An overview of grants for publishers of Czech Literature abroad offered by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the Czech Literary Centre.

The Czech Literary Centre asked four experts from four European countries to write an overview of trends in literature for children and young adults in their country. In November we published texts on the situation in Germany and France (check them out HERE) and in December we continue with texts from Britain and Spain.

3. Great Britain

What’s new on the British “kid lit” scene
 
When looking for trends in the world of literature for children and young adults in Britain, one has to keep in mind the obvious: English is an omnipresent lingua franca spoken both as a first and second language, and English-language books for children are part of a vast industry that caters for the educational and leisure needs of a global population of readers.

The other aspect worth stressing is that books for young readers are part of an infrastructure that includes not only publishing, bookselling and the libraries network, but also an array of institutions, organisations and associations that promote literacy and reading, provide “discoverability” tools and produce educational resources. Apart from the UK chapter of the well-known international YBBY network, there are reading promotion charities, such as The Book Trust, The Reading Agency or the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, working alongside children’s librarians and teachers.
 
 

Recalibrating representation and inclusivity

 
One of the most significant recent trends is a continuous process towards “localisation” to ensure that English-language books reflect the world of their readers. If reading is to shape consciousness and help develop a sense of identity, children should be able to relate to the stories they read and identify with the characters. Yet, for too long, children’s books had been out of step with the diversity of British society. Reflecting Realities, a study commissioned by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), showed a significant need for better ethnic representation in children’s literature: only 1% of the 9115 children’s books published in the UK in 2017 had an ethnic minority protagonist, and only 4% featured any ethnic minority characters at all, while, as reported by the Education Department, 32% of school children in England are from minority background. The findings prompted the launch of a number of initiatives aimed at redressing this imbalance and led to the creation of recommended reading lists by websites such as Love Reading4Kids highlighting books with protagonists from ethnic background.

The Noughts & Crosses series. Foto: Amazon

Given the ongoing emphasis on the need to validate ethnic minority children’s reality and experience, the second survey conducted in 2018 and published the following year showed a welcome change to 4% of books featuring a minority protagonist. The same year saw the production of Noughts and Crosses, a television series based on the bestselling young adult novels by Malorie Blackman, Britain’s only children’s laureate of colour. The novels, the first of which was originally published back in 2001, were written in the genre of speculative fiction and presented an alternative future where race roles are reversed in a world where Africans had colonised Europe and subjugated the white population. This literary device makes young readers reflect on colonial history and the legacy of slavery reflected in societal inequality, a topic brought into focus by the Black Lives Matter campaign. The successful TV series was first aired in March 2020 with a sequel already announced.
 
 

“In Other Words” stands for Translation

 
Children’s books in translation is another trend worth mentioning in the context of growing diversity in “kid lit” publishing. Translated literature forms a very small share of newly published books, but the number of books in translation has been steadily rising in the past decade and have even been reported by Nielsen Book in 2019 to sell better than original writing. While this refers mostly to literary fiction for adults, there have been some translated books for young readers in the top selling category. Maps, the lavishly illustrated reference book for young readers by the Polish couple team Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński, is a case in point: the book became a surprise bestseller after it was published in 2013.

Daniel Mizieliński and Aleksandra Mizielińska. Photo: https://oladaniel.com/about

But most books in translation require a concentrated effort to materialise: the original has to be discovered and the translation and production often supported with a subsidy. This was demonstrated by In Other Words, a two-year programme by The Book Trust that aimed to raise the profile of translated books for young readers and to encourage UK publishers to publish more such titles. A shortlist, selected from around 200 submissions of original titles, was presented to British publishers with the incentive of a marketing subsidy and a toolkit with a range of resources.
 
 

A new old category: World Kid Lit

 
An ongoing campaign that champions diversity in children’s books is World Kid Lit, a blog run by a collective of volunteers. While “kid lit” is the trendy new label for children’s books, “world literature” is a term dating back to a time long before books for children and young adults were classified as a separate category. The blog coined a combination of the two and embarked on promotion of diversity in children’s literature with articles, interviews and reviews, as well as recommendations of titles for translation. Set up in 2016 with the idea of designating September as World Kid Lit Month, it now has a worldwide following among authors, translators, librarians and teachers, as well as publishers. It also lists books published in English translation, showing a year on year growth. And this is where the role of independent presses needs to be mentioned: the majority of books in translation, whether aimed at young readers or adults, are published by independents with dedicated imprints: Oneworld with Rock the Boat, Pushkin with Pushkin Children’s or The Emma Press, while Tiny Owl, Lantana and Book Island are children’s publishers committed to responding to the multicultural nature of British society. There are also recent newcomers, such as Centrala, a publisher specialising in graphic novels and comics, based in two locations in central Europe and in London.
 
 

Poetry for young readers

 
Trends in children’s literature often echo overall trends – after all, the boundary between age-defined reader categories can be blurred. In recent years, growing interest in poetry has been documented in sales and engagement with live poetry events and competitions, and the same trend has been observed in poetry for children. A 2018 survey by the National Literacy Trust found that “nearly half of children and young people engage with poetry in their free time, reading it, listening to it, writing it and performing it”, and there is a plethora of resources produced by the Poetry Society and other organisations to encourage even more such engagement. Numerous recommendation lists highlight themed poetry anthologies – focused on animals or nature – as well as titles by single authors, including children’s poetry classic Road Dahl or veterans Julia Donaldson, Brian Patten and Michael Rosen.

Dean Atta. Photo: Hussina Raja

But there are two books by young authors that stand out among the many recent publications, both employing poetic narrative to tackle tough topics: Dean Atta’s Black Flamingo (2019) weaves themes of race, gender, identity and coming of age into a beautifully crafted novel in verse about a mixed-race teenager who finds himself as a drag artist and eventually embraces his uniqueness. In the second book, The Girl Who Became a Tree (2020), the award-winning performance poet Joseph Coelho, who is immensely popular with children, turns from his trademark funny word play to a different tone in this delicate novel in poems, based on the myth of the nymph Daphne, about a young girl who loses her father.

