Sugar Is Dissolving — Web Exclusive
By Jiri Orten
Translated by Lyn Coffin; Zdenka Brodska
Sugar is dissolving and sweetness is seeping out,
breakfast time.
Put on sandals, look around, to see if there's still
fog, if it didn't want to lift, if it will
be a nice day or will drizzle from
sky over hill.
Your head is clear and you look at things as if for
the first time,
you aren't touching a thing in yourself from
the past, oh, take now the words you are whispering,
lighter than dew, and weigh them out exactly
against tears and blood.
A walk awaits you, before waters are muddied, before your
world turns mud.
Look around carefully, see how the earth is turning, how
it floats through the universe, look, focus your eyes, how
close to the circle made by the dead you are,
the dot in the center.
Jirí Ohrenstein, born in Central Bohemia in 1919, is considered one of the finest writers of Czechoslovakia's so-called war generation. As a teenager, Orten moved to Prague and began to publish poems in avant-garde journals and to act in experimental theater groups. His first book of poems, Cítanka jaor (Reader of Spring) was published in 1939. In 1940, following the German occupation of Prague, Orten was expelled from school and forced to take odd jobs, such as clearing snow. For fear of denunciation from anti-Semitic newspapers, he published his poems under pseudonyms. His collections of poems from this time include Cesta k mrazu (The Journey towards Frost, 1940) and Ohnice (Charlock, 1941). On his twenty-second birthday, Orten, while trying to cross the street to purchase cigarettes, was struck by a German ambulance. Because he was a Jew, the first hospital he went to refused to admit him. He died two days later. His diaries, which contained not only all of his poems but also record many of his conversations, letters, and dreams, were published in three volumes after his death. Following the arrival of Communism and socialist realism in Czechoslovakia in 1948, however, his work was condemned as "degenerative muck." He would regain favor during the Prague Spring in the late 1960s. Orten's poems show a strong influence of both Czech folklore and surrealism.
Lyn Coffin was born on Long Island, New York. She is the author of nine books: two of poetry, one of poetry/fiction/drama, and six of translation. She has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in over fifty quarterlies and small magazines, including Catholic Digest and Time magazine. Her plays have been performed at theaters in Malaysia, Singapore, Boston, New York (Off Off Broadway), Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. She has given poetry readings with Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, and Philip Levine, among others. She is a member of Washington Poets' Association, PoetsWest, Seattle Playwrights' Studio, and Dramatists' Guild. Zdenka Brodska's criticism has been published in venues including The New York Review of Books and she has translated widely from Czech.