Overview

'O fair Slavenka! / You sing no more', laments the twenty-four year old Jan Kollár, wandering the ancient forests of Germany where Slavs once lived: 'Where once the marble walls / of Perun's palace rose on high, the posts / - O, shameful mockery! - now prop a byre'. Born in Mosovce, in the Turiec region of what at the time was the Kingdom of Hungary, the Slovak Kollár (1793-1852), was to become one of the great poets of the Romantic period. His masterpiece Sláva's Daughter [Slávy dcera, 1821-1851] is an epic striking both in its breadth, and intent. For although composed during the Czech and Slovak national revival period, the 'nation' that Kollár bewails, praises, and serves in this poem is 'Slavdom'. Sláva's Daughter is unique in its unrelentingly aspirational Pan-Slavism. Kollár was of the opinion that Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Poles, Croatians, Russians, and all the rest were merely 'tribes' of the one Slavic nation, and their languages 'dialects' of one great Slavic speech. A Pan-Slav, he worked for ever greater cultural reciprocity between the 'sons of Sláva', which hopefully would lead to their political unification. As poetry, Kollár's masterpiece is a bold and singular work of literature, which combines the style of Petrarch's Il Canzoniere with the prophetic grandeur of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The story it tells develops over the space of 645 sonnets arranged into five peripatetic cantos. Along with Kollár's narrator, we follow his donna ideale Mína, and Milek, the Slavic Cupid, as they lead us along the banks of Slavic rivers (Sála, Vltava, Danube), and those of Slavic Heaven and Hell (Lethe, Acheron) towards the great dawn of Pan-Slavic triumph. Sláva's Daughter, which Glagoslav presents unabridged and annotated in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski, is a must read for all those interested in the poetry and history of the European nineteenth century.

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Jan Kollár (1793-1852), Lutheran pastor and poet, Kollár is one of the most important poets of the Romantic Period in Central Europe. Born in Slovakia, a tireless defender of the rights of Slovaks, Croats, and other peoples in the Hungarian Kingdom subject to increasing Magyarisation, Kollár was nonetheless a Pan-Slav. In his view, all Slavs - Poles, Czechs, Russians, etc. - are not separate nations, but 'tribes' of one great Slavic nation. His greatest work of poetry is Slávy dcera (1821 - 1852), which proclaims his ideal of the cultural and political integration of the Slavic peoples of Europe. In five Cantos named after rivers both real and mythological, Sláva's Daughter combines both the style of Petrarch's Il Canzionere with the epic breadth and motivation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Charles S. Kraszewski (born 1962) is a poet and translator, creative in both English and Polish. He is the author of three volumes of original verse in English (Diet of Nails; Beast; Chanameed), and two in Polish (Hallo, Sztokholm; Skowycik). He has also authored two satirical novels Accomplices, You Ask? and At the Tone (both San Francisco: Montag, 2021, 2024). He translates from Polish, Czech and Slovak. He is a member of the Union of Polish Writers Abroad (London) and the Association of Polish Writers (SPP, Kraków). In 2022, he was awarded the Gloria Artis medal (III Class) by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland, and in 2023 the ZAiKS award for Translation into a Foreign Tongue, presented by the Polish Society of Authors (ZAiKS).

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