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Though the Sky is Embroidered by a Zigzagging Bat by Olga Stehlíková
First published: 24 October 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915108-24-1
Translation from Czech of these Selected Poems is by David Vichnar.
 
Olga Stehlíková’s poems fashion new worlds, recognisable
as our own planet, but not quite as we’ve seen it before.
Her images are continually surprising, the language
even more so, the humour pitch-dark. David Vichnar’s
vibrant translations ably convey the unconventionality
of the original Czech in poems that never stray from
deep human concerns and anxieties: a camera takes
the place of a crucifix above a hospital ward door, a face
reflected in a swimming pool is struck out by a “gentle
plastic duck”, and when the poet asks “What does
a head replay at the moment/ of falling headlong off
a staircase/ as long as a bridal veil?”, she also dares
an answer. Literary critic Karel Piorecký writes, “Olga
Stehlíková’s poems present a unique quality of intensity
and complexity. They combine strength of intellect and
the insights of literary tradition with a relaxed playfulness
and humour. Rationality and irony play a strong role in
them, but always combined with a subtle sensitivity
and empathy for the fate of humanity in the turbulence
of  the contemporary world.”
 
*
 
What does a head replay at the moment 
of falling headlong off a staircase
as long as a bridal veil?
 
An entire life fast-tracked, a life in a flipbook
one traverses with a thumb
in order to make clear it really signified nothing
a bannister in a prefab house 
polished by children’s bums
all the mistakes that needn’t have happened
since the warnings came 
instances of fatal irreversible hesitations 
intense failures in emergency situations
fear thwarting bravery
amusing faux pas – amusing for others
deaths and births and weddings and divorces – of others
abasements at the final exam
repeatedly getting sacked from the job
a few seconds ahead of one’s own entry into the world –
the first scream, so tenuous and yet shrill
blood-spattered
a disappointed love for Susie, who so nonchalantly
sidestepped
 
or that grinning slipper with auntie’s face?

 

Though the Sky is Embroidered by a Zigzagging Bat by Olga Stehlíková

£10.00Price

  • the golden revolutionary song


    My plate holds the gold standard,
    investment-wise,
    I cover and console myself with it, 
    as my ɒksɪdʒ(ə)n runs out.
    I write because no-one listens to me
    when I’m silent.
    Heya hey, friends, are you snacking?

     

    Should I get bored, I put on entertaining                                                                             programmes
    on the dishwasher,
    I shut no one in the dishwasher, the grimy one,
    I put a tablet into the dishwasher,
    no one is blissfully circumfused inside the

                                                            dishwasher.
    When I’m bored, I read in eyes.
    When I’m bored, I force myself
    into golden activities,
    saintly chores. 

     

    *

     

    a look


    I’ll keep stroking the back of your neck
    for so long till it grows a little stalk
    the magic bean of our love 

     

    I’ll squeeze you in your tightest spot 
    as if you really had one 
    I’ll drown you in my shallows 
    like a mouse 

     

    at the slightest touch I’ll spill out like the blossom of

                                                                    an aged peony 
    I’ll keep staring into your eyes for so long
    you won’t be able to tell a look 
    from the daub we’ve made together

     

    there’ll be a large vaccination check
    and then we’ll make new better children
    less akin to torrential rains

     

    think twice about turning me down
    think hard
     

  • Olga Stehlíková works as a freelance writer, book editor and critic with a focus on contemporary Czech literature. She has edited dozens of books of poetry and prose for various Czech publishing houses and her poems have appeared in many Czech and foreign literary magazines. Her debut book of poetry, Týdny (Weeks, Dauphin 2014), won the Magnesia Litera Book Prize for poetry, the premier Czech poetry prize. Her second collection of short poems Vejce/Eggs was published in 2017 in a unique edition, together with an LP album with music by Tomáš Braun. Her third collection was An Exclamation Point as High as a Pole (2018). Her fourth collection, The Siren’s Song, was published in 2022. She also published separately a single poem What a Mother Speaks of When She is Silent, in 2021. Olga’s poems have been translated into seventeen languages. She has also published six award-winning children’s books and was awarded the first Critic of the Year Award in 2018. Though the Sky Is Embroidered by a Zigzagging Bat is the first comprehensive selection of Olga Stehlíková’s poems to be published as a book in English translation.

     

    *

     

    David Vichnar is senior lecturer at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University, Prague. He is also active as an editor, publisher and translator. His publications include Joyce Against Theory (2010), Subtexts: Essays on Fiction (2015) and The Avant-Postman Experiment in Anglophone and Francophone Fiction in the Wake of James Joyce (2023). He has translated into English H by Philippe Sollers (from French), Melchior Vischer’s Second through Brain (from German), and also Louis Armand’s Snídaně o půlnoci from English to Czech. He has been programme director of the annual Prague Microfestival and manages Litteraria Pragensia Books and Equus Press. He was the editor-in-chief (2006 – 2016) of Hypermedia Joyce Studies, the first online journal of Joyce scholarship. His articles on contemporary experimental writers as well as translations of contemporary poetry and fiction – Czech, German, French and Anglophone – have appeared in numerous journals and magazines.

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