Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Czech by Marcela Sulak. Compared to Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Poe, called Lautréamont's "elder brother" by the Czech Surrealists, Karel Hynek Mácha (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 and adult can recite the first stanzas of the poem from memory, and new editions still regularly appear in Czech bookstores. Unlike many of his European peers, Mácha's work has been largely ignored in English translation. The present volume provides the original text in parallel.

Author City: PRAGUE CZE

Karel Hynek Mácha was born on November 16, 1810, in an old part of Prague where his father was the foreman at one of the city's mills. At school he learned Latin and German, the two languages approved by the Hapsburg authorities, and later studied law at Prague University. His great model was Byron, with whom he shared a romantic idealism, wandering the Bohemian countryside to visit castle ruins, always making sketches and notes describing the natural beauty surrounding him. He also walked the length of Moravia and Slovakia as well as making a journey to Venice on foot.

Much influenced by the Czech intellectuals who were trying to revive the language at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Mácha wrote MAY and many of his poems in Czech (though his early writing was in German, the compulsory language of his education). In this way he identified himself with the Byronic hero who gives his life to a cause.

Mácha died of pneumonia on November 5, 1836, just shy of his 26th birthday. He was to have been married in Prague to the mother of his son three days later. Buried in a pauper's grave in Litomerice, his remains were exhumed in March 1939, as Nazi German was occupying the country, and given a formal state burial at Prague's Slavin Cemetery on Vyšehrad among the great Czech dead. In addition to MAY, Mácha in his short life wrote a number of poems, short prose sketches, and a journal where he explicitly describes his sexual encounters with his wife to-be, Lori.