– Alexandra Büchler
 
 

4. Spain

The panorama of Spanish literature for children and young adults
 
Details on sales of books for children and young adults in Spain for 2018 presented by various institutions⁵See the Spanish Book Market Report 2018. underscores the fact that this branch of the book market is blossoming and grows every year. Books for children and young adults earned 6% more than in the previous year and amounted to 14% of the output intended for export. This is logical in a country where 38% of the population admit to not reading a single book in a year and where total sales of books for children and young adults equals 12.8% of all the books sold. Data from the Ministry of Education and Culture⁶An overview of Spanish books published in 2018: sector analysis: https://sede.educacion.gob.es/publiventa/panoramica-de-la-edicion-espanola-de-libros-2018-analisis-sectorial-del-libro/estadisticas-libros-y-lectura/21661C has provided us with more information on what is going on.

Given the current fragmentation of the book market, the sector of books for children and young adults is one of the most active. I counted almost 100 independent publishers publishing children’s books in my own personal list. Some release five or six new titles each year, others more than 12. The large publishers from this sector publish textbooks, and their literary divisions are primarily aimed at schools. Mónica Rodríguez, Gonzalo Moure, Begoña Oro or Alfredo Gómez Cerdá are some of the authors that are repeatedly encountered in this group. These types of books usually deal with worthwhile and current social themes.

In 2017, 11,296 titles applied for an ISBN, though not all were published. This means 30 new titles on average per day. Given these numbers and despite the fact that applications were 29.3% lower in 2018, it remains an amount that is difficult to accommodate in terms of both economics and research. In the commercial system based on the large turnover of books, first runs rarely reach 2,000 books, and many of the smaller editions don’t even reach a print run of 500 copies, a quantity that the market is able to absorb. In this situation, it often happens that writers and illustrators publish many titles annually with the hope that their book will sell out. 99% of ISBNs requested in 2018 were for first editions. If we take into account that the average price of a children’s book is 10 euros, it is not necessary to do elaborate calculations to see that writers and illustrators barely make a living from the sale of their work.

One of the most striking tendencies in recent years was the large-scale production of picture and illustrated books. Publishers such as Siruela, Impedimenta or Nórdica have joined the ranks of traditional publishers of children’s books. The topics are varied: from educational through purely imaginative, where the illustrators show off their art, to even those focused on self-help such as the bestseller El monstruo de colores (The Colourful Monster, 2018) by Anna Llenas. This title has sold more than 500,000 copies and paved the way for similar books from other publishers. Everything that a parent or teacher who wants to use books to teach children, whether it is how to brush their teeth, become toilet trained, manage emotions, or warn of an environmental catastrophe, is available. I wrote about this phenomenon on my blog.⁷https://anatarambana.blogspot.com/2017/08/superlij-llega-la-literatura-infantil.html

Anna Llenas. Photo: Anna Llenas’s archive

Another interesting tendency was books for first time readers: i.e. small-sized fold-out books with rhymes about everyday topics. With regards to the usual themes, many books tend to be more sociological than literary: migration, ecological catastrophe and women’s issues. These books try to accommodate current social discussion and welcome the support of parents and teachers, the very people who buy these books.

The rise of nonfiction books deserves special attention. All publishers include in their range titles that attempt to increase factual knowledge. However, Zahorí Books is the only one that is exclusively dedicated to this field. Right now, a boom in books on nature is underway.

This development in picture books, it seems, pushed reading to the background for children from 8 to 12 years old. Book production was smaller and focused on issues connected with lessons or preserving classics. Therefore, the success of Los futbolísimos (The Footballest, 2018) by Roberto Santiago, which has sold more than two million copies over its 16 titles, is no surprise.

In recent years, comics and graphic novels have undergone an impressive rise, though 75% of the 4,000 titles released in 2019 were translations.⁸https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20200713/482289805817/el-75-de-los-comics-que-se-leen-en-espana-son-producciones-extranjeras.html The publisher Salamandra has widened knowledge of its name thanks to the Fnac Award (an international award for graphic novels Fnac-Salamandra Graphic, ed.) and operates side by side with other traditional publishers, such as Astiberri, Dibbuks and Norma among others. Among teachers and parents, this is an overlooked phenomenon, while at the same time, perhaps the most interesting works can be found there. One example is Artur Laperla and his series Superpatata (Super Potato, 2011), which has sold more than 40,000 copies, in which readers discover adventure as well as humour and lively dialogue.

– Ana Garralón

Europe continues to schlep all its unresolved and suppressed traumas from the centuries gone by. For many years the only thing that defined Europe was its entanglements with the past, with the detritus of old injustices, divisions of power, common culprits and collective victims. Lately, populism has proved to be a political stance with a capacity for responding to the prevailing emotions, prejudices and fears of its inhabitants. This is the kind of politics that feeds on frustrations and emotions and offers a political agenda that promises quick and straightforward solutions to any and every problem. Populism has been on the rise in many countries around the world, be they traditional or recent democracies. It is frequently appropriated by demagogues.

But Europe has a different tradition. In the Czech context, it is hard to imagine a time when Charter 77, the movement initiated by Václav Havel, didn’t exist. For imagining this conjures up a sense of total relativity of values. Charter 77 was the first significant act of solidarity in communist Czechoslovakia, a time when people found the courage to stand up for their rights. Furthermore, it awakened their sense of equality, solidarity, cohesiveness, togetherness and a selfless willingness to help one another. In this context, the 1968-1969 polemic between Václav Havel and Milan Kundera has gained a new relevance. Havel did not share Kundera’s a priori scepticism with regard to acts of civil courage that stand no chance of having an immediate effect. Havel believed that one was obliged to act as a matter of principle, for example when people were unjustly imprisoned. He emphasized the importance of long-term, assiduous work on the part of everyone who hasn’t tired of doing things like writing petitions again and again. And he believed that you should do these things even if it makes you look foolish. Upon their release, many former prisoners said that petitions on their behalf had given them much succour, making them feel that their imprisonment was not pointless. For unlike those “outside”, they were aware that a petition was about much more than their own release. At the same time, they said it was invaluable for them to know that they had not been forgotten, that there were people out there who shared their views and did not hesitate to take a public stand on their behalf at a time of widespread apathy and resignation. In our time the Turkish writer Aslı Erdoğan, the Kurdish author and politician Hevrin Khalaf and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo feel the same.

The European community, sovereignty and language

Currently we hear much talk of “European community and sovereignty”, on an international level. Nevertheless, 27 dwarves cannot turn into a giant capable of stopping another giant. All of the dwarves speak their own mother tongue and behave according to their own mentality. “France is the country of fashions, England the country of moods, Spain the country of ancestors, Italy the country of splendour and Germany the country of titles,” Immanuel Kant once said, sarcastically. The list could go on, with Western arrogance and inferiority complexes in the East added to the mix.

