Ketos A Poet by Night

The great Czech poet and surrealist Vítězlav Nezval (1900-1958) is a phenomenon: hardly anyone has managed to help language achieve such beauty. The poet and translator Ondřej Cikán has now brought this beauty into German. The centre of the anthology 'A Poet by Night' is Nezval's virtuoso long poems 'For the Night' and 'Edison', which are still popular in the Czech Republic today. They are completed by poems from different creative periods, e.g. 'Cocktails', 'Death Bell for Otokar Březina', 'A Little Cloth and Adieu' and 'Verses about Prague'. In the appendix there is, on the one hand, a crime novel entitled 'The Poet' by Karel Čapek, in which Nezval is lovingly taken to task, and, on the other, the famous poem 'Zone' by Guillaume Apollinaire, whose Czech translation by Karel Čapek inspired Czech poets to develop their own genre, the 'zone poem'.