Translated by Nathan Fields
The selected poetry of Milan Děžinský, translated by Nathan Fields, including many poems previously not published in English by the celebrated Czech poet.
About the Author :
Milan Děžinský is a Czech poet and the author of eight collections of poetry. In 2018, he won the Magnesia Litera Award for poetry, the most prestigious annual literary prize in the Czech Republic. His work has been translated into English, German, and Polish, and several of his poems have appeared in US and UK magazines, including The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse, and PN Review, as well as the Prague-based B O D Y. He lives in Roudnice nad Labem in the Czech Republic.
Review :
Milan Děžinský’s poems probe what lives in the shadows. They’re alert to the echoes and whispers of history, to what’s heard through walls, and to secrets forests keep. They speculate about the wonder of a woman’s tongue, peer into the composition of matter, question who is prey and who is predator. And perhaps most importantly, these poems are attentive to every kind of messenger: injured animals, apparitions, ‘the mathematical beauty of frost,’ a wall containing a still-trembling ‘tear of builder’s sweat.’ Deep and dark as chasms, sometimes wry, sometimes chilling, they demand repeated readings. Dear translator, can we please have some more?
Milan Děžinský’s poems embrace immediacy. They arrive on the page as if from a vast silence. Aware of the cost of history, claiming no place in the world, Děžinský inhabits contingency: ‘I gaze into the sun and I’m already someone else.’ Then a poem will slip, who-me, into the infinite, without a trace of rhetoric, with no comment on the distance traveled: ‘We look into the fire / as if again witnessing / the creation of the world.’ Searching for a language freed of hierarchies, intimacy without a template, Děžinský’s vision is radically open. You might think of James Baldwin’s insight that ‘The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.’ In an age that bows to absolutes, Gravitation is beautifully autonomous, intuitive, human.
