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[ excerpt ]
Czech writing
about the translator:
Marcela Sulak, a translator and poet, is an assistant professor of Literature at American University.
Her poetry has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, including Fence, Indiana Review,
Notre Dame Review, Spoon River Review, Quarterly West, and River Styx. She is
the author of Of All the Things That Don't Exist, I Love You Best and Immigrant.
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may
by Karel Hynek Macha
translated from the Czech by Marcela Sulak
illustrations by Jindrich Styrsky
Compared to Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Poe, called Lautreamont's "elder brother" by the Czech Surrealists,
Karel Hynek Macha (1810-1836) was the greatest Czech Romantic poet, and arguably the most influential of any poet
in the language. May, his epic masterpiece, was published in April 1836, just seven months before his death.
Considered the "pearl" of Czech poetry, it is a tale of seduction, revenge, and patricide. A paean as well to his
homeland, virtually every Czech student learns to recite the first stanzas of the poem from memory and new
editions are still regularly published. The reason for the poem's popularity and longevity is the beauty of its
music and its innovative use of language. Scorned at first by the national revivalists of the 19th century
for being "un-Czech," he was held up as a "national" poet by later generations, a fate from which the interwar Czech
avant-garde, who considered him a precursor, tried to rescue him.
As opposed to the other important 19th-century European poets, Macha's work has been largely ignored in English translation.
The present volume provides the original Czech text in parallel.
Praise:
This seems to be the first English version in more than 50 years of the greatest
poem by the premier romantic poet of the Czech language. Macha (1810-36) published his masterpiece at
his own expense shortly before he died, probably of cholera. Mostly in tetrameters, with expansive
sections in longer lines, the poem pioneered iambs in Czech, in which dactyls and trochees work more
easily, and is famously melodious. It is prefaced by a rather crude patriotic paean that is Macha's
acknowledgment of his era's call for patriotism in Czech literature, which he otherwise ignores in
favor of international romanticism. The poem portrays a young woman pining for her lover condemned to
death, his last hours and execution, nature's lament for him, and the poet's recollection of the
lovers' legend. Byron, or Keats, well could have written it, and if translator Sulak declines to
slavishly render its rhymes (observable on left-hand pages in this bilingual edition), she convincingly
echoes its meters and movingly conveys its various beauties. |
— Ray Olson, Booklist
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To my mind the most modern Czech poem is K.H. Macha's May. |
— Jindrich Styrsky
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Marcela Sulak has beautifully maintained the same style of poetic language as Macha, with the use
of the dash to represent silence and time lapse. Sulak's Introduction is also informative for the non-reader of Czech and fairly
explains the difficulties in maintaining a true English parallel to the original. |
— Slavic and East European Journal
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ISBN 978 80 86264 22 6
128 pp.
145 x 190mm
2 pen-and-ink drawings
hardcover
poetry / bilingual
temporarily out of stock
reprint in summer 2010
a few copies are still available through:
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