The Short Career of Riccardo Selvi as Translator of Czech Poetry in the Early 1930s

This article reconstructs the short career of Riccardo Selvi as a translator of Czech poetry. Thanks to archival documents and reviews published in Czech newspapers regarding his work, we have been able to reconstruct his rather singular literary path. In addition to his translation of Máj (‘May’) by K.H. Mácha — his most famous exploit —, we examine his translation of the libretto for Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka in the context of the controversy that ensued in the newspaper Lidové noviny. Selvi’s efforts help to shed light on the essential role played by Czechoslovakian institutions, in terms of their financial support, and on various strategies of poetic translation outside the academic world during the 1930s.