Krvavé sonety - The Bloody Sonnets

Poet, playwright, writer, eminent translator and lawyer, Pavol Országh, commonly known by his pen name 'Hviezdoslav' is one of the most important figures of Slovak literature and culture. The Bloody Sonnets is a cycle of 32 sonnets that he wrote, aged 65, between August and September 1914, in the early months of World War 1 and long before the full horrors of this war had unfolded. The sonnets were first published in 1919 in Prague, as they could not have been published during the war, without severe consequences for the author, publisher and printer.
Unlike many poets, such as Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke and Rainer Maria Rilke, who were enthusiastically pro-war as fighting in Europe began, Hviezdoslav's poems were a passionate response to the growing hostilities into which his native country, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was entering.
In his preface to The Bloody Sonnets, John Minahane calls Hviezdoslav one of the major poets of the First World War: a “Slavic Don Quixote” who “flung himself … against the poets of all Europe”. This collection of sonnets expressed a robust anti-war sentiment. At a time when poetry on both sides of the conflict celebrated the virtue and beauty of fighting and dying for one’s country, Hviezdoslav was referring to the war as a “human slaughterhouse” in which “nation hurled itself on nation, massed / intending murder, rabid to destroy”.
This new translation by John Minahane was published to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War and we are delighted to welcome John to the Centre for an interview about his work on this collection.

John Minahane was born in Baltimore in Ireland and has lived in Slovakia since 1996. In recent years he has translated works of poetry and fiction. These include selections from two major Slovak poets (Ladislav Novomeský, Slovak Spring, Belfast 2004; Milan Rúfus, To Bear The Burden And Sing, Martin 2008) and the classic novel by Margita Figuli, Three Chestnut Horses, Budapest 2014. His translations of living Slovak writers include Six Slovak Poets, ed. Igor Hochel, Todmorden 2010, and most recently Eleni Caj, A Butterfly’s Trembling in the Digital Age, Cardigan 2017. John has also written extensively on literature in the Irish language and has translated works from Irish and German.