Harvard Professor Emeritus by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Harvard Professor Emeritus

Harvard Professor Emeritus,

thank you for coming to my reading,

though you had so many other attractions to choose from,

upstairs Šalamun was speaking, Pamuk two doors down.

Thank you for coming, although you started to snore

before I started to read, and you woke up again

at the applause. It was wonderful to watch you sinking

into your chair, plunging into the amniotic fluid

of sleep, nourishing yourself on my metaphors

through an invisible umbilicus. Or maybe in the meantime

you were out on a cosmic walk wearing a spacesuit

of Slavonic speech, protecting you from the void.

Or else you had no dreams at all, you were on your usual

self after a stroke, and I was keeping you alive

in a poetic coma. I don’t know, in any case

thank you for coming. What mattered more to me

was your presence than your absence.

(Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)