The House of the Tragic Poet

This gripping epic poem recreates the last days of Pompeii with all the wit and humour of an erudite disaster movie. Czech poet Vladimir Janovic brings to life characters from the mosaic of the floor of the House of the Tragic Poet in the final hours before the volcano erupts and the lava flows. Vladimir Janovic writes: 'The mosaic shows a group of six young men about to enact a satyr play. I am trying to tell the story of this small theatrical company as it prepared its dramatic offering for the summer feast of the Vulcanalia, an offering intended to appease the god of fire. But we are in the year AD 79, a few days before the eruption of Vesuvius.' Translator Ewald Osers calls the poem 'a quite remarkable achievement: the accuracy of archaeological detail combined with the sensitive recreation of the characters and the atmosphere lend the work a persuasiveness and a credibility that, heightened by Janovic's powerful poetic language, grip the reader almost as if he were reading a thriller. And it is not, of course, only about the last days of Pompeii: it is about real people, about human relationships, about life and death, and about tragic poetry as one of man's ways of coping with life and death.' First published in Czech in 1984, The House of the Tragic Poet appears at the same time as a companion volume, The New Czech Poetry.

About the Author :
Vladimir Janovic, born 1935, published his first poems in periodicals in 1962. His first volume, Black-out of Paradise, was published in 1968. Both it and his next book, Romulus's Lamentation (1970), reflect an existentialist sense of loneliness, senselessness and pointlessness. By the time his next volume, Honeycomb of Clay (1975), appeared Janovic had arrived at a brighter, more active view of existence. His work not only contains a few baroque themes, but he also uses an increasing range of strict traditional forms, from the ghazal to the rondel. As a kind of follow-up to the rondel 'Leningrad' from Honeycomb of Clay Janovic in 1978 published a cycle of twelve cantos, Poem about a Snowy Levitation, a highly successful poetical composition inspired by one of those magical "white nights" for which Leningrad is famous. It is, at the same time, a personal experience and a poetic awareness of the city of the Revolution, the city of the Blockade, the city of Peter the Great, Pushkin, Lenin, Blok and Akhmatova. The work is written in finely chiselled verse, in the tradition of the great pre-war Czech poets Vitezslav Nezval and Josef Hora. A very different book is his next volume of poetry, Fair in the Mist, whose individual poems are a kind of emotional biography of the author, from boyhood to adulthood. All Your Bodies (1983) revealed a power¬fully sensual and erotic note in Janovic's poetry. His close links with Italian culture and art are reflected in many of Janovic's poems, as well as by his translation of Cristofanelli's book on Michelangelo and his selection of Eisner's pre-war translations of Michelangelo's poetry. Most strongly, however, this "Italian side" of his artistic person¬ality emerges from The House of the Tragic Poet (1984), a lyrical-epic – Janovic's description - poetic evocation of Pompeii a few days before its obliteration by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius. It is a quite remarkable achievement: the accuracy of archaeological detail combined with the sensitive recreation of the characters and the atmosphere lend the work a persuasiveness and a credibility that, heightened by Janovic's powerful poetic language, grip the reader almost as if he were reading a thriller. And it is not, of course, only about the last days of Pompeii: it is about real people, about human relationships, about life and death, and about tragic poetry as one of man's ways of coping with life and death.