Kolář – Whitman
Kolář and Whitman

A Meeting of Poets, the Role of the Czech Translation of Leaves of Grass in the Works of Jiří Kolář and Other Czech Poets

Summary/Abstract: This essay, in the form of a collage, pays tribute to the artist Jiří Kolář (1914–2002) and clarifies the special role of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) in the context of Kolář’s own works and in Czech poetry of the 1950s. It provides room for the views, for example, of Jan Grossman (1925–1993), Josef Čapek (1887–1945), and Emanuel Frynta (1923–1975), to explain the unique nature of Kolář as aman and his creative and intellectual potential, which ‘destined’ him to translate Leaves of Grass. It looks back at the inspiration of Whitman’s verse and opinions, and its translation into Czech by JaroslavVrchlický (1853–1912), Emanuel z Lešehradu (1877–1955), and Pavel Eisner (1889–1958), and its meaning in the history of Czech poetry from the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth.

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