On the Waves of TSF / Na vlnách TSF - Seifert Jaroslav

The famous modernist manifesto Revolutionary Anthology Devětsil, published in the winter 1922, lists two editors, Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) and Karel Teige (1900–1951). Similarly, we should preface the 1925 collection Na vlnách TSF (On the Waves of TSF) with the names of these two authors, leading representatives of the Czech avantgarde between the two World Wars and founding members of the artists’ group Devětsil. Karel Teige laid out the verses of his friend Jaroslav Seifert as striking typographical poems. Purportedly, he “depleted” nearly all the font cases he could find at Obzina’s printing shop. In any case, he faithfully fulfilled the precepts of poetism about the world and poetry—to be multisensory. Imbued with “all the beauties of the world,” Seifert’s verses are introduced with a mischievously reversed paraphrase of Karel Hynek Máchas (1810–1836) famous words: Light grief on the face / Deep laughter in the heart. With the effortlessness mimicking wireless transmission, Seifert and Teige transport us to Paris (Seifert visited the City of Light with Teige in 1924), to places where pineapples grow, to Australia, Marseille, New York, to distant ocean shores, and back to the banks of the Vltava river in Prague—all this facilitated, as it were, by Télégraphie sans fil (literally from French: wireless telegraphy). To be sure, the greatest concern of the lyrically gloomy narrator is joyfully unambiguous honeymoon destinations; if die we must
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