First name

Pavol Országh

Pseudonym

Hviezdoslav, Jozef Zbranský

Birth date

02. 02. 1849  [en] Vyšný Kubín

Death date

08. 11. 1921  [en] Dolný Kubín

Fields of interest

poézia, dráma, preklad

Briefly about author

He published his first poetry under the pseudonym Jozef Zbránsky in the late 1860's whilst still a student at Kežmarok. But sometime in the middle of the 1870's the young Pavol Országh decided on the poetic name "Hviezdoslav" ("Star-lauder") and subsequently used just this one-word pseudonym. It was not a chance decision because from childhood he had been fascinated by the view of the eternal spaces of the night sky seeded by the immense mass of stars and constellations and certainly also because through this sight he gradually came to realise the great beauty of the universe and felt wonder at the fact that man, too, is part of this, that a concrete individual received the capability to perceive this universe, to understand and reflect on it. In such a "cosmic" reflection the constant pillar of Hviezdoslav's work was formed - for example, the notion of "freedom" and "justice" valid for all people and all nations - and here, too, the basic architectonic conceptions of his work were conceived: Hviezdoslav formed himself as the type of creative artist consciously attempting to achieve a high level of universality in his work. Although the intrinsic character of his individual talent was, above all, lyrical, he also became an important epic poet and translator and, to give due to his relatively numerous occasional poems (often written as a result of a direct social commission), even a significant poet-commentator, very sensitively and often very precisely observing the ebb and flow of national life at the time of its awakening. What is striking about his work is not only its variety as to genre, theme and form, but also by its unusual richness of motif and thought, resulting from the uncommon breadth of Hviezdoslav's spiritual and educational horizons. This fact should be mentioned particularly in view of the poet's life having been confined to a narrow region - a fate, perhaps, that he had not chosen voluntarily but which he accepted consciously so that he could identify with it not only at "the bread and butter" level (as a local village barrister) but as a creative person spending a large and for him a fundamental part of his life "in the service of the spirit" through activity in the "the gleaming chambers of poetry". Thus it became evident that this man "timidly wading his shallow Orava river" vis à vis the mighty seas of Shakespeare's poetry (his self-description when translating Hamlet) is one of the most universal spirits of Slovak literature and national culture; and owing to the monumental conception and internal articulation of its linguistic means, the architecture of his poetic work is a unique literary act. At the same time this work is difficult for the reader because the living roots of Hviezdoslav's art are deeply and firmly rooted in his native Orava. The crown of his work rises towards "star-spangled" fantasies, desires and ideas where he encounters the illuminating genius of world poetry. The ceaseless circulation of significant impulses - feeling, emotions, images, thoughts - between the roots and the crown creates the semantic nerve system of the whole of Hviezdoslav's work: from the level of a specific earthiness it connects with the level of universal humanity, and even of a "cosmic mind", in order to return to the earth and always towards a new, often dramatically experienced expression of his own, essentially human destiny and mission. This central pole of significance leading from the earth to the stars and from the stars returning to the earth, immortalised (perhaps only intuitively) in the semantics of his pseudonym, Hviezdoslav, chosen in the poet's youth, became the identifying supporting element of the poetic system of his work, but simultaneously the ideational principle of the whole of the artistic architecture of the poetic works of Hviezdoslav.

Briefly about production

poetry (lyrical collections and cycles):
The Poetic First Flowers of Jozef Zbránsky (Básnické prviesienky Jozefa Zbránskeho, 1868), Northern Lights (Severne žiare, 1870), Hearth and Campfire (Krb a vatra, 1880), Sonnets (Sonety, 1886), Offshoots I-III (Letorosty I-III, 1885 - 1895), Walks in the Spring (Prechádzky jarom, 1898), Plaints I-IV (Stesky I-IV, 1903 -1907), Reverberations I-III (Dozvuky I-III, 1909 - 1911), The Sonnets of Blood (Krvavé sonety, 1914), In an Autumn Midnight (V jesennú polnoc, 1916 - 1920). The collection of poems, Nenogista roze, published in 2011 in Latvian contains also selected poems by him. 

