the grains of sand from your eye one by one.
I’ll shake out the fog from your hair.
I’ll drink up the silence after your scream to the depths.
© Jan Litvák
FALLEN ANGEL
In front of our shop there are a few green stalls for the seasonal sellers of fruit and vegetables. Not far away there is the stone bench where Granny was selling her flowers and windfall pears picked in the garden. A homeless man had settled inside one of the stalls at the end of the winter. Here he battled the night frosts. And at the time when the frosts were becoming less severe…
It was the evening, the time when he was usually getting ready to sleep. As I was going to buy something or other at the grocery I found him standing by the stall in bewilderment and feathers flying all around. When I came out of the shop, I spoke into the cloud of feathers, “It seems as if an angel has fallen here.”
He shook his head and complained about his situation. We had a nice chat. In a few days they moved him on. I trust he went to the place he’d come from.
© Jan Litvák
LADY OF THE DAY
The night has placed the stars in the dark like a lady,
Who has put her necklace on a dark blue cushion
and fallen asleep only shortly before dawn.
Her eyelids don’t, her lips don’t tremble,
When she sighs, wounded by a lovely dream,
And immobile she sleeps, until the half light.
When she goes barefoot on the beaches of the planet,
her clothes, woven from distance, dimly glitter,
only the moon hears its sweet rustling.
And afterwards, when she sings into dreams, completely happy,
Because your silence has returned her fantastic sigh,
She’ll come to you through blue windows like a bright star.
Open to love they will enter the door, forgotten, found.
© Jan Litvák
SLEEP
I sleep, it’s my life, my death.
Late risers try to catch me in a dream
Exactly as I try to catch them.
What, perhaps I used not to like, I like now.
The world is but a dream.
A jug for portable dreams.
A jug tucked away in the hay of dreams.
© Jan Litvák
VICTOR
Until now I haven’t been able to explain who exactly Victor was. Either he was a waster surrounded by everything exotic and unattainable or perhaps an emigrant, who took a job as a deck hand when he shipwrecked on the French bank in German Karlsruhe. Was he a Spanish convict released on parole after a few months or an Indian fakir, a Jewish salesman or South American mountain man living from dawn to dusk on coca? Was he that Christ, who received for his thirty-third birthday malaria, and then, when Death lay next to him in bed, leaped out in a trance and to the sounds of wild African rhythms danced with her the whole night? Was he also an actual Atlantean, the mysterious effendi, appearing at the same time in many different places and disappearing into a grayish cloud of hashish smoke?
You would certainly find few people who would actually swear that he was just an ordinary bastard. Yet, he himself boasted that to stay alive in the desert he could easily become, let’s say, a cannibal, and on the way from the disco he would shag any likely young slapper with a bow in her hair. When to our immense surprise he got married it was put about that his wife, Napoleon’s great great-granddaughter, beat him all the time and that he whacked her in the presence of guests. The ranks of Victor’s friends dwindled and he became a simple divorced vendor of pancakes paying the maintenance for his son with difficulty. Did he stop being a seer? It’s easy to say, but few can tell. When I went out of the door of Victor’s flat bitten to the bone by tenderness, I noticed that I was accompanied everywhere by an inseparable crowd following certain rules unheedingly:
seers, the people, who mean something, instead of their stories in thousands of flickering images notice only their own light around them.
Every single day is spent with seers and every day is equally different from succeeding days. And they are similar in this. And they are similar all at once.
Seers have something temporarily rock-like, because an every day feeling of happy coincidence unerringly or through error to a confluence of light.
Victor didn’t hold to this so steadfastly, but I understood that it was like this and absolutely true… So let us speak again as seers. Through the memory of visions we shall forget our uncompleted stories as we forget our names in sleep’s memory.
© Jan Litvák
LIFE BEARER. HUNTRESS OF PEOPLE
The huntress is bored with me
The evening signs in black on the edge of the sky
Like fire on the orange deck of a ship.
Sleep has fizzed out of me,
Dreams have crossed the sands.