A key difficulty in translating specific national and period-related traits arises from the fact that we are not dealing with issues that can be easily grasped and identified, but rather specific qualities that pervade, to varying degrees, all aspects of speech, literary works or political rhetoric. Translating a text means expressing it in a unity of content and form through different linguistic material. Literary works and political speeches are unique, historically conditioned facts. The original and its translation cannot be identical. That is what makes translators and interpreters – people who are not only fluent in various languages but also well-read and thoroughly educated – so vital in Europe. Their work demands far more than a knowledge of languages: it is translators who help Europeans lacking a common language understand one another. For public intellectuals like Susan Sontag saw Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka as true giants and European culture as the source of all culture. From this perspective, Sontag regarded America as a European colony. Things are very different nowadays.

The comparison between the European Union and United States is not quite apt: we lack a common language and cultural background, and our way of thinking is also related to language. Language is of paramount importance. After all, even if a word has survived intact, it can mean so many different things. In the European context, it is empty clichés and their impact that are of particular concern. We live in a world in which linguistic interpretations carry far more weight than reality itself. They actually become reality, from which “actual reality” is derived. We need to ask the question: what is the truth of language? In his essays, Václav Havel coined terms such as “post-totalitarian system” or “anti-political politics”. But these were just auxiliary concepts that he chose to serve a specific purpose in a specific context. To him, words such as socialism or communism meant nothing except loyalty to the government. We need this kind of profound truth in language, otherwise the unification of Europe by the means we have so far employed will amount to nothing but an attempt to make scrambled eggs without breaking a single egg.

Europe, mentality and borders

Europe is a peculiar space. A thrilling space. In Australia, you can travel for thousands of kilometres without any change in the landscape. In Europe you can cover just a few hundred kilometres, or in some regions only a few kilometres, and everything will be different. Not just the language, but also the architecture, the food on your plate and, above all, the mentality. And mentality is a collecting vessel, a receptacle for a plethora of nineteenth century terms, such as nation, nationalism, chauvinism. Terms we keep tripping over.

During a discussion on European literature in New York in the autumn of 2010 (for Americans, Europe is a small, and perforce unified, area), what stirred up the strongest emotions was a comment by a French author. He said something along the lines of: Europe equals France and everything else is just rubbish. The panelists reacted strongly to his statement, the audience less so – they felt a bit lost trying to follow an argument between a French writer on the one hand, and a Spanish, Polish, Czech and Italian author on the other. On the other hand, they found it thrilling to witness such a turbulent clash of ideas. Customs houses may have disappeared but borders keep making themselves felt: different mother tongues, mentalities and experiences have left their imprint on individual countries and the behaviour, the facial features and gestures of their people. Human foibles, sympathies as well and antipathies, also play a role (for example, Gerhard Schröder could not abide the French, or farmers, and trying to list everything and everyone people such as Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman have loathed would be a pointless and never-ending endeavour). Mentality is linked to language. And language needs freedom of opinion and expression.

Europe and the struggle for the power of words

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” At a time when international radio was still in its infancy and not even science fiction authors could envisage the internet, the final sentence in particular was ground-breaking: “regardless of frontiers”. That is the original wording. Freedom of expression is further defined in Article 20. However, it turned out that additional legislation was needed so that war propaganda and hate speech – statements advocating all forms of national, racial and religious hatred that incite discrimination, hostility, hatred and violence – could be punished. A state that is party to an international treaty is legally bound to comply with it – in theory. It is required to fully incorporate it in its political and legal system and provide guarantees for the observance of these rights. But what if a state won’t do this? Or, even worse, what if diplomats loudly profess freedom of expression at international conferences while back at home repression and censorship is widely deployed and any semblance of freedom is punished, silenced, nipped in the bud?

Moreover, nowadays those suffering from poverty, ill-health, lack of education or access to the internet, find that their freedom of expression is, in practice, largely curtailed by circumstances. For the rest of us, the limits of freedom of expression are defined by the country we happen to be in, as well as by companies and organisations that control our means of communication. The actual freedom of expression we enjoy as individuals is the result of conditions in particular states, as well as conditions laid down by virtual states, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter or other platforms, such as publishers, radio stations, newspapers, universities and other institutions, depending on where one lives. Anyone willing to give up his or her freedoms in order to gain certainty will gain neither freedom nor certainty. In the system of global information and communication the struggle for the power of words has also become a struggle for power over the word.

Europe and democracy

When democracy fades away, it doesn’t happen all of a sudden. Rather, it disappears gradually, a centimetre a time. We can see this in the East as much as in the West. We must cling to the freedoms we have secured. And once again, this demands a great deal of strength. The fundamental choices haunting all of us now are between the individual and the crowd; between a closed society and open democracy; totalitarianism and freedom; reason and zealotry; tolerance and hysteria; creativity and freedom of opinion or censorship. European countries are becoming radicalised, some vigorously and spine-chillingly, as in Hungary, where no one any longer cares about individuals bereft of hope. Why does self-identification cause so much suffering to so many of us in Europe? In democracies, the right and the left oscillate like the pendulum of a clock. In the Czech Republic, we have recently seen a curious phenomenon: instead of choosing between parties, personalities and ideas, many people are choosing between a political system and its total rejection. The solution is not a choice between parties but between morality and immorality.

What frightens me especially as I look at Europe these days are the developments in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Something that was unimaginable only a few years ago has become a social reality: once again nationalism, racism, antisemitism and sexism are rampant. We have forgotten too quickly that the freedoms we fought for and achieved three decades ago cannot be taken for granted. We live in an era of economic pragmatism that despises democracy and reduces it to business. Some have even called for a new definition of human rights. Many in Eastern Europe succumb to resignation because freedom has not turned out to be they imagined it. It requires them to take responsibility, and it will take us several generations to get there. What Eastern Europe has adopted from the West amounts mostly to consumerist behaviour and neoliberalism. Democracy, however, calls for different values and our language calls for different words.

Let us recall the idealism of 1968 Prague. Back then, people had faith that every individual citizen could effect a degree of change. This is the kind of faith we need today. During the Prague Spring people showed courage. They found a constructive way of resisting the social reality they were dissatisfied with because they wanted to achieve something. In those days, change came from the bottom up. There was much more humour, directness and hope around, people stood up for something, fought for something, suffered for something. Europe did not yet seem swamped with the lava of general indifference.

