#jarmila milner

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Although a poem is only a little word machine/ as William Carlos Williams says/ a little word machine ticking in the world of megamachines and megatons and megaelectronvolts, although in the world of a poem one doesn't live any better than in any other world, although the world of a poem is dreary, arises out of desolation and perishes in the desolation of spiritual history, although art doesn't solve problems but rather only wears them out, as Susan Songtag says, yet a poem is the only sword and shield: for in principle and in essence it is not against tyrants, against automobiles, against madness and cancer and the gates of death, but against what is there all the time, all the time inside and out, all the time in front, behind, and in the middle, all the time with us and against us. It is against emptiness. A poem is being as against emptiness. Against the primary and secondary emptiness.

[joanofarc]

josef hanzlík, translated by jarmila & ian milner.

[derangedrhythms]

Vladimír Holan, Selected Poems; 'Meeting in a Lift', tr. Ian & Jarmila Milner

TEXT ID: We stepped into the lift. The two of us, alone. We looked at each other and that was all. Two lives, a moment, fullness, bliss. At the fifth floor she got out and I went on up knowing I would never see her again, that it was a meeting once and for all, that if I followed her I would be like a dead man in her tracks and that if she came back to me it would only be from the other world.