They have spilled rustlingly in your hair.
Beauty in pale delicate purple
Has followed in the tracks
Of verminous scorpions and spiders
Hurrying into darkness.
The sky has been uncovered. Lifted.
Flocks of birds have carried robes in celebration
To their king.
They have floated on a fresh breeze.
Crowns of malachite,
Ecstatically open to the blue
And faithful to the earth,
Have trembled with pleasure.
Bliss has poured down beneath the bark in strong currents to the ground.
Muffled it has lifted roots.
It has tickled the little hooves of kid goats
Hurled on to sand a moment before
Standing on trembling legs with an awe
For which I have sought the words.
An eagle has cast aside the whole world
With a single movement of its wings.
Saintliness, more stone-like than temples
Has stood everywhere in the dust
Where the masses had taken refuge.
And there where nobody came
Was place for many.
The huntress of people has become an old woman.
Her face is perhaps reminiscent of continents.
When I watch her from the terrace
She spins a rope on a spindle,
Pulling it out between her fingers.
The veil has slipped from her like a snake
from her forehead, from her neck and shoulder.
She draws it back and holds it with her teeth.
From the courtyard
she entices me for flat potato pancakes.
Laughter smoulders in my home.
In a shack of twined wickerwork and rags
Just by the road
A girl has been born tonight
To a wandering people –
These women and men
Concealed in wretched shacks
Who keep only lizards as domestic animals.
Into what nappy will they wrap the baby girl
Until she takes tiny steps
Along the tracks of mice?
Meanwhile bliss will twine from rays,
from fibre a shawl from wild sage.
Meanwhile she places the lipstick of the raspberry to her lips.
Meanwhile the Life Bearer weaves a net of life over her.
Their flowers have little names.
They are lit only with a silent joy
in the conscience of the dark
which gets beneath their nails.
Even if they get richer in their dreams
With topazes up to their waists
Want insists on being their godmother.
She rouses them at once. The poorest of the poor.
They haul a wretch away in cords
Wherever they wish,
Soldiers snooping in the streets.
The beggar is born like a view
Where you can see yourself
Like a silent child
that knows you, but will not tell you
The wretched of God.
He gets a gift of food, clothes and innocence
If somebody puts them in his hands.
Blessedness in the blueness rolls round.
The world sees me according to what I look at.
Dreams make me toss and turn in bed and torment me.
The huntress has already spread a net there
And through her terribly empty eyes I see
How terrible it is not to see:
To walk beside trees on a road full of potholes,
And not notice the medicine in a low young wood
In the eyes of mischievous young monkeys.
The wonder of forest people with pokes
Which they carry on their backs
As if it were pleasure itself
and not just winnowed forest straw.
Charmed into animals they have trembled,
The women of the untouchables,
Who hide food like a treasure.
They have stood by their hovels
In golden slippers stitched from sand
Behind beds of wild potato.
The stream has gurgled in the thirst of beggars
Repairing the road under waterfalls,
who are almost naked when they wash
and sleep only in hollows,
in the prints of their bodies.
Thirst has poured from them into the dust
Still hot as asphalt.
I have been all of them since morning.
I too have many bulls’ hearts. Like tomatoes in summer.
I can pick a full basket for you.
All these people are me,
When I sit in bed in the evening only alone.
Until thoughts overwhelm me and kill,
One by one I receive them into myself.
Meanwhile in the distance they huddle together in the sand,
There’s smoke from embers between boulders
And an unreturning river takes them me into dreams.
It is time and I have no time
To puff at my mind as at a dandelion,
To get rid of poverty
Sooner than it will get rid of me.
It is time and I have no time.
The day hasn’t enough strength to start.
The huntress
The numbed dark of unseeing
Falls into your eyes like a flake.
Pluck it out quickly
Or just wait
Until it dissolves.
Like blindness which disappears
In the eyes without trace.
This is the pain.
It always returns to me
And I always return to it
To that almost unbearable pain.
© Jan Litvák
LEONARD COHEN
TOM WAITS
PATTI SMITH
