RADUZ AND MAHULENA[1]
A SLOVAK TALE IN FOUR ACTS
By Julius Zeyer
Authorized translation from the Bohemian by Zdenka Buben and George Rapall Noyes, Songs by Dorothea Prall
NOTE
Julius Zeyer (1841–1901) occupies a position beside Vrchlický and Svatopluk Cech, as one of the three great poets of Bohemian literature of the later years of the nineteenth century. A thorough romantic in all his work, he resembles to some degree the English Preraphaelites. He is most famous for his long narrative poems, which may perhaps be compared with those of William Morris. His fairy-tale drama, Radúz and Mahulena, though written in prose, is throughout poetic in spirit, with no concessions to modern realism. It is “a tale of old,” of the childhood of the Slovak folk in northern Hungary, a Slavic people who, as the author tells us in his dedication, lived for a thousand years beneath the yoke of the “Huns,” (not Germans, but Magyars), and who now have attained their own national life in union with their kinsmen, the Bohemians.
All Bohemian names are accented on the first syllable. An oblique stroke over a vowel (as in Radúz), indicates the long quantity of the vowel, not the accent of the word.
and to those
who with him so passionately love the Slovak people and with him so bitterly suffer and so stoutly endure
i dedicate this poem of mine
knowing well that I strew my simple flowers not on the grave of a brother people by the Tatra Mountains, but on the threshold of a cavern radiant with the light of a future of salvation, on the threshold of a cavern of mortal tortures, from which this down-trodden people shall come forth into the light as Lazarus of old,
- ↑ Copyright 1923 by the POET LORE CO. All rights reserved.