So what went wrong? The themes of 1968 are still highly relevant today, as freedom of the media and independence of the judiciary are again under threat in many countries of Eastern Europe. One of the reasons why the past totalitarian way of thinking survives is that the perpetrators of the totalitarian past were allowed to go unpunished. This proved to be a fundamental mistake. Following the regime change of 1989 it was important to clearly identify the culprits and to dispense justice to those who had suffered so much. A debate about the mistakes of the past would have enabled our society to heal and develop in a different way. This was how (West) Germany handled its past – it took them several decades to come to terms with the legacy of the Nazi dictatorship and its crimes. But it was also a question of language. The dangerous parallels with today abound.

Totalitarianism, language, propaganda

In their memoirs and letters, those who survived don’t mince their words. However, their only means of describing the atrocities was language, which proved insufficient. The victims returning to normal life found the old language unusable. Language itself is nothing but a construct, a game that adapts to society. Language deceives itself. The official term for the extermination of European Jewry was “deportations”. Nazis referred to extermination as “self-cleansing” and “revival”, as “getting rid of a boil on the healthy body of the German nation” and “cleansing that body of the Jews”. The man in charge of the Department of National Hygiene (Abteilung für Volkshygiene) at the Ministry of the Interior defended Nazi government policies by arguing that his job was to implement an “active policy that seeks to provide consistent protection of racial health”. It is incredible quite how much effort went into the legal definition of “Jews” to ensure that the rest of the population could feel that these measures did not apply to them. Racially “pure” citizens felt safe and didn’t care about what happened to anyone else. Zero solidarity, zero empathy: nothing but indifference. This is what paved the way to the concentration camps. In private, Hitler was obsessed with hygiene and often used comparisons with illnesses, epidemics, befouling, isolation. He likened Christianity and Bolshevism to the plague and Jews to germs and loathsome vermin. For the head of the press department of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs the “Jewish question” was a “question of political hygiene”. For the Jews to be excluded, they had to be stripped of their status as German nationals and members of the national community. As soon as the first bureaucrat used the term “non-Aryan”, the fate of European Jewry was sealed. And the moment the “Jewish question” shifted from the context of “racial” self-defence to the realm of political “hygiene”, the language and the rhetoric changed too. The official title of the SS department charged with the extermination of European Jewry was the Economic and Administrative High Command (SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungs Hauptamt). In this language, which Viktor Klemperer called the language of the Third Reich, the emphasis shifted to efficiency. The activities of this department, couched in the language of bureaucracy, were no different from other rationalized activities. The only thing bureaucracy requires is efficiency. Bureaucratic rationality inspires horror. Its language deflects attention. As the deportees were led to their death in the gas chambers, they were told they were going to “washrooms”. Before the Germans started to build gas chambers, on Hitler’s orders, they wanted to exterminate their mentally ill and physically disabled fellow citizens: this was referred to as a “merciful death”. And vice versa, they aimed to “ennoble” the German race through organized impregnation of women of “good racial quality” by men of “good racial quality”. All this was the result of a rational administration of society and applied science. The “cleansing of the nation” by means of murdering other groups was discussed in a language that used words such as “reduction”, “active control” of population trends, “elimination” and “evacuation”. The official designation of institution that coordinated the murders of the mentally disabled through euthanasia was the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care (Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Anstaltspflege), known as T4 after Tiergartenstrasse 4 where its office was located. Following protests by some prominent church representatives this “engineering project” was suspended in 1941. However, the same people did not protest against another project, known as “the final solution”, that affected another group of people: the Jews. Even today populists often resort to racist language as they climb the greasy pole to power. They advocate segregation to incite the crowds and to strengthen the national community.

On the other hand, some words are missing from the vocabulary of bureaucratic state systems – morality is one of them. The system prefers words such as discipline, loyalty, duty and obedience to superiors, thus enabling the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian societies. Moral considerations of good and evil are immaterial. All that matters is being united under a single boss with totalitarian tendencies and visions, and following only the rules of “his” organization. The subordinates and “subjects” concentrate solely on the tasks allocated to them by their boss. Even today, modern society foregrounds efficiency and evinces moral blindness. The internet and modern technologies erase the humanity of the individuals targeted by those in power. They will use violence to protect the borders of a national community and the state will silence its critics. This use of violence goes against moral considerations. It is immune to the influence of solidarity, respect and mutual help. Modern bureaucracy silences moral awareness. It solves the problem in a rational way.

Except that every human life is sacred, although bureaucracy has no idea how to deal with this concept. The principle of collective guilt based on gender, religious faith, or skin colour has not disappeared. The state divides human lives into those that are valuable and those that have no value. The latter need to be eliminated. World War II put paid to this tendency to widespread modern forms of human coexistence. The factors that made the Holocaust possible are still with us today: a powerful government, a mighty bureaucracy, and the silent majority.

Discussion of totalitarianism in Europe and the mistakes of the past is crucial. In Central Europe this process still has a long way to go. But instead, those who were in positions of influence before the change of regime in 1989 have regained power in most countries of the region. The old horrors have raised their ugly heads again everywhere. East European society is sick. And more than that: It refuses treatment. In 2022 war and genocide here is called a “special military operation”.

Europe and truth

I have felt for several years now that there are many in Europe who would rather see a wall or a fence erected again between the East and the West. Certainly, Europe is once again divided by a mental border, one that never completely disappeared. This border also passes through Germany, where the difference between the East and West is still visible. In 1989 I was full of hope that we might be able to preserve all that was good about Eastern Europe, blending it with the humanist values of the West. But something quite different has happened. Many have started to emulate the example of the nouveaux riches, with their arrogant behaviour and proclivity to corruption. Personal enrichment, by whatever means, is now acceptable as the sole aspiration in life. Similarly, many have come to admire the Chinese model that I have experienced at first hand during my frequent visits to the country: an economically successful, hybrid capitalist-communist police state holding out the promise of affluence. China has married the worst of capitalism with the worst of communism –in terms of economics this works like a dream, albeit one without human rights. In the era of neoliberalism many have begun to forget concepts such as human rights, democracy, freedom of religion, the rule of law, a dignified life for all; many don’t even mind that the internet is censored. But freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, a fundamental element of humanity, the mother of truth.

