Translating Yusef Komunyakaa into Czech: A Personal Confession

The poems in Magic City were those that got me first. Reading and rereading "Venus's-flytraps," I felt my own childhood memories come intensely back to life, I felt that the landscape of the poet's personality and my own shared borders, even more, seemed to overlap or flow together despite the geographical distance and the time that divided them. The rural worlds of the five-year-olds in Louisiana and in Silesia, Czechoslovakia, as much as they differed in natural and social imagery, contained and radiated similar mysteries that only later, indeed much later, became poetic memories and expressions. The lines of verse I kept absorbing brought alive my own experience of wading through bliss and hell, through innocence and early knowledge; the lines I kept reciting gradually took the sound and form of my own thoughts in my own language.

The whole process took days and weeks but it happened, for the most part spontaneously. Needless to say, searching in the storage of my memory and Czech vocabulary for the most adequate equivalent for an English expression let loose an obsessive train of questions, the answers to which, I hoped, would allow me to get "over to the other side" the corresponding words, image, turn of phrase, rhythm, tone, or mood. As a natural by-product, such a quest for words continuously provides the seeker with the potential of some deeper self-knowledge (just as the creative act provides such knowledge to the poet himself).

The earlier and later autobiographical poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa was thus not only an invitation to the world of the poet but an encouragement to revisit my own boyhood, marked as it was by similar emotional and intellectual wanderings and wonderings. My parents, too, were common people who gave their whole lives to good work and family; I wished I could have written at least half of the "Songs for My Father" for my own father. As in Komunyakaa's poetic series, some tensions could have been relaxed, more affection and love could have been uttered. What is more, I too grew up with the Bible, which was one of the very few books in our house. As an altar boy, kneeling in the dark silence of the local church, I mulled over passages from the Gospels, trying to grasp their import. In awe, I found myself "praising dark places" that I discovered in the natural surroundings of the neighborhood and suspected in the universe; I learned to extol and celebrate the multiformity of life and had to force myself through traumas caused by instances of rural violence such as the ritual, and more often just routine, killings of animals on the small farm. In this setting, it was the radio that functioned as a daily cultivator and educator for me. For in the postwar years, Radio Luxembourg brought even jazz to the boys and girls in Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian villages. And jazz, it should be stressed, was something very new for us; it brought previously unknown excitement; it was a sign of modernity and a manifestation of regained freedom.

I have to admit in all frankness that I chose for the volume of Komunyakaa's selected verse, which I called Charmed (Oč arování), those poems that addressed me personally, either as references to familiar things or as manifestations of extraordinary insights into the complexity of existence. I chose the poems that enriched me as a reader in the hope that the translations would call up some comparable response in Czech readers.

One very special quality of Komunyakaa's poetry lies in its music. It is first of all the music of "what is being said," but then, further, it is a poetic music with an obvious kinship to jazz and a modality pertaining to the blues. Yet the applicability of the poet's statement, "I think of language as our first music," is certainly not limited to his own language and his own poetry. Although this notion seems to be something rather generally recognized and valued, as a number of mimetic poetic theories from...