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When I Meander

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Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collage artist, and Professor Emerita of Slavonic Studies at Indiana University. A Czech exile, she lived and taught in the U.S. for over forty years, publishing extensively in Czech and English. She continues to publish bilingual books of poetry, conducts international author readings, and participates in many international poetry festivals as guest of honor and medalist. She currently resides in Prague and is joining us today on Zoom.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Bronislava, what poems have you brought for us today?

When I meander into the groves

of silent despairs, silent hopes,

I no longer know where the light sleeps,

where lives the rose I so much prefer,

where eternity can strike without embarrassment,

where it sounds with joy.

I no longer know

where we go meet the journeys

saturated with love, shining, fabulous,

like a bird released from the nest,

scented by being, zesty and loud,

journeys, which quicken our heartbeat,

journeys, which promise to make us ring,

journeys, which make our eyes glitter

and the dark long,

I no longer know.

 

 

I hear

 

The shriek of crying roses, doomed during the first flood.

Roses, which didn’t arrive by recent mail.

The shriek of tightly closed fists finding no one to strike.

The shriek of stirred up empty walls

and words unpronounced, names long uncalled.

 

I forsake your spectral power,

world of shadows – world of goods!

You fat fool, grinding clay in your teeth

in times when the heart finds no place of repose.

 

 

Steep streams of water

bury themselves in the ground with intoxicating decisiveness.

Rain firmly clenches in its fist

its waves of tears falling to us from the sky.

I am under them on the square

without a home – without a voice,

helplessly searching, looking for your sign.

And in this vain struggle

with your inescapable non-being

I come for a communion – for a spilling

of the body and the blood.

I am coming to be folded in

the freeing joust of earth and water.

 

 

                                                For Steve                    

You are leaving, you will leave, you have left.

With a bang and without regret.

A friend in poetry and living,

you escape into the unknown, from where you won’t return,

where everything is the way it is supposed to be,

where nothing can be gained and nothing lost,

where there is time for everything and peace,

where cash is not in short supply,

but books, concerts and films

no longer speak to us

and verses are not written

and loved ones wave only from afar.

Good-bye and welcome!

 

                       

An invitation to be

for a second -– for a moment filled with hope.

For the seeing of what we are blind to

for hearing a child’s voice on our knee

for sleeping deep and without remorse

till the dawn, in which all abandons us

and all accepts us.

 

(English original)

 

 

I am the moon.

I reflect what shines on me

its mystery.

But I do not reveal it.

I keep you guessing. Wondering.

Dreaming of that which I conceal,

absorb, swallow and refuse to give up.

 

(English original)

 

You've been listening to the poetry of Bronislava Volkova on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.

Grove of trees

(guangyangluo, pixabay)

Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collage artist, and Professor Emerita of Slavonic Studies at Indiana University. A Czech exile, she lived and taught in the U.S. for over forty years, publishing extensively in Czech and English. She continues to publish bilingual books of poetry, conducts international author readings, and participates in many international poetry festivals as guest of honor and medalist. She currently resides in Prague.

On this edition of the Poets Weave, Bronislava reads "When I meander into the groves," "I hear," "Steep streams of water," "You are leaving, you will leave, you have left," "An invitation to be," and "I am the moon."

FULL BIO:

Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collagist, essayist and Professor Emerita of Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, where she was a Director of the Czech Program at the Slavic Department for thirty years. She is a member of Czech and American PEN Club. She went into exile in 1974, taught at the Universities of Cologne and Marburg in Germany and subsequently at Harvard and University of Virginia in Charlottesville in the USA.

She has published eleven books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and seven bilingual editions illustrated with her own collages. She is also the author of two books on linguistic and literary semiotics (Emotive Signs in Language, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1987 and A Feminist’s Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature, Edwin Mellen Press, N.Y., 1997), as well as the leading co-author of a large anthology of Czech poetry translations into English Up The Devil’s Back: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry (with Clarice Cloutier), Slavica Publishers, 2008.

Her scholarly publications include topics of Czech poetry, Czech popular culture, issues of exile, gender, implied author values and emotive signs. Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages. She has also received a number of international literary and cultural awards and participated in a number of international poetry festivals around the world.She has also periodically done extensive exhibits of her collage work.

Books of her selected poems are currently available in English, Russian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, German and Spanish. Recently, she has published a book Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought (Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America), Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2021, available also in Open Research Library and in Czech translation in Nakladatelství Pavel Mervart, Czech Republic, 2022.

More at www.bronislavavolkova.com

www.indiana.academia.edu

www.youtube.com/channel/UC3y1GreHstX_OMgYi0paftA

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