So what about language? In Europe, the Chinese police state has been labelled a “harmonised and stabilised” society. The battle for the power of words may be taking place in the global information and communication system but it begins in our own backyard.

Europe. A house without a roof or a roof without a house?

In autumn 2011 I was in Germany, attending a meeting of members of the Paneuropean Union at Andechs, a Bavarian monastery where seven kinds of beer are brewed. The organisation was founded in 1922, banned by the Nazis and re-established after World War II. It was headed by Otto von Habsburg until his death in 2011 and over the years its members have included Franz Werfel, Albert Einstein, Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. I participated in a heated discussion that sought the answer to the question: “Europe – a house without a roof or a roof without a house?” A fruitful metaphor. Everyone used it and I just followed its various iterations. Enterpreneurs were represented by Prince Wolfgang of Bavaria and Bernard Antony, a renowned cheesemaker from Alsace. Alsace is a region that has had to find a way for the Germans and the French to coexist in a small space. Archbishop Jean-Claude Périsset proposed a renovation of the European house on Christian foundations. But what would happen if Muslim Turkey were let into the house? He had much to say about the traditional family. But what does a family look like these days? What shapes and forms do families come in these days? Politicians were represented by Herbert Dorfmann, a Euro MP from South Tyrol, and the media by Georg Paul Hefty, a political scientist and editor of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. So who and what did I represent? Literature? The people? And whose perspective? Europe’s? The panic that is gripping Europe is unnecessary, Hefty argued, we are not experiencing a crisis of the European Union but rather a crisis in its individual countries. He was one of the first to admit, in the 1990s, that a woman might one day become Chancellor of Germany. He was also the first person to ever use the feminine form of the German word for ‘chancellor’, which later became word of the year. And Chancellor Angela Merkel was the first to allow the possibility that a country might be “excluded” from the EU, with indebted Greece in mind. She triggered an avalanche – from that moment, the option that any state could be excluded from the EU was on the table, as was the option that a country might leave the EU if its economy was strong, and it was unwilling to “pay for” countries whose economy was weaker. It’s a bit like a train passing through a country: the passengers can get on and off depending on how comfortable and fast they find the train. But Europe is not a train, it is here, it is the countryside, the country, it is people. It does not move.

We often hear people complain that the younger generation is not interested in the European Union, that it regards the EU merely as a grouping founded in response to economic need. They don’t give any thought to the European Union for the simple reason that they are European. They travel, study languages, forge friendships across borders and continents, taking it all for granted. What matters is not unity but common interest. What matters is a Europe united on the basis of democracy and friendly relations: a spiritual dimension. And that calls for the best translators and interpreters.

Returning home from Andechs (even though I was “at home”, in Europe, throughout) my thoughts wandered to more general subjects. For centuries it had been macho political power games that moved the world. But perhaps times were changing. Nevertheless, there is only one way, the oldest and hardest way: to respect others, try to understand, acknowledge and accept them. Ultimately, there is only one border: that between two human beings. Maybe it is time to change the metaphor for 2022: rather than one big house, Europe is several smaller houses that respect both their common space as well as each other’s privacy.

Europe and language as a way of classifying people

A friend of mine, a great writer, moved to a new flat in Berlin some time ago, and went to the florists’. “Where are you from? France?” – “No, Romania”– “Oh, I see, never mind, don’t worry about it.”

I’ve come across similar reactions: “Where are you from?” – “You’re from the Czech Republic, Bohemia, Eastern Europe? I see, never mind, don’t worry about that.”

Children are taught by grown-ups at home and at school to classify people in this way and this vicious cycle is impossible to break. It is natural for people to believe that their way of seeing the world is the correct one, the only possible one. But Europe has proven again and again that there are countless ways of seeing the world, that the words we use to think with can be “bleached” and used “in different ways”, that we can live “in different ways”, that creative freedom knows no bounds. The struggle for freedom and for free, critical thinking is always exhausting and it never ends. Concepts such as “collective guilt” and “collective victory” are monstrous. And nationalism has lately taken on even more monstrous forms when it keeps spouting the same question: “Where are you from?” We ought to ask a different question, a much more important one: “Who are we?”

The only thing that matters is not giving up. Young people – this is something I’ve learned in recent months – are fed up with hearing only those speak of Europe who speak of it with condescension, sullying its visions. They don’t want to be robbed of their hopes and future by populists, or see their hopes stifled by a general lethargy.

Europe in 2022. The freedom of a state is not the same thing as freedom in a state

Let me come briefly back to Europe’s past, which continues to exert a decisive influence on us. There were six million Jews among the more than twenty million people murdered on Hitler’s orders, but the Jews were the only ones destined for total extermination. It was a crime committed at the heart of Europe, by the country that was the pride of modern civilisation, with the best science and technology at its disposal. A country in the midst of Europe produced mountains of corpses and moral devastation. The rest of Europe stood by in silence. To this day, the Holocaust epitomizes the right of the strong to do what they will with the weak.

Nazi rule is gone. But its prejudices endure, flourishing in new guises. The Nazis have shown totalitarian states all over the world how to deprive of their humanity those who “violate the order” – and how to corrupt language.

This year, 2022, we have been eyewitnesses to a war. In an era of economic pragmatism, we have reduced democracy to business. Those politicians and pundits who had long underestimated Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the repression he unleashed at home and the aggression he directed at other countries, now resort to the excuse that he had recently undergone a radical transformation. Never mind all those years we watched his attempts to rebuild the disintegrated Soviet Union by means of war and terror. And for many years now he has pursued another, much bigger goal: to divide and destroy Europe and establish an alternative (Eurasian) “union” under Moscow’s wing, in much the same way as the Chinese President has been striving for an Asian union under the leadership of Beijing. People in Eastern Europe (including the former GDR), who endured Soviet occupation for decades, know that the only thing dictators of Putin’s ilk respond to is a show of strength.

Putin is punishing the Ukrainians for everything that has happened in Eastern Europe since 1989. We, East Europeans, are undoubtedly united by our common experience of totalitarian regimes, by our personal and social experience of Russia or rather, the Soviet Union. The parallels with Russia’s current imperial policies are obvious. Ukraine is being denied the right to independence, as are other former Soviet republics. And in addition to that, Ukraine is being denied its own culture and language.

