Hamlet’s Spanish Boots

Difficulties refused to agglutinate.  
The stool was aglow, but Holan had no shoes
to walk away with,
to push off the sickly lump of lard.

Hamlet took them as booty
in that long night, starting in 1949
and finishing only in 1964,
and left him
all by himself in the elegiac lounge of dissonance, in
the malign wrinkle of Central Europe.

The Prague river glasswork over Kampa
still features all these images, as though
the treetops were still chewing them, very slowly
puffing them out of their pipes of memory,
filled long ago but never
smoked to the end.

Hamletovi španski škornji

Hamletovi španski škornji

Tegobe se niso in niso hotele sprijeti.
Stol je žarel, a Holan tedaj ni imel čevljev,
da bi odšel,
da bi odrinil bolestno kepo masti.

Hamlet mu jih je uplenil,
v tisti dolgi noči, ki se je začela leta 1949
in končala šele leta 1964,
in ga pustil
samega v elegičnem salonu disonanc, v
maligni gubi Srednje Evrope.

Praški rečni vitraž nad Kampo še danes
predvaja vse te podobe, kakor bi jih
krošnje še vedno žvečile in prav počasi
puhale iz svojih, davno
napolnjenih in nikdar
do konca pokajenih pip spomina.