The Old Man's Verses

Poetry. Translated from the Czech by Deborah Garfinkle. Adopting the persona of the eponymous Old Man, celebrated Czech poet Ivan Divis (1924-1999) writes of the comfort of memory, the nature of faith and the pain of exile. In this moving chronicle of loss and isolation, Divis transports us through space and time, from the pristine mountain peaks of Tibet to a Prague gutter, and from the Big Bang up to the barbarous century of Hitler and Stalin, right through to the brink of the new millennium and the threshold of his mortal existence. With alternating lines of earthy vulgarity and lyric transcendence, the poems in this moving collection expose the longing, pathos and absurdity of human existence. Available to English-speaking audiences for the first time, THE OLD MAN'S VERSES is a provocative, darkly humorous collection from one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary poets.

Ivan Diviš (1924-1999) was an influential Czech poet and essayist of the post-war generation. While a high school student in Prague during World War II, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Peckárna and Pankrác. On his release, he worked in a bookstore and for a publishing company, and went on to study philosophy at Charles University. His literary career flourished during the climate of intellectual freedom of the early 1960s. However, after the Soviet invasion of 1968, he chose to emigrate to West Germany rather than face censorship. After the Velvet Revolution he returned to Prague, where he died at the age of seventy-five. Diviš was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1995.