[In the following review of A Wreath of Sonnets and a French-language anthology of Seifert's verse, Banerjee offers praise for the poet's oeuvre.]

Outside Czechoslovakia, the award of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature to Jaroslav Seifert (1901–86) was greeted with a yawn of indifference and a few winks hinting at the political inspiration behind the honor. Seifert was, after all, a lifelong Social Democrat from a victimized country, and he had gained world attention as the head of the Czech Union of Writers in the defiant months that followed the Russian invasion of 1968. However, to his people he was the much-loved, still-vibrant survivor of a magnificent generation of poets with roots in the 1920s. In this country journalists searching for a firmer footing for their comments soon found that apart from The Plague Column (1979), very little was available in English translation. The two books under review [A Wreath of Sonnets and Les danseuses passaient près d'ici: Choix de poèmes, 1921–1983] are a welcome attempt to fill the void.

[Translated by J. K. Klement and Eva Stucke, A Wreath of Sonnets] is a bilingual, Czech/English presentation of a linked cycle of fifteen sonnets about Prague, written in 1956. They represent a culmination of Seifert's "national" period, which began after the catastrophe of Munich, when he identified himself with the voice of his people's grief and bitter outrage. Ironically, in the fifties, even while his poems from Přílba hlíny (A Helmet-full of Earth; 1945) were being recited in the schools, his new writing was in official disfavor after he had published an unwelcome poem of mourning for the death of his friend, the great poet František Halas (1901–49). Věnec sonetů saw publication only in 1964, as part of the sixth volume of Seifert's collected works. The wreath form is a chain of sonnets linked by the obligatory repetition of each last line as the first line of the following poem. The fifteenth sonnet sums up the cycle, being made up of all the preceding fourteen last lines. Seifert uses this intricately patterned verbal design to develop his emotional meditation, a lover's argument, in favor of his decision to remain in Prague, even under the shadow of death. The last poems reads like a magic incantation intended to break the evil spell of the city's history.

The translators' preface makes it plain that they understood their challenge to be much more complex than the already formidable task posed by the virtuoso form. They had the benefit of an intimate knowledge of the rich but unobtrusive subtext of cultural allusions that Seifert blends into his concrete and spontaneous images of Prague. No matter how traditional his form, Seifert remained a modernist in essence, and his visual grasp of the concrete, his sensuous polyvalence, are derived from his years of apprenticeship in the avant-garde Devětsil group. But how can the translators recapture the epiphany in a single Seifert stanza, associating the glimpse of a momentarily bared bridesmaid's leg with the rose-colored glow on the windowpane of an old Carmelite convent on a particular street in Prague? The English translation breaks the spell of the moment by spelling out the erotic allusion of the blush in a simile ("the windows of Carmelitesses / shine like a rosy, blushing face") that is nowhere to be found in the original, which had relied on juxtaposition only and left the blush for the experiencing imagination of poetic arousal. Before...