epic poems:
Agar (1883), The Gamekeeper's Wife (Hájnikova žena, 1884 - 1886), Bútora and Čútora (Bútora a Čútora, 1888), Rachel (1891), Ežo Vlkolinský (1891), Midday Meal (Poludienok, 1892), Supper (Večera, 1892), Cain (Kain, 1893), Christmas (Vianoce, 1897), Gábor Vlkolinský (1897 - 1899), The Dream of Solomon (Sen Šalamúnov, 1901), Shorter Epics (Kratšia epika, 1920), Two Visits (Dve návštevy, 1920)

drama:
Revenge (Pomsta, 1869), The Stepfather (Otčim, 1871), Clouds (Oblaky, 1879), Herod and Herodias (Herodes a Herodias, 1909)

collected works and selections:
The Collected Poetical Works of Hviezdosla, volumes 1 to 15 (Zobrané spisy básnické Hviezdoslava, zv. 1-15, 1892 - 1931), Biblical Poems (Básne biblické, 1912), The Writings of P.O. Hviezdoslav in 12 volumes (Spisy P.O. Hviezdoslava v 12 zväzkoch, 1951-1957), Poetic First Fruits (Basnicke prvotiny I-II, 1955-1956), Poetic Maturing I-II (Básnicke zrenie I-II, 1957-1958), Works I-IV (Dielo I-IV, 1973, second edition 1997-1998)

translations by the author:
With concentration and a well thought-out literary-cultural conception he devoted himself to translation in the last twenty years of his life. Collected posthumously into volumes 12 to 15 of The Collected Poetical Works of Hviezdoslav; these contain the works of, and selections from, the following authors: Shakespeare (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream), Goethe (Faust I, Iphigenia on Tauris, Ballads), Schiller (a selection of lyric poems), Pushkin (Boris Godunov, The Caucasian Captive, The Gypsies, Rusalka and others), Lermontov (A Song about the Emperor Ivan Vasilievitch, the Young Guard and the Doughty Merchant Kalashnikov, The Demon), Mickiewicz (Crimean Sonnets and others), Slowacki (In Switzerland and others), Petőfi (a selection of his lyrics), Arany (lyric poems and ballads), Madách (The Tragedy of Man)

works translated into foreign languages:
Book editions of various works have been published in Czech, Russian, Hungarian, German, French, English, Georgian and Ukrainian. He is also present in foreign anthologies of Slovak literature (Polish, Russian and others)

Biography for author

His civic name was Pavol Országh. He was born 2 February 1849 in the village of Vyšný Kubín in the Orava region in northern Slovakia. His family was of landowning (yeoman) origin although they lived from working their own large farm. After completing elementary school in his native district in 1862 he was sent to further studies, graduating for the first three years from the gymnázium (secondary school) in the Hungarian city of Miskolc where he began to write his first poems in Hungarian. Beginning with the fourth year he attended the gymnázium in Kežmarok and continued his studies, maturing to a Slovak national consciousness and towards writing in Slovak. He matriculated in 1870 and studied for two years at the Law Academy in Prešov. After working for various advocates in Dolný Kubín, Martin and Senica, he passed the necessary examinations in Budapest in 1875 and was able to open his own practice in the small town of Námestovo in northern Orava. In 1876 he married Ilona Nováková, daughter of the Protestant senior clergyman Samuel Novák in Dolný Kubín, and gained a position in the Orava county court in this town. However, he remained in the service of the state for only a short time. In 1879 he returned to the life of an independent barrister, again in Námestovo, where he remained for the next twenty years. In 1899 he moved again to Dolný Kubín, but he was not successful in continuing his legal practice, so in 1902 he formally retired. He continued his literary work, both original and translations, for which he received a number of prizes even outside the Slovak literary world. In 1912 he was elected a member of the Hungarian "Kisfaludi Society" and in 1913 a member of the Czech Academy of Science and Arts. At the beginning of the First World War he reacted from the standpoint of an unswerving humanist with a cycle The Sonnets of Blood (written in August and September 1914) which could not be published until after the war. In May 1918 he led the Slovak delegation to the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre of Prague where he inserted into his speech a hint on the possibility of a close co-existence of Czechs and Slovaks in the future. So he accepted with enthusiasm the founding of Czechoslovakia at the end of that year and the establishment of realistic prospects for the free growth of Slovak national life. However, he did not live long enough to enjoy the new political situation, dying 8 November 1921.

about author

Hviezdoslav came as an artistic genius greater than all who had come before to capture all the threads of Slovak artistic and literary creation and spin it with a strong gentle hand and with a new brightening of colour in the cloth representing Slovak life, expressing the Slovak spirit for all time.

His poetry is a permanent electric tension between the heavens and the earth (the real and unembellished, dusty, dirty, oppressed and poor earth), between God and man, between the ideal Good and ideal Justice and the devastating and humiliating and, if you wish, shameful reality. "Don't we walk daily through the underworld?" he asks, the poet whom we are used to look for somewhere in the empyrean and among flowers.

Sample

FALLEN ARE THE LEAVES