However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also brings to mind what my parents and grandparents told me about the popular uprisings in the GDR in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks. In the summer of 1968, they saw with their own eyes our country being invaded by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, which ushered in the depressing and seemingly endless period of “normalisation”. Poland’s anti-communist resistance, triggered by the creation of the independent trade union Solidarity, brought renewed hope of reforms and radical change. Gorbachov’s policy of glastnost and perestroika also deserves mention. Many people failed to anticipate the “special military operation” in Ukraine, believing it was unthinkable. They had a brutal awakening. Many people in the West believed for too long that Russia and Putin did not want a war, even though there was plenty of evidence of Russia’s imperial, aggressive political goals, which were achievable only by military means. I’m speaking of Transnistria, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, the occupation of Crimea, the cities of Grozny and Aleppo wiped off the face of the earth… Not only had the West “underestimated” Ukraine, it was also completely wrong in its assessment of Russia and Putinism. The war in Ukraine has set a precedent for Europe, shaking the foundations of the post-war European order to its foundations. We must not forget that Ukraine’s fight against an imperial power is ultimately also a fight for our own, European freedom and democracy. These events have shown that the East knows more about the West than vice versa.

From a psychological perspective, perpetrators always show remarkable solidarity with one another: they are drawn to each other by their past actions and their desire to evade punishment. If there are enough of them, they succumb to the impression that their multilateral solidarity legitimizes their criminal behaviour. This was how the Nazis reacted after the war, and how the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did after 1989. The twenty-first century has only added further technical details to their orchestrated propagandistic deception. With a predictable effect on the masses. Yes, sadly, there are parallels.

Europe, language and “reliable” witnesses

On 22 June 1944 a delegation of the International Red Cross arrived in the Jewish ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt); its members walked down the main street side by side with Nazi officers and Jewish elders. To this day, Holocaust deniers cite the commission’s “reliable” testimony. In fact, the whole thing had been staged. People drank coffee in a café and attended a rehearsal for Verdi’s opera (Requiem) being held in the room above the gym. At one point, children rehearsing another opera (Brundibár) downstairs cheerfully raised their props (exercise books, pencils, books), as instructed by their director. In his report for the International Red Cross Maurice Rossel describes their surprise at finding that people in Terezín lived an almost normal: life and that “the people who have ended up in the ghetto were not being sent anywhere else.” In fact, 68,000 people were deported from Terezín in 1944. By the end of October 1944 that number rose to 88,194. Meanwhile, the report of International Red Cross was being translated and read around the world and distributed not only by the Nazis. This exercise in sham propaganda has served as a model for present-day PR agencies and fake news.

Europe and trauma

World War II dealt a psychological blow to all of Europe. The trauma does not end when a person leaves a concentration camp. It doesn’t end when the last survivor passes away. The trauma is the air that Europe breathes. The fact that so many lost their lives is horrific. But what makes it utterly scandalous is that the Holocaust took place here, in civilized, cultured and industrially developed Europe, built on Christian foundations and on clichés about loving one’s neighbour. It is a scandal that something like this could ever have happened in Europe. That something like this is possible at all. That we allowed it to happen. Because we were the ones who allowed it to happen. And the consequences are with us to this day. The excuse that the moral instinct vanishes at a time of raging war or profound crises in society does not wash. If the Nazis had won, the Holocaust would not have broken any laws and would not have qualified as a crime. At Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem his defence lawyer said that his client had done things for which people are decorated if their country wins a war, but are sent to the gallows if their country loses it. This is both cynical and trivial at the same time. Does it mean that the one who has power is in the right? To me, this entails a warning for our times: the modern state with its bureaucratic culture forces us to view society solely through the lens of trade, greed and lust for money, as the object of effective administration, regardless of the ultimate goal. Modern bureaucracy silences moral sensitivities, resolving problems in a rational way. Further danger lurks in the fact that present-day politicians let themselves be guided by economic interests rather than political ones. And the emergence of politicians seizing the opportunity to destroy a group that gets in the way can become reality at any time. These days our problem is technical progress, heartlessness and lack of empathy and solidarity with others.

A moral person cannot hide himself or herself in the role of an observer. The unsatisfied appetites of a single person can be enough to plunge an entire country into chaos. Past centuries creep into the present, raising the spectre of second-class citizens, with new imaginary Stars of David, blue circles, pink triangles being pinned to coats. For most people this is just a game on social media: they withdraw from reality, their eyes glued to smartphones. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have always been extremely attractive to millions of people. But life is a gift and we have to treat it as a gift that is precious.

Freedom means responsibility

Translating and interpreting is an art that comes with very specific responsibilities. At the same time, every kind of art is also an oasis of humanism whose importance grows at a time when rational consumerism and the luxury of indifference are the rule. This kind of authentic, non-sentimental humanism is extremely important today. It is an oasis of humanity that rejects political pigeon-holing. Literature, too, is a form of humanism that transcends time. It nurtures concepts such as trust, creativity, compassion, charity, that is to say, concepts that our modern, performance-oriented society usually regards as on the verge of being suicidal. It is an oasis of morality arising from the fact that we are alive and share this planet with others. It is not limited by the claim that the forces determining our present conditions course through global space, while institutions of political action remain basically unchanged, that is to say, local. The fact that we don’t see eye to eye with others is not an obstacle on the path to human community.

A united Europe is a successful answer to our history and geography. Unless we turn Europe into a full-blown player on the global scene, each of us will remain just a ball that other powerful nations can kick around. What we need right now is a cool head, clear reason and creative thinking. And the protection of human rights. In this day and age, truth has become so blurred and lies so widespread that you don’t recognize the truth unless you love it. In this respect translators and interpreters play a crucial and multifaceted role. Their thinking must not be purely mechanical. Purely empirical literalness is dangerous. Empirical literalness is typical of translators who translate mechanically, without opinions of their own and without understanding the differences between individual linguistic systems. Last but not least, translators have to be familiar with traditions, the past, the mentality and traumas of their own country and the country of the “other”. In this respect there are great differences between various areas of culture. For the diversity of languages derives not merely from the diversity of sounds and signs but from the diversity of world views. We need a common inner language. We all know that common humanity now faces the most fateful of all the fateful decisions of humankind.

