SOURCE: A review of The Casting of Bells, in Slavic Review, Vol. 45, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 171-72.

A Czechoslovakian-born American educator and critic, Salzmann specialized in Slavic Studies and anthropology. In the review below, she offers praise for Seifert, but laments the degree to which his translators distorted his verse in the English-language version of Odlévání zvonů (The Casting of Bells).

Publication of an English translation of a work by a poet who subsequently is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is a significant event, and it was particularly so in the case of Jaroslav Seifert, the 1984 Nobel laureate, whose extensive poetic work is virtually unknown to the English-speaking public. Of his many hundred poems, gathered over the past sixty years into some thirty-odd volumes, only a score of individual pieces and one other collection, Morový sloup have thus far been rendered in English. An attempt to...