Hviezdoslav (Pavol Országh) - Letorosty

Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav was a Slovak poet, dramatist, writer, translator, jurist, a member of the Revolutionary National Assembly of Czechoslovakia (1918), honorary chairman of Matica slovenská (1919), and a reformer of the Slovak language and stylistics. This is the only translation by Vasyl Siomukha from the Slovak language, completed at the request of the Ambassador of Slovakia to Belarus in 2008 for the occasion of the First Belarusian National Dictation, written by Western ambassadors at the Belarusian Language Society. At the time when Országh wrote this poem, the situation of the Slovak language in Austria-Hungary was catastrophic. The aggression of the German language led to the near-total displacement of Slovak from use—a situation analogous to that experienced by the Belarusian language in our country.