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Soft Pliancy of Water

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"Soft Pliancy of Water"

Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collage artist, and Professor Emerita of Slavonic Studies at Indiana University. A Czech exile, she lived and taught in the U.S. for over forty years, publishing extensively in Czech and English. She continues to publish bilingual books of poetry, conducts international author readings, and participates in many international poetry festivals as guest of honor and medalist. She currently resides in Prague. Her latest book is Where Everyone Leaves Never to Return, published in 2023 by Plamen Press.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Bronislava, what poems have you brought for us today?

Old women are invisible in our spheres.
They can take initiative and laugh at the foolishness of men or young women alike 
or they can look with pity at those who vie with each other to please men, 
who are unappealing, indolent, without imagination.
Passion does not touch them, they live by daily concerns and plans, 
which can be broken at any time.
Mostly without kisses and caresses, unembraced.
Jacques Brel sings to them of devotion and desire,
which they do not feel. For a little while 
they may let themselves be carried away by this illusion of words and melody, 
but deep down their lives are entirely different.
They enjoy little things that do not inspire love songs 
and definitely, they do not desire to be “your dog’s shadow” 
as Brel sings in his beautiful song.
And yet only then their lives are truly free.
Only then are they happy, fulfilled and calm.
Only then do they set forth with the angels. 
Another end has come to visit my home
as so many times before. 
The deaths of some were bearable, the deaths of others
split life apart. As if the day were no longer
a day, the night a night, the morning a morning or the evening an evening.
An end, powerlessness, the effort to move on, even though
the will is no longer there. Life may go on, but it is no longer
the same. Every such death slices off a piece of the heart 
and reduces the capacity of the lungs. The saddest is the loss
of animals. They are like children, so utterly devoted, innocent 
and helpless. To watch their suffering is devastating, 
and to step into a life without them is insensate. 
To rejoice, inconceivable. 
And so, we can only hope there is a patch of heaven for dogs. 
Just a bridge away.
The soft pliancy of water…
Remember, remember!
It is what you must be 
to overcome the hardness of the stones --
the unpliable, the coarse, the implacable,
the absent-minded, the absent, 
the scatterbrained, the preoccupied,
the cruel, the thoughtless,
the missing, the late,
the disrespectful, the stupid,
the forgetful, the forgotten. 

You've been listening to the poems of Bronislava Volkova on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.

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Note from Bronislava:

"I would like to introduce today my new book Where Everyone Leaves Never to Return, which has been written primarily in Czech, but also in English and published by Plamen Press in Washington, D.C. in 2023 with a rare book alternative version accompanied with my collages by Explorer Editions. It is a book moving between this world and the other, a book of parting with loves, with passion, with animals, with youth, with foolish beliefs etc. It is also a book of coming to oneself, as well as playful shifting of perspectives on various concepts of life. The book has been written in the span of about five years, since 2016 till 2021 and it is my twelfth book of poetry. Since 2000, I have been writing and publishing my poetry bilingually and with my color collages. The book is available through the publisher, electronically as well as published on demand. Plamen Press is distributed by Ingram."

FULL BIO:

Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collagist, essayist and Professor Emerita of Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, where she was a Director of the Czech Program at the Slavic Department for thirty years. She is a member of Czech and American PEN Club. She went into exile in 1974, taught at the Universities of Cologne and Marburg in Germany and subsequently at Harvard and University of Virginia in Charlottesville in the USA.

She has published eleven books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and seven bilingual editions illustrated with her own collages. She is also the author of two books on linguistic and literary semiotics (Emotive Signs in Language, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1987 and A Feminist’s Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature, Edwin Mellen Press, N.Y., 1997), as well as the leading co-author of a large anthology of Czech poetry translations into English Up The Devil’s Back: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry (with Clarice Cloutier), Slavica Publishers, 2008.

Her scholarly publications include topics of Czech poetry, Czech popular culture, issues of exile, gender, implied author values and emotive signs. Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages. She has also received a number of international literary and cultural awards and participated in a number of international poetry festivals around the world.She has also periodically done extensive exhibits of her collage work.

Books of her selected poems are currently available in English, Russian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, German and Spanish. Recently, she has published a book Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought (Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America), Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2021, available also in Open Research Library and in Czech translation in Nakladatelství Pavel Mervart, Czech Republic, 2022.

Dipping fingers in a lake

(AdobeStock)

"Soft Pliancy of Water"

Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collage artist, and Professor Emerita of Slavonic Studies at Indiana University. A Czech exile, she lived and taught in the U.S. for over forty years, publishing extensively in Czech and English. She continues to publish bilingual books of poetry, conducts international author readings, and participates in many international poetry festivals as guest of honor and medalist. She currently resides in Prague. Her latest book is Where Everyone Leaves Never to Return, published in 2023 by Plamen Press.

On this edition of the Poets Weave, Bronislava reads "Old women are invisible in our spheres," "Another end has come to visit my home," and "The soft pliancy of water."

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