D. H. Lawrence, a poem in Czech translation, 1948.

"How Beastly the Bourgeois Is"

https://poets.org/poem/how-beastly-bourgeois

Although Stephen Spender's foreword and Karel Offer's introduction were both written in 1946, this book was published in 1948. I assume that Lawrence's poem proved to be one of the most popular in the year of the Czechoslovak Communist Party coup d'état of February 1948, but I wonder how long the anthology was allowed to circulate?

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species —


Presentable, eminently presentable —
shall I make you a present of him?


Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing


Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.


How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species —


Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable —
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.


And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.


Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty —
How beastly the bourgeois is!


Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

D.H.Lawrence

The poets included:

See also, blog post on Edwin Muir in Prague:

https://corfublues.blogspot.com/2020/03/edwin-muir-in-prague-1948-foreword-to.html


Pavel Šrut's translations of D. H. Lawrence (published 1990):

My copy of Lawrence's poems, lent to Pavel in Prague for his translations, circa 1987-1989.

Anticipating  the Velvet Revolution?

O! Start a Revolution

O! start a revolution, somebody!

not to get the money

but to lose it all for ever.

O! start a revolution, somebody!

not to install the working classes

but to abolish the working classes for ever

and have a world of men.

Pavel Šrut (1940-2018), poet and translator- "under the totalitarian regime he was not allowed to publish and his texts came out in samizdat form".

https://www.czechlit.cz/en/author/pavel-srut-en/


D.H.Lawrence, Censors:


Censors are dead men
set up to judge between life and death.
For no live, sunny man would be a censor,
he'd just laugh.

But censors, being dead men,
have a stern eye on life.
--That thing's alive! It's dangerous. Make away
      with it!--
And when the execution is performed
you hear the stertorous, self-righteous heavy
      breathing of the dead men,
the censors, breathing with relief.