The poet and columnist Petr Hruška was born in Ostrava on 7 June 1964. Dresdner Lyrikpreis (1998) and Jan Skácel Award (2009) and National price for literatury (2013) winner. Lives in Ostrava in Czech Republic. He studied at the Ostrava Mining University. Between 1990–1994 he studied Czech Literature and Literary The- ory at Ostrava University (his M.A. thesis was on Contemporary Underground Czech Poetry and Prose). Later he completed his doctoral studies at Masaryk University in Brno (doctoral thesis on “Postwar Surrealism and Reactions to Inertia in the Avant-Garde Model in Official Poetry”). From 1994–1995 he had an internship at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and since 1995 he has been employed there as a researcher in 20th Century Literature. He works in the Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Brno and also teaches literature at Masaryk University in Brno.

A ROOM FOR THE NIGHT

the big trucks roared as if ravenous beasts of the night
you called out the price to me
a room for two people

the guy from the gas station angular with lack of sleep
led us up a steep staircase Berlin Krakow Trieste all of it was in the past now

I had never seen
such a narrow room
when we wanted to turn around we had to embrace

Translated by Jonathan Bolton