POETRY ON THE SHOAH

JAROSLAV SEIFERT A SONG AT THE END Listen:   about little Hendele. She came back to me yesterday and she was twenty-four already. And was as beautiful as Shulamite. She wore a light-grey squirrel fur and a pert little cap and round her neck she'd tied a scarf the colour of pale smoke. Hendele, how pretty you look! I thought that you were dead and meanwhile you have grown more beautiful. I am glad you've come! How wrong you are, dear friend! I've been dead twenty years, and very well you know it. I've only come to meet you. Translated from Czech by Ewald Osers

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JAROSLAV SEIFERT LOST PARADISE The Old Jewish Cemetery is one great bouquet of grey stone on which time has trodden. I was drifting among the graves, thinking of my mother. She used to read the Bible. The letters in two columns welled up before her eyes like blood from a wound. The lamp was guttering and smoking and Mother put on her glasses. At times she had to blow it out and with her hairpin straighten the glowing wick. But when she closed her tired eyes she dreamed of Paradise, before God had garrisoned it with armed cherubim ... Often she fell asleep over the Book which slipped from her lap. I was still young when I discovered in the Old Testament those fascinating verses about love and eagerly searched for the passages on incest ... That time I did not yet suspect how much tenderness is hidden in the names of Old Testament women. Adah is Ornament and Orpah is a Hind, Naamah is the Pleasant and Nikol is the Little Brook. Abigail is the Fount of Exultation. But if I recall how helplessly I watched as they dragged off the Jews, even the crying children, I still shudder with horror and a chill runs down my spine. Jemima is the Dove and Tamar a Palm Tree. Tirzah is Pleasantness and Zilpah a Raindrop. My God, how beautiful this is. We were living in hell yet no one dared to strike the weapon from the murderers' hands. As if within our hearts we did not have a spark of humanity! The name Jecholiah means The Lord is Mighty. And yet their frowning God gazed over the barbed wire and did not move a finger - Delilah is the Delicate, Rachel the Ewe Lamb, Deborah the Bee and Esther the Bright Star. I'd just returned from the cemetery when the June evening with its scents leaned against the windows. But from the silent distance now and then came thunder of a future war. There is no time without murder. I almost forgot: Rhoda is the Rose. And this flower perhaps is the only thing that's left us on earth from ancient Paradise. 1979 Translated from Czech by Ewald Osers

Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986), an eminent Czech poet, was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984.

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