Translated from the Czech by Julia Sherwood

On Wednesday 13th July, a group of young translators of Czech literature from all over the world met at an informal event in the Czech Centre in Prague. They were the winners of the third annual Susanna Roth Award, an international competition for beginner translators. Important figures on the Czech literary scene were also present, including journalists from the Právo newspaper and Czech Radio, the head of the Literary Section of the Arts and Theatre Institute, Viktor Debnár, and head of the Czech Centres Programme Department, Tatjana Langášková. Anna Bolavá, author of Into Darkness, an excerpt from which was chosen for translation by the competition committee, was also in attendance. Into Darkness is the story of a lonely, ill woman who has dedicated most of her life to collecting, drying and providing medicinal plants. Despite the slow, seemingly dispassionate pace, a strange unease bubbles under the surface of this novel which won the 2016 Magnesia Litera Award for prose.

The winners, author and organisers in the Czech Centre. Photo: Anna Pleslova.

The translators welcomed the opportunity to meet their international colleagues as well as the author, who until then they had known only from her book. The winners were: Desislava Vilimovská (Bulgaria), Tena Šinjori (Croatia), Mei Kashima (Japan), Park Su Hyun (South Korea), Anna Steinbachné Bobok (Hungary), Katharina Hinderer (Germany), Agata Wróbel (Poland), Claudia Marek (Austria), Maria Cristea (Romania), Alexey Artyuchin (Russia), Ludmila Smoljar and Oleksandra Stukalo (Ukraine) and Paddy Phillips (Great Britain) whose translation can be read in full here. More information in Czech about the winners can be found here.

Early the next morning, Paddy Phillips and Mei Kashima were interviewed by Czech Television, after which they joined the other winners in the Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague for a translation workshop.

The diplomas presented to the winning translators at the workshop in Prague. Photo: Anna Pleslova.

The first speaker was Viktor Debnár who introduced the activities of the Literary Section of the Arts and Theatre Institute, including the CzechLit website which promotes Czech literature abroad and aims to help translators navigate the complex Czech literary scene. Debnár also discussed residencies offered by the International Visegrád Fund, the history and future of the Susanna Roth Award as well as the series of European Literature Nights held in Prague.

Radim Kopáč from the Literature and Libraries Division of the Ministry of Culture then talked about the Ministry’s translation grant programme. This year the programme has allocated over €220,000 to support 135 translations, which is a record number representing approximately two thirds of all translations of Czech literature published in 2016. Kopáč also mentioned that winning the Susanna Roth Award is seen by the grant committee as a significant plus when evaluating applications.

Radim Kopáč. Photo: Anna Pleslova.

Petr Janyška, director of the Czech Centre in Warsaw, talked about Czech literature and Czech studies in Poland, where an unprecedented number of young translators, 40, took part in the competition. Janyška had a lot of good news from Poland: the publisher Książkowe Klimaty has already decided to publish Anna Bolavá’s Into Darkness and is currently looking for the right translator. There has always been significant interest in Czech literature in Poland, where it is seen to be of high literary value while also being popular with readers. For example, during just one weekend at the Warsaw Book Fair, 500 copies of the recently translated National Avenue (Národní třída) by Jaroslav Rudiš were sold and children’s books, such as the Oddgluttons (Lichožrouti) series, are also gaining in popularity. As for Czech Studies in Poland, it attracts over 500 students annually. Although this bodes well for the future, Janyška emphasised the need for a new generation of translators and more support for translators after they complete their studies. This is one reason why initiatives like the Susanna Roth Award are so important. Janyška suggested that similar events should take place more often and should be followed by a workshop for the participants where established translators would assist and provide feedback to their younger colleagues. One such workshop was organised this year for the Polish participants in the competition.

Petr Janyška. Photo: Anna Pleslova.

After Janyška’s presentation, German translator Doris Kouba took the floor. She had a number of practical tips for the beginner translators, especially about how to successfully pitch a book to a publisher. She stressed that the key is a flawless synopsis presenting the author as an important voice of their country or generation. Likewise it is necessary to choose an appropriate publisher for the given translation. Kouba also mentioned the practice of pitches, i.e. events where translators have little more than one sentence to “sell” their book to potential publishers. In her opinion although this is often demeaning for the translator they must be prepared for it. Kouba further stressed that translators should be involved in the whole publishing process up until the book is printed — they should oversee the editing and approve the final text. She also urged the young translators to take advantage of every option available to them, including grants, scholarships and residencies. Doris Kouba is a firm believer that translation is hard but rewarding work which must be appropriately remunerated and it is up to the translators themselves to push for better conditions. For example, efforts in Germany led to a court decision which set a minimum pay of €20 per translated page.

Following the workshop, the participants took a train to Brno in time for the first evening of the annual Bohemistics Seminar. During the 5-day event, the translators attended author readings, a series of lectures by Czech publishers, translators and academics and also had the opportunity to visit many Moravian towns and landmarks.

Translators at the Bohemistics Seminar in Brno. Photo: Soňa Šinclová.

The competition’s history

Viktor Debnár initially came up with the idea of organising a competition for beginner translators of Czech literature in 2013. The aim of the competition from the outset was to support young translators as well as to help Czech authors reach an international audience. The award, named after renowned Swiss translator, Susanna Roth (1950–1997), who contributed significantly to the promotion of contemporary Czech literature abroad, is organised by the Literary Section of the Arts and Theatre Institute and Czech Centres. It is for translators up to 40 years of age, whose task is to translate a piece of contemporary Czech prose written by an author of a similar age. Contestants must be citizens or permanent residents in one of the participating countries and cannot have published a book translation in the language of the given country. The winners are chosen by a jury of translators and academics in each participating country.

When the competition was first held in 2014, the rules outlined above had still not been firmly established. The organisers had not set an age-limit for the author of the original text and instead chose to take advantage of the centenary of Bohumil Hrabal’s birth. Thus the participants translated one of Hrabal’s never-translated short stories or an extract from a longer prose piece. For instance, the text selected for Great Britain was the short story Polomy v lese. 138 translators from 12 countries took part in the competition.

2014 competition winners, not pictured: Svetlana Rohach and Montserrat Tutusaus Romeu. Photo: Jaroslav Balvín.

The 12 winners were rewarded with a stay in Prague during which they took part in an intensive programme focussing on Hrabal and Czech literature in general − they met Hrabal’s friend and expert on his work, Tomáš Mazal, traced Hrabal’s footsteps in the Libeň district with Lenka Mandová from the Prague Information Service, attended Literature Night and the Book World Prague international book fair where they met respected Czech Studies specialists and also took part in lectures and discussions at the Institute of Czech Literature. The winner from Great Britain, Frances Jackson, explained “I wanted to take part in the competition because of my professor at Oxford, Dr. James Naughton, who died this year in February. He translated Hrabal in Great Britain. Without him I wouldn’t know Czech and so I wanted to do something for him, as I wasn’t able to attend his funeral”.

