Zpíváno do rotačky / Básně do sbírek nezařazené / Překlady (Dílo J. Seiferta, sv. 4)

The fourth volume of Jaroslav Seifert’s Collected Works features poetry true to its title—these are poems that Jaroslav Seifert, following his expulsion from the Communist Party (1929), generally published anonymously in the second half of the 1930s in the Social Democratic daily press (Ranní noviny, Právo lidu, Večerník Práva lidu, etc.). In a regular column in Pondělní ranní noviny, known as the “Monday Verses,” Seifert responds to current events of all kinds, ranging from the vagaries of the weather to the results of Sunday derbies, political and cultural scandals of the First Republic (the activities of Jiří Stříbrný, the controversy with J. S. Machar), and the global situation (the rise and ascendancy of Hitler’s Germany, the Spanish Civil War) to more timeless and cyclical themes such as the start of the school year or May Day, which allows us to trace the development of Seifert’s poetic motifs. Jaroslav Seifert compiled some of these verses, illustrated by the prominent cartoonist František Bidl, into the satirical collection *Zpíváno do rotačky*, which has been published several times; a portion of these verses is included in *The Works of Jaroslav Seifert*, edited by A. M. Píša (1957). The volume thus offers a counterpart to Jaroslav Seifert’s separate collections and his journalism from that period, previously unpublished in book form. It also contains several short translations from that time, the usual variant readings, explanatory notes, and an index of names—Published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Prague, the Czech Literary Fund Foundation, the City of Kralupy nad Vltavou, and the Charter 77 Foundation.