May - Hardcover

As opposed to the other important 19th-century European poets, Macha's work has been largely ignored in English translation. The present volume, the sole to exist in English, provides the original Czech text in parallel."

Karel Hynek Mácha was born on November 16, 1810 in an old part of Prague where his father was the foreman at one of the city's mills. At school he learned Latin and German, the two languages approved by the Hapsburg authorities, and later studied law at Prague University. His great model was Byron, with whom he shared a romantic idealism, wandering the Bohemian countryside to visit castle ruins, always making sketches and notes describing the natural beauty surrounding him. Influenced by the Czech intellectuals who were trying to revive the language at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Mácha wrote May and many of his poems in Czech (though his early writing was in German, the compulsory language of his education). In this way he identified himself with the Byronic hero who gives his life to a cause. Mácha died of pneumonia on November 5, 1836 just shy of his 26th birthday.