In the Image of Their Muse. The Pinnacle of Czech Poetry with a Western and Eastern Touch

May, an 1836 poem by the Czech Romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836), is undoubtedly the most famous and most influential piece of Czech poetry. The poem has, however, never gained much popularity with reading audiences abroad, despite a plethora of translations into a great many languages. This paper focuses on the utmost achievement of Czech poetic discourse as viewed from the Russian and English, or Eastern and Western, perspectives. First, it briefly recounts the history of the poem’s reception at home, from its outright rejection and criticism, lasting exactly one hundred years. Second, it examines the poem’s poetic qualities, sketching its setting and plot to show the context and subtext, and juxtaposes some of the main passages of the original with their different versions in English and Russian, attempting to reveal Mácha’s poetic potential, or Muse. Third, it follows up on two empirical studies by a Czech scholar, Jiří Levý, revealing how the poetic potential, or Muse, of the respective translators have been moulded by their target language cultures, especially in terms of Romantic fatalism, the stock-in-trade of Romantic poetry, coined by George Gordon Byron, and the religious spirit as captured in the works of Russian nineteenth-century writers. The comparative reading also reveals, as a kind of side effect, how translation as such may enhance our understanding of the source text.