The Absolute Gravedigger Read online

  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