Antilyrik and Other Poems

Vítêzslav Nezval (1900-1958) was an active participant in the European avant-garde between the two world wars. In the 1920s, he was the founding figure of "poetism," a movement of poets and artists centered in Prague. Like other major innovators, he worked through a prolific sweep of modes and genres: open and closed forms of verse, experimental plays and novels, numerous translations of his modern counterparts and predecessors, and forays as composer, painter, journalist, and social commentator. In the foreground of avant-garde activity in Prague, Nezval forged an alliance with André Breton and his Paris circle in the 1930s, founding the first Surrealist group and magazine outside of France.

Antilyrik and Other Poems brings together, for the first time in English, a sampling of some of Nezval's major poems from the 1920s and '30s, revealing the extraordinary depth and breadth of his poetic project.

Jerome Rothenberg, co-translator with Milos Sovak, is an internationally known poet and author of over sixty volumes of poems and nine assemblages of innovative and traditional poetry. He translated Federico García Lorca's Suites for Green Integer. A physician and researcher, Milos Sovak has been active since the 1960s as a book designer, typographer and the publisher of limited edition books through Ettan Press in California. He is the son of a Prague family with close personal ties to Nezval.

See the PIP Biography of this author