Two Poems

The American poet Stephan Delbos, who first visited Prague in 2003, links the worlds of Czech and Anglophone literature through his life and work. For Delbos’s first book in Czech, we selected two of his substantial poems, “Walking to Břevnov” from his collection In Memory of Fire (2017), and “A Child’s Guide to Candor” from his collection Small Talk (2021). “Walking to Břevnov” portrays the end of a love affair between two characters, Singleton and Stranger, in which Prague has played a central role. In “A Child’s Guide to Candor,” the narrator confronts the Czech and American worlds, at times speaking to his infant son and at times meditating on a parent’s responsability in bequeathing speech. Concerns about contemporary events blend with the narrator’s admiration for the minute particulars of daily life, and with his memories of childhood and the lives and deaths of his relatives.