Překlady Vítězslava Nezvala: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé

This article analyses three sets of translations that form the core of Vítězslav Nezval’stranslation work: The Work of Arthur Rimbaud (1930), The Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé(1931) and a selection from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (completed 1931,published posthumously 1964). It observes that Nezval declares the translation to bean “analogy and imitation of the original poem”, created ex novo from the original“content and verbal material”, as this is in line with translation theory at that time,which demanded that a translation should above all be an original poem. In keepingwith this principle, Nezval has Rimbaud speak in the modern poetic language whichspeaks for itself in his collections. His poetic licence is then excused, if not justified,by the conviction that Rimbaud’s poetics are the product of a modernism thatbasically consists in the associative mechanism. However, Rimbaud’s, Baudelaire’sand Mallarmé’s modernism does not work on the basis of the associative principle:quite the reverse, the works of all these poets are characterized by highly rationalstructuralization. Hence Nezval presented a quite specific “imitation” of the originaltexts, projecting his own poetics that were in thrall to a cubist-poetist faith in poeticimagery in perpetural motion.