Poetry
May
Máj
Karel Hynek Mácha · 1836
Synopsis
On the shore of a Bohemian lake, a young woman waits for the man she loves. She is told that he is locked up in the castle, tried for a murder, and that he will die in the morning. The prisoner, leader of a band in the forest, spends his last night at the window of the keep: he listens to spring rising from the lake and asks what comes after.
Context
Rejected by publishers, the poem was published at the author's expense on 23 April 1836, by the Prague printer Jan Spurný, in six hundred copies, preceded by a dedicatory poem: it was the only book published in its author's lifetime. Patriotic critics reproached it for its lack of national spirit, and Josef Kajetán Tyl parodied it. The second edition, prepared in 1845 by Karel Sabina, gave an incomplete text; the 1836 edition was not reprinted as it stood until 1903.
Who it is for
Four cantos broken by two interludes, 824 lines in rhymed iambic tetrameters, preceded by a dedication. The text can be read in French in Xavier Galmiche's volume published in 2007.
Prizes and reception
Panned on its publication, the poem now counts more than two hundred and fifty Czech editions, and the generation of the 1850s claimed its title as a banner.