Poetry
Sláva's Daughter
Slávy dcera
Ján Kollár · 1824
Synopsis
A traveller journeys through the lands where Slavic was once spoken, from the Saale to the Elbe and then the Danube, and counts the Germanised villages, the translated place names, the graves. He loves a woman he met in Germany, Mína, and ends up seeing in her the daughter of the goddess Sláva and the figure of the peoples to come. One hundred and fifty sonnets follow this double path, preceded by a funeral lament for the lost lands.
Context
The book takes up the eighty-six sonnets of the author's first collection, published in 1821 under the influence of Petrarch's Canzoniere, discovered in Jena in a German translation. It appeared in Pest in 1824: a prologue in elegiac couplets, then three cantos, Sála, Labe and Dunaj. The 1832 edition brought the whole to six hundred and fifteen sonnets in five cantos, the two new ones, Léthé and Achéron, borrowing from the Divine Comedy a Slavic paradise and hell. John Bowring translated some of the sonnets into English as early as 1832.
Who it is for
A smaller number of sonnets in the 1824 edition, many more in the 1832 edition, which adds two cantos. In French, only a few sonnets have appeared, in a 1987 anthology.
Prizes and reception
His most famous work, a major contribution to the nascent Pan-Slavism; its form as a love and patriotic poem became a model for Czech and Slovak letters.