Background
Seifert was born on September 23, 1901 in Zizkov, Czech Republic. His father Antonín was a blacksmith in a factory. During his childhood, the family moved several times to various, mostly poor, sublets within Zizkov.
(This is Seifert's first collection published in English i...)
This is Seifert's first collection published in English in the U.S.A. (translated from the Czech). A year later, in 1984, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. A year after that he passed away, but not before The Spirit That Moves Us Press also published his Mozart In Prague: Thirteen Rondels (in Czech and English) and Eight Days: An Elegy for Thomas Masaryk (in Czech and English).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0930370260/?tag=2022091-20
( This is the best translated and largest edition of poet...)
This is the best translated and largest edition of poetry by the Czechs' only Nobel Prize?winning poet, Jaroslav Seifert (he won the prize in 1984 and died in 1986). The poetry is surprising in its simplicity, sensual, thoughtful, moving, comic in turns. Author Milan Kundera has called this collection ?the tangible expression of the nations genius.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0945774397/?tag=2022091-20
Seifert was born on September 23, 1901 in Zizkov, Czech Republic. His father Antonín was a blacksmith in a factory. During his childhood, the family moved several times to various, mostly poor, sublets within Zizkov.
Leaving school and eschewing a university education, Seifert began writing at a young age, and his first volume of poetry, Mesto v slzách (A City in Tears), appeared in 1921.
The longstanding hostility between Seifert and the Soviet-allied Communist regime that endured in Czechoslovakia until 1989 was all the more remarkable given Seifert's own embracing of Marxist ideology early in his career, and before that the genuine working-class background from which he hailed - out of which, Communist theory held, the most dedicated and ideologically pure comrades came.
Seifert was a member of the early Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. But it was also a time of change in the Soviet Union, with party leader Josef Stalin moving to seize control after the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin, and ruthlessly eliminating dissent along the way.
Seifert worked as an editor to newspaper Rudé právo (Red Rights) and a journal called Proletkult (Proletarian Culture), he also edited a Communist illustrated weekly called Reflektor between 1927 and 1929.
His poetry continued to evolve, and for a time he briefly dabbled in surrealist verse.
Titles published during this era include Jabliko zklina (An Apple in the Lap) in 1933 and Ruce Venusiny (The Hands of Venus), which won him the Czechoslovakian State Prize for Literature in 1936.
In 1938, Czechoslovakia's two decades of independence came to an abrupt end when Nazi Germany invaded.
Seifert's poetry took a drastic, and courageous turn at this point.
"It was during the Nazis' reign that he first earned not just popularity but the loving devotion of his readers, " explained a fellow Czech writer, Josef Skvorecky, in a 1985 issue of the New Republic.
In the final days of World War II and the German occupation, Seifert very nearly became one of the many who did not survive the war years and their terrors.
They were marched to the train station, where scores of Germans were boarding trains to flee Czechoslovakia as Soviet troops neared, and told to wait against a wall, where they would be shot as soon as a wave of German families had departed by train.
Inexplicably, a half-hour later, they were told to go. Seifert later captured this day in a chapter of his 1981 volume of memoirs, Všecky krásy světa.
After the war's end, the situation seemed promising in Czechoslovakia, despite the presence of Soviet troops.
Based on a minor character in the work of Bozena Nemcova, a Czech literary pioneer of the late nineteenth century, the poems failed to meet appropriate state-proclaimed guidelines.
For a time, Seifert turned to writing children's literature, a necessary refuge for writers whose work failed to fit in with the ideological standards of Communism.
The restoration of his literary reputation among fellow Czech and Slovak writers came in 1956, when authorities began cracking down on dissent.
"If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver, " he told the assembled writers, according to Skvorecky's New Republic article.
"If a writer is silent, he is lying. "
The response from the state was swift: publication of any new work from Seifert was suspended.
Instead he remained behind the Iron Curtain, a dissident writer within his own country.
He returned to poetry again only in the mid-1960s, and in a far freer verse form that his earlier efforts.
The change in Seifert's style coincided with a new and hopeful mood in the country, as more moderate Communists had gained some measure of control within the Party and managed to enact some economic and social reforms.
This period of liberalization was a short-lived one, however, and ended abruptly in August of 1968 when Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia from the east to reassert Soviet control.
His works were widely read, though only in secret samizdat form, which meant they were privately, often crudely printed and the editions passed among friends and sympathizers.
One volume of verse, Morovy Sloup, was somehow smuggled out of the country and issued by a West German publishing house.
It later appeared in English translation as The Plague Column.
Only in 1981, on the occasion of Seifert's eightieth birthday, did the regime appear to concede that the poet was a literary figure of significant stature in the country.
After years of an official publication ban, an edition of Morovy Sloup was issued, followed a year later by Všecky krásy světa (All the Beauties of the Earth), his memoirs in lyrical sketch form.
The announcement of his Nobel Prize honor reignited controversy, however.
The win was announced in rather terse terms in the state-controlled press, but then the Charter 77 signers who had recommended Seifert's name to the Nobel-deciding Swedish Academy were harassed and even jailed.
Back home, however, the Czechoslovak Communist apparatus issued statements hinting that the choice of Seifert was less about his poetry than an attempt to discredit the Soviet Bloc, but the significance of Seifert's honor was not lost on anyone.
"Seifert's Nobel Prize is treasured by the Czechs, " explained writer Roger Scruton in a London Times article, "not because it was a fitting recognition of literary merit, but because it was the first true sign that the 'unofficial' culture is internationally acknowledged as the true culture of Czechoslovakia, and acknowledged, not through the work of fast-living exiles, but through the heroic labour of those still at home. "
The Nobel win fueled interest in Seifert's works in translation.
At the time of his win, just three volumes of his poetry existed in English translation.
During his long career he rarely gave interviews to foreign journalists, but did so on the Nobel Prize occasion.
Two journalists from Time magazine, Henry A. Grunwald and John Moody, came to visit him, and asked if he had any message for American readers.
"Read our poetry, " Seifert advised. "If it is possible. It is a bit touchy to speak about these things. Your people should appreciate their liberty. "
( This is the best translated and largest edition of poet...)
(This is Seifert's first collection published in English i...)
His fearless challenges to Czechoslovakia's Communist, authoritarian regime made him a national hero, however, and the Nobel committee commended his work as "a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man, " according to New York Times writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.