Translations of Vitezslav Nezval: RIMBAUD, BAUDELAIRE, MALLARME

This article analyses three sets of translations that form the core of Viterslav Nezval's translation work: The Work of Arthur Rimbaud (1930), The Poetry of Stephane Mallarme (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 be an "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 keeping with this principle, Nezval has Rimbaud speak in the modern poetic language which speaks 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 that basically consists in the associative mechanism. However, Rimbaud's, Baudelaire's and Mallarme'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 rational structuralization. Hence Nezval presented a quite specific "imitation" of the original texts, projecting his own poetics that were in thrall to a cubist-poetist faith in poetic imagery in perpetural motion.