Rio Preisner's poetic works in English
The collection Prague in Thaw (Praha za časů plujících ker) by Professor Rio Preisner was first published in Czech in 1992 by the publishing house Pražská imaginace. It was the first volume of his poetic works published in his homeland since he left Czechoslovakia in 1968. The collection was inspired by Preisner’s first visit home following the liberation of Czechoslovakia from Soviet hegemony in 1990.
Masaryk University Press now presents the book in a bilingual edition, pairing the Czech original text with an English translation by the author’s former student, Charles S. Kraszewski. Written in a demanding, allusive style that recalls the work of Georg Trakl and T. S. Eliot, the collection is a reckoning with Czechoslovakia as it emerged from five decades of Communist oppression. It is not a work of nostalgia, it is the clear-eyed assessment of Prague, and Czech society and culture, as the exile experienced it after an absence of over two decades.
Originally a consideration of how the Prague he loved had been affected by ‘enslavement’, today – three decades into Czech freedom – it is time to consider it as a touchstone for our own musings upon how far Prague, and the Czechs, have come since the emancipation brought by the Velvet Revolution.
Rio Preisner (1925–2007) was a poet, essayist, literary historian, and translator. He was born in 1925 in Mukačevo, then part of Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine). After World War II he studied German and English at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, where he earned his PhD in 1950 with a dissertation on the work of Franz Werfel. In 1952 he was imprisoned by the Communist regime and spent two years in a Stalinist labor camp. After his release he worked in Prague as a teacher of German at the State Academy of Languages and as a translator. In 1968 he went into exile with his family, first to Vienna and later to the United States. Until his retirement in 1992 he taught in the Department of German at Pennsylvania State University. Preisner is best known to Czech readers as the author of essays and prose works, notably the two-volume Americana (1992), a reflection on American democracy, and his “trilogy on totalitarianism”: A Critique of Totalitarianism (1973), Czech Existence (1984), and To the Very End of Czechia (1987). At the same time, he was a distinctive and accomplished poet, the author of eight poetry collections ranging from City Plan (1968) to Viennese Veduti (1994). In 1997, the Prague publishing house Torst issued his Collected Poems (Básně).
Prague in Thaw was published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Rio Preisner’s birth, at the initiative and with the generous support of the author’s daughter, Mrs. Ruth Preisner Quinlan, to whom we extend our sincere thanks. Our gratitude also goes to Professor Charles S. Kraszewski, the translator and author of the afterword and glossary, and to Professor Jiří Hanuš, author of the foreword. Their support and inspiration were instrumental in the creation of this bilingual edition.
