Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders by Vítězslav Nezval

His translations from Czech include The Absolute Gravedigger (2016) and Woman in the Plural (2021) by Vítězslav Nezval and Paris Notebook (2020) by Tereza Riedlbauchová. His poetry, essays and translations have been published internationally. STEPHAN DELBOS is the Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

He served as editor of the Czech group’s journal Surrealismus. Along with Karel Teige, Jindřich Štyrský, and Toyen, Nezval frequently visited Paris and forged ties with the French Surrealists. In addition to The Absolute Gravedigger, his most important work includes Pantomime, Prague with Fingers of Rain, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and A Prague Flâneur. A founding member of both Devětsil in 1920 and the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia in 1934 (the first such group outside of France), Nezval’s oeuvre consists of numerous poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays, and translations. VÍTĚZSLAV NEZVAL (1900–58) was the leading Czech avant-garde writer of perhaps the entire 20th century. Have fingernails digging into their palm linesĪdrift like mutable clouds over the chaotic land Have bloodshot eyes like a withering grape leaf I was falling like Earth falls in its flight through space I was falling but it was just a feeling of forgetting I was falling with the entire landscape with its invisible swamp I was falling like a burning sheet of paper that consumes a poem I was falling like the cindery fall of a glowing cigar I was falling like a man whose memory leaves him I was falling like a tower that sees its birds take flight I was falling along with the entire landscape

That the earth had spun away from its orbit and was falling I owed her a reply and so we now walked in silence How sad it is to look into windows where people are eating dinner

Those uncertain and distant graveyard lights How terrible the roads that end in fields I felt terrible like a drowned man who’d forgotten he had ever lived Which is what I call a few freshly plowed fieldsĪs beautiful as forgetting that you were aliveĪnd I felt terrible like a drowned man being resuscitated I went walking with my girlfriend last night I greet your gliding flight O wings of death Editor’s note: This poem is excerpted from Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon Press, 2021).

Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders by Vítězslav Nezval