Pavel Hrádok

Pavel Hrádok is a fake Czech poet, made up by the real Spanish poet Juan Manuel Bonet, who published a collection, Praga, of his 'translations' of Hrádok's verse in 1994. It is an exercise rather like Christopher Reid's fake 'Eastern European' poet Katerina Brac, who appeared in Katerina Brac (1985), except Reid concentrates on the process of translation - you read Katerina Brac constantly making allowances for the poems' clumsiness, because we trust that there are good foreign poems behind them. Bonet is much more about imaginative identification. Anyhow, Brac first, then Hrádok. The lineation in 'Tin Lily' may be a bit out of whack, because I remember it as being in three-line stanzas and the online version I found was printed as prose.

Tin Lily

A salvo of blurred words
from the oracular tin lily
on top of the olive-green van.

Just one of those anomalous things
that city-dwellers are no longer surprised by
at certain seasons of the year.

I mean - not the seasons
of nature, but those speedier
human phases that run athwart them.

It was often tricky to separate the words
from the razzmatazz,
and the sentiments could be difficult.

But the way the driver kept his van moving
at a regular walking pace -
anyone could admire that.

Only in eyes here and there
I might see something like resentment,
or terror, or disdain.

Picture an olive-green van
and its four-ways-facing lily
strafing the boulevards.

This is no surrealism,
but an image of the new reality,
a counterblast to Copernicus.


Primavera

Tener otra vez veinte años, no pensar
sino en cómo pasan las barcas sobre el río,
en cómo verdean las jardines,
en cómo se agitan faldas blancas
a la hora en que cae la tarde.
Tener, sí, otra vez veinte años, incluso
en esta Praga del 53.