Ewald Osers, Poet and Translator

From Radio Praha (2011)

I'm catching up with old news from Radio Prague, a great resource.

Ewald Osers made a fine translation of Jaroslav Seifert’s The Plague Column (London, 1979).

Guardian obituary (2011)

The Prague Post

Here are some short extracts from Ewald Osers’ own poems about Prague, which he gave me to read and to use on the soundtrack of a film I once planned about Prague.

From Prague Revisited (I) by Ewald Osers

I.

An ageing beauty waking from her sleep,

The make-up gone, or smudged:

The peeling colourwash from the old houses

With here and there a blemish more than skin-deep…


II.

Effortlessly

She seduces you.


III.

Her flaunted breast,

Saint Nicholas,

her melting whisper

below the old weir-

the old courtesan

has forgotten nothing.


IV.

Is it because she was old

Forty years ago

That she seems no older

Today

When I have put a life

Between then and now?



From Prague Revisited (II)


And still this city grips me by the throat.

No, not the famous sights, the postcard views,

The places where the tour buses unload

Their cargo of sightseers. No, I choose

The quiet crooked streets that I remember

From childhood, though their plaster may be peeling,

Raw brick-wounds festering in the distemper,

The gilded emblems dull……


1984



From Prague 1971
For George Theiner


Down this square

Once rang laughter of students, euphoria

Of a waking dream after a waking nightmare…..

And then the human torch,

That exclamation mark after

The passage of tanks…..



Behind padlocked gates

The wrought-iron privacy of once-noble gardens,

Weeping willows behind lichen-covered puttos,

Their marble smiles crumbling

From the neglect of an equalitarian society

Of equalised disenchantment…"