Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Czech Poetry- Mike Arnautov

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Czech Poetry- Mike Arnautov

Zvěrokroužení

(some of my poems in Czech)

Here is a small selection from my poems in Czech, collectively entitled "Zvěrokroužení". The title does not readily translate into English. Czech "zvěrokruh" means Zodiac, or literally "animal-circle". The title does a typically Czech trick of twisting this noun into a grammatical neologism, so the result is something like "Animal-Circling", which is pretty horrid in English. :-)

It is curious, really, how my capacity/need for literary expression differs between my three languages. In Russian (my first language), I used to write metric, rhyming poetry - fairly juvenile, which was appropriate enough, but tolerable in places. In Czech (my second language), I wrote free verse - some of it not bad, if I say so myself. In English (my third language) I expressed myself through interactive fiction (see Adv770 and the earlier Adv660), and wrote some short stories, published on the Net under a different name. (It amuses me to keep my several Net personae separate, even though the original motivation for doing so has long ceased to apply.)

Anyway, here are some of those poems, probably only of interest to Czech speakers. Where the translated title is a link, it leads to an English translation.

Koan pro levou ruku		A Koan for the Left Hand
Obratník Jednorožce		The Tropic of Unicorn
Havran		Raven
Zlomek snu		Dream Fragment
Bristolský večer		A Bristol Evening
Meditace		Meditation