Satanella (1932)/Jaroslav Vrchlicky

by John Joseph Reichman

 

JAROSLAV VRCHLICKY
(1853–1912)

 

On a beautiful and brilliant September morning, twenty years ago, the sad news reached Prague that Jaroslav Vrchlicky died . . . after four years of both physical and mental anguish. The capital was shocked by the irreparable loss of the greatest Czech poet.

 

And we, his former students from the University of Prague, where he had been active for many years as professor of the history of modern literature, were touched more deeply by his early departure than perhaps anyone. For, how long ago was it that we listened to his absorbing lectures dealing with the Spanish dramatists of the 17th century, with Goethe's "Faust" and Madach's "Tragedy of Man," with Dante's "Divina Commedia" and Shelley's "The Cenci"—to name only a few of his many subjects. We were a mere handful, not more than four or five graduates who, in the narrow worm-eaten benches of the old college of Klementinum, drank from the inexhaustible fountain of Vrchlicky's profound knowledge, matured poetical wisdom and sparkling critical inspiration.

 

We vividly saw our beloved professor, as he walked the streets of the city of "a hundred towers." In his grotesque, "out-of-fashion" overcoat, his slouchy, large brimmed gray felt hat, his long silvery hair protruding underneath, and occasionally a lighted cigarette in his mouth, he was a picture of the heroic dreamer amidst the toil and tumult of a great city in the modern, mechanical age.

 

Or, we saw him standing on the rostrum before his professorial pulpit, and with closed eyes—while only the few gas-burners in the dimly lighted lecture room were humming their monotonous melody—reciting in a high pitched voice a few scattered verses of his masterful translations. With what anxiety we listened, always eager to hear more and more from him, whom a French contemporary not inaptly chose to label, "the Czech Victor Hugo!"

 

And then, as members of the academic fencing club, we stood around his coffin, a silent, stolid guard in the monumental Pantheon hall of the National Museum. And, when at last, just before dusk of a gorgeous summer evening, his body was laid to rest in "Slavin," the renowned burial ground of Vysehrad (the Czech Westminster Abbey), we all felt that in the passing of Vrchlicky Czech literature lost its greatest poet and inspirator.

 

In 1903, there appeared in Pelcl's "Rozhledy," an influential Prague magazine, an inflammatory article entitled "A Paper Pyramid," containing a condemnation of Vrchlicky's achievements. We, his ardent students, were thoroughly convinced that a flagrant injustice had been inflicted upon the prince of the Czech poets whose fiftieth birthday was then being observed throughout the nation with unexampled solemnity.

 

It is true, indeed, that there never was a poet more productive than Vrchlicky. As one of his more recent critics sets out, Vrchlicky wrote such a mass of verse, original and translated, besides a large quantity of prose, that the literary output of his life was greater in volume than that of any other of the world's leading writers excepting Lope de Vega.

 

Vrchlicky published about seventy volumes of original lyric and epic poetry, more than thirty dramas, fifteen volumes of prose-criticism, essays and stories.

 

In addition to his exuberant productivity he was unquestionably a poet of God's grace, a perfect magician of the Czech letters, a master of form and versification, an inspiring teacher who opened new horizons to the creative faculties of his nation in the field of poetry.

 

An equally important part in the literary work of Vrchlicky are his prolific translations, from the Romance languages including Victor Hugo and the rest of the Parnassiens, Baudelaire and Verlaine, representatives of French poetry, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Michael Angelo, Parini, Giuseppe Carducci and other Italian poets, Calderon, Camoens, and Verdaguer, the principal Spanish authors. From English and American literature Vrchlicky translated Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, Poe, Whitman; and from the German, Goethe (the whole of his "Faust"), Schiller, and Robert Hamerling. Among others his translations include Ibsen, Mickiewicz, the Magyar poets, Petofi, Aranyi and Madach, the Persian poet Hafiz and the Chinese "Shi-King" (collaborating with Professor Rudolph Dvorak) besides several voluminous anthologies of Italian, French and English modern poetry.

 

The most amazing fact about this enormous quantity of Vrchlicky's literary work, is that it was produced by a man who was not merely a writer and scholar, but who also, in a unique manner, understood the difficult art of living, who was a refined "bon viveur" in the Rabelaisian sense of the word; and who was a model husband to his wife and a loving and doting father to his daughter Eve, who at present is one of the prominent actresses of the National Theatre in Prague.

 

My dear friend, Mr. Roderick A. Ginsburg, undertook to familiarize the English-reading public in this country and abroad with one of Vrchlicky’s earliest epic poems, "Satanella" (1874), written at the age of twenty-four years under the spell of romanticism so happily inaugurated in Czech literature in 1836 by Karel Hynek Macha and his immortal epico-lyrical poem "Maj" (May).

 

It is my firm conviction that Mr. Ginsburg fully succeeded in his difficult and painstaking task of interpreting Vrchlicky's beautifully molded verses into their equivalent English counterparts.

 

I hope that his English version of Vrchlicky's colorful poem will be gratefully received by English lovers of poetry who will have the opportunity to see to what extent the Czechs, now flourishing as a virile, independent nation, possess commendable qualities not only in the domain of music, so well known through the compositions of Dvorak, Smetana and Janacek, but also in the wide realm of literature.

 

JOHN J. REICHMAN, PH.D., J.D.

 

Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A., May 1932.