On the Waves of the Wireless (1925) can be called Jaroslav Seifert’s first mature collection of poetry, although he was only 24 when it was published and although, as he recollects in his memoir All the Beauties of the World, it was composed on a lark and as a jeux d’esprit.

As first published, the book’s design was an explosion of typographical exuberance and sight gags. Seifert recounts how he and his graphic designer friend Karel Teige raided the typefaces of their Prague printer to produce a collection unlike anything seen before in Czech. A love poem, for example, was offset by the brand name of a condom manufacturer on the facing page.

Despite the jokes and playfulness, the work is a masterpiece of poetic vision in keeping with Seifert’s avant-garde manifesto of poetism, which “rather than inventing new worlds, reinvents the world as it is to become one vast poem.” This can most clearly be seen in the 1938 revision Svatební cesta (Honeymoon), which removed typographical idiosyncrasies to let the poetry speak for itself.

The book’s epigraph is an inversion of lines from the romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha, known to every Czech reader: “On the face a faint grief / and deep in the heart a smile.” Seifert proclaims that although the world as we see it seems sometimes intolerably sad, there is always a cause for hope and rejoicing.

Na vlnách TSF may thus be seen as a programmatic, book-length expansion of the “Monologue of the Handless Soldier” from his first collection, Město v slzách (City in Tears, 1921), in which a war veteran who has every reason to be bitter and resentful refuses self-pity and instead praises the world in which he and his able-bodied fellows live.

Where Město adopted the voices of anonymous Prague citizens and the proletariat, Na vlnách TSF is unabashedly high-brow, invoking Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Mayakovsky. The poems grew out of a trip to Paris with Teige in 1924 but equally out of the enthusiasm for French modernism, which was a feature of Czech literary life in those years. Even the title plays on this enthusiasm; at the time there was no Czech term for the wireless radio, and the French term télégraphe sans fils was used instead.

The most accomplished celebration of modernism and technology, however, is not one of the Paris poems, but rather the piece that Seifert chose as the title poem of the 1938 revision, Svatební cesta (Honeymoon), where the ecstatic description of a train journey through the Alps mimics the rhythm of the railway carriage itself, and French words are expertly, even impertinently, caught up in the Czech rhyme scheme. There is also a healthy, thrilling dose of sexual joy in the poem. Throughout his life, Seifert loved women and loved to celebrate their charms.

Dana Loewy includes the collection as Svatební cesta among his translations, published as The Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert (Northwestern University Press, 1997).

Categories: Literature, World Literature

Tags: Analysis of Jaroslav Seifert’s On the Waves of the Wireless, Czech modernist poetry, Czech poetry 1920s, Dana Loewy translations, Honeymoon poem Seifert, Jaroslav Seifert avant-garde, Jaroslav Seifert biography, Jaroslav Seifert early works, Jaroslav Seifert literary criticism, Jaroslav Seifert modernism, Jaroslav Seifert poetry, Jaroslav Seifert themes, Mésto v slzách analysis, On the Waves of the Wireless academic article, On the Waves of the Wireless analysis, On the Waves of the Wireless character study, On the Waves of the Wireless criticism, On the Waves of the Wireless plot, On the Waves of the Wireless poem meaning, On the Waves of the Wireless summary, On the Waves of the Wireless themes, poetism movement, Seifert and Apollinaire, Seifert and Cendrars, Seifert and French modernism, Seifert and Karel Teige, Seifert and Mayakovsky, Seifert City in Tears, Seifert love poems, Seifert poetic style, Seifert train poem analysis, Svatební cesta analysis