Poetry
Dunaj a Seina
Not translated into English
Emil Boleslav Lukáč · 1925
Synopsis
Poems born of the author's years of study in Paris, which constantly set home against the world, the city against the village, the native land against the foreign land. Lost in the big city, the poet feels a stranger there, among people he sees as enemies or wolves, and dreams of a homeland in green and blue; the native house becomes the moral value on which all his poetry rests. In the sonnet Taedium urbis, he expresses his disgust at the city and what, for him, is dearer to him.
Context
The author's second collection, after Spoveď (1922), the book appeared in 1925 in Banská Štiavnica, from August Joerges. Born of the poet's Paris studies, it bears the mark of the legacy of Hviezdoslav and of French lyric poetry, and its foreign words and epithets earned him the nickname poeta doctus. A study published in 2009 in Slovenská literatúra makes the home the fundamental ethical value of this poetry, in which one passes from intimate borders to cultural, national and political ones, always under a theological horizon, and compares his beginnings with those of Ján Smrek, born like them of symbolism and decadence.
Who it is for
A collection of about seventy pages, in learned verse laden with Latin and rare vocabulary.
Prizes and reception
A landmark collection by a poet regarded as the leading representative of Slovak poetry between the wars.