From Library Journal
After huge success translating the Old English heroic narrative Beowulf, 1995 Nobel Laureate Heaney turns his attention to folk song. Written by an unknown poet later identified as Ozef Kalda, these poems were published in a newspaper in a town in Moravia, where the great Czech composer Leo Jan cek (1854-1928) lived and taught. At the age of 63, Jan cek had a passion-filled relationship with a young married woman he met on holiday, which in 1917-19 inspired "Diary of One Who Vanished," a song cyle, or interrelated series of lyrics, using Kalda's poems. "The standard fare of folk song," the poems recount the sad story of how a "young gypsy girl" lures a farm boy away from his home into the forest. Heaney's version of the 21 dramatic songs forms the lyrics for a new international coproduction of Jan cek's work, which had its premiere in Dublin in 1999. The ballad-like Czech setting and rural landscape of County Derry, Northern Ireland, where Heaney grew up and which has been the enduring inspiration of his work, have distinctive kinship. Elegant as a Renaissance miniature or Shakespearean song, spare yet sophisticated, this charming translation fuses a master craftsman's command of the vernacular with "love's/ Deep dream and yearning."DFrank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
In a follow-up to his grand translation of
Beowulf, Heaney brings to English a tiny cycle of Czech love poems made famous by Janacek, who first set them to music in 1919. A classic tale of forbidden love, the poems relate the experiences of a young farm boy who forsakes house and home to run off with an irresistible Gypsy girl. The boy's sexual epiphany, brought on by the girl's seductive manner and sad plight, comes off the page in tight syllabic verse that effectively captures the earthy qualities of his consuming love. Only the diary remains in the end, sole witness to this carpe diem affair, as Johnny follows his Zefka and their newborn son into the forest with the paradoxical farewell: "To find my life, I lose it." Perhaps it was the timeless drama of these slight lines that appealed to Janacek when he first spotted the 23 anonymous poems titled
From the Pen of a Self-Taught Man in his local paper in May 1916 (it was not until 1977 that Kalda's authorship came to light); perhaps, too, the lure of a relationship ultimately relegated to the page intrigued this avid letter writer who saved all of his correspondence. We do know that the then, 63-year-old Janacek identified the poems' "Zefka" as one Kamila Stosslova, the muse of his last and wildly prolific years, who was 38 years his junior at the time of their meeting and who never fully returned his obsessive affection. Heaney highlights the fascinating convolutions of the Diary's compositional history in his introduction, adding that his translation was commissioned by the English National Opera and taken on by him as a sort of "experiment" in wedding a singable English version of the poems with Janacek's folk melodies-no small feat.A delightful little libretto of love at all costs results, bearing a music all its own. --
Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
