Background
Jaroslav Siefert spent most of the 20th century being buffeted by some of the greatest forces of social upheaval you could imagine. A Czech student who saw the shell shocked and pained soldiers return from the Great War only to watch in horror as the Nazis siezed his country there after and then hail the Russians as liberators only to sour on them and confront the Soviet explotaition of Czechoslovakia as well. Seifert loved poetry, and while he made his living as a journalist it’s his poetry that won him international recognition and respect, culminating in the 1984 Nobel Prize “for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man”
Works
“Life is a beautiful long dream
if you just live what’s in front of you”–About Childhood (translated by me with help of Google Translate)
“I cannot tear my eyes away
from that picture.
It is mine,
and I also believe it is miraculous.”“Old Tapestry”
Message
In a lot of what Seifert writes, there’s a sense of difficult and being weighed down (see Background for a sense as to all the stuff that weighed him down). But at the same time there is a joy and inspiration that he culls even from these moments of bleak oppression. I translated the “About Childhood Poem” illustrated above and read it to the boys (as I had intended to from the start of this project). While Owen saw it literally as watching your kids in a river bank, Alex thought it was more about not giving up, and I saw it as appreciating the moment. Honestly, chances are that we’re all right: there’s beauty in every moment, despite the cruel whims of politics.
Position: #7 Left Winger
Seifert’s ability to speak to both trauma and hope, both defensiveness and optimism, makes him an ideal attacker who can still be an asset on both sides of the ball. He doesn’t seem to have the breadth or scope of a central midfielder, but he seems like an ideal attacker who can make the needed moves both with and without the ball. In addition to the Eastern European heritage I can easily imagine him in Vozdovac highlight reels, so his colors reflect that team.
Obviously, reading a dozen or so poems by a man doesn’t make me an expert. Come on Czech literary geniuses bring on the criticism, I’m ready!
MacKenzie's Boot Room 