Zvěrokroužení

(some of my poems in Czech)

Here is a selection from my poems in Czech, collectively entitled "Zvěrokroužení". The title does not readily translate into English. Czech "zvěrokruh" means Zodiac, or literally "animal-circle". The title does a typically Czech trick of twisting this noun into a grammatical neologism, so the result is something like "Animal-Circling", which is pretty horrid in English. :-)

It is curious, really, how my capacity/need for literary expression differs between my three languages. In Russian (my first language), I used to write metric, rhyming poetry - fairly juvenile, which was appropriate enough, but tolerable in places. In Czech (my second language), I wrote mostly free verse - some of it not bad, if I say so myself. In English (my third language) I expressed myself through interactive fiction (see Adv770 and the earlier Adv660), and wrote some short stories, published on the Net under a different name. (It amuses me to keep my several Net personae separate, even though the original motivation for doing so ceased to apply long ago.) However, recently, much to my surprise, a poem in English happened to me too.

Anyway, here are some of those Czech poems, probably only of interest to Czech speakers. Where the translated title is a link, it leads to an English translation.

To my delighted amazement, I have now discovered that Bonnie Larson Staiger, a North Dakota Associate Poet Laureate, responded to the English translation of "Meditation" with a poem of hers, titled "Still" published in North Dakota Quaterly