For the next competition in 2015, an expert committee selected David Jan Žák’s The Return of the King of Šumava (Návrat krále Šumavy), a biographical novel about Josef Hasil, who smuggled people across the Czechoslovak border to the west under the Communist regime. 91 translators from 13 countries, including Egypt, Russia and Finland entered the competition. The winner from Hungary, Zsuzsanně Juhászné Hahn, has since had two translations published — Petra Soukupová’s To Disappear (Zmizet) and Dora Kaprálová’s A Winter Book about Love (Zimní kniha o lásce) — and is currently working on Jan Němec’s EU Prize for Literature-winning A History of Light (Dějiny světla).

Author David Jan Žák and the winners of the competition in 2015.

The future

Preparations for next year’s award are in full swing and the organisers are currently deciding which book to set as well as how to improve the competition in the future. There are a number of avenues to pursue, including holding it more than once a year, improving the award’s connection with international publishers and providing more feedback to participants. At CzechLit we’re already looking forward to next year’s competition!

Cover image: Susanna Roth and Bohumil Hrabal. Photo: Daniel Roth.

Mellow, full of traces of contrasting aromas. As though after the fall of communism Czech prose never quite recovered from the shock of losing its dominant role, a position it had occupied since the national revival in the early 19th century, when it had been used as a tool for building a national community, forming national collective values and role models, and later functioning as the “conscience of the nation”. It lost some great names which had created an established international brand (Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Arnošt Lustig and Ivan Klíma). And it also operates differently at home: after years in which authors also performed the role of celebrities, in the 1990s their position changed to one in which – apart from a few bestselling authors – the attribute “writer” has to be added to the author’s name when he is speaking on TV; in which contemporary Czech novels no longer have print runs of 20,000 copies, but 400 copies, which makes even the author himself start to question the value of the hundreds of hours invested in a piece of work. This is serious literature, which does not fit into a world which has decided to amuse itself to death. With some exceptions (Chaim Cigan, Václav Kahuda, Ludvík Němec and Jan Němec), this literature doesn’t know how to play; it still wants to try to solve the world’s problems or at least analytically break them down.

Palate:

Light, smooth, sweet at first and then bitter, elusive. It is not good at talking about the present, as this entails an endless rehashing of the past; it is as though communism had never ended and the border zones had never disappeared. It contains few characters whose behaviour cannot be explained through their roots in the past, be they personal, familial or national (Jiří Hájiček, Radka Denemarková, Jakuba Katalpa). Leaving one’s native soil immediately smacks of the exotic (Petra Hůlová, Martin Ryšavý, Jana Šrámková, Matěj Hořava). This kind of trip (or even a postcard) across the border has to be justified to the reader; it has to be related in terms of values to what is at home. In this literature, “ours” and “foreign” is still one of the fundamental oppositions in the construction of the world. It is a quiet literature, settled, calm; it does not want to make a scene, it avoids daring exploits and it doesn’t like uncontrolled experiments. It is a humble Scheherazade who prefers to patiently tell her tale over and over again (Michal Viewegh, Petr Šabach, Emil Hakl, Miloš Urban and Kateřina Tučková).

It could export stories from the pub, but they are not easily transferable when they leave the setting of Czech beer culture. It lives off its Central European heritage of anecdotes, absurdity and fragmentation. It likes characters/pieces which are moved around the chessboard of history by the hands of giants sitting behind the board (Jiří Kratochvil, Irena Dousková, Tomáš Zmeškal). It can work with detail and analyse characters’ inner feelings in times of crisis (Zuzana Brabcová, Tereza Boučková, Jan Balabán, Marek Šindelka). It is able to depict the world around us in an interesting way only if a conceptual filter/concept is placed in front of it, creating an image that is more animated than played out (Jáchym Topol, Patrik Ouředník, Michal Ajvaz, Daniela Hodrová, Vladimír Binar, Sylva Fischerová).

For Czechs, the short story was always seen in relation to the novel as scrap or as preparatory work, a rough drawing or sketch. The obsession with writing the great social novel evidently persists to this day. So it is perhaps a paradox that contemporary Czech short stories, seen from afar, appear to be far more substantial than the majority of contemporary Czech novels.

Finish:

Hard, bitter and short. Bestsellers are created by (all)capable advertising campaigns, clever timing and the forceful promotion of the text, not by respecting the characteristic anatomy of the bestseller. The response from reviewers lies hidden in the pages of specialist literary journals, seldom seeing the light of day in the mass media. That is why the author’s strategy has to focus on the possibility of future endorsement through film adaptations or writing for the foreign market. Therefore, he is consciously creating a work that will survive the journey undamaged, which in the case of a small society and culture (as the Czech one unquestionably is) involves not only a linguistic but also a cultural transfer. Contemporary Czech prose does not appear to be offering any notably great works.

Each year the output is filtered though dozens of literary awards, but even from a national perspective, the differences in these works are much more marked than their similarities. Rather than there being a few outstanding works which could be served up as a main course, something like tapas or a buffet is on offer. Several small morsels which can be combined in an interesting way according to one’s individual tastes to create a mosaic of flavours. As with a visitor to a whisky bar who cannot decide what to drink, there is always the agreeable option of tasting more and more samples, depending on how much you can tolerate, in small doses, but over a long period of time.

In recent years, the detective, crime and thriller genre has been experiencing a boom in Czechia. New Czech authors have appeared whose books touch on contemporary reality and carefully outline the psychological profiles of their characters, while disrupting and updating the well-established pattern of murder – investigation – smart detective – surprising denouement.

The most popular form of light reading

Detective novels have always been very popular with Czech readers, and since the 1960s, when the communists allowed them to be translated again, they have been fortunate in having excellent (Anglo-Saxon) translators, with Jan Zábrana at the forefront. During the period of communist censorship it was one of the few gripping styles of fiction that was tolerated (unlike horror and fantasy, which were completely ignored). Detective novels had print runs of anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 copies, and readers did not have to wait too long for the translation to come out.

Czech authors tended to take these translated works as their model, and for a long time they struggled with their own local setting, which seemed too sedate for sophisticated and exciting crime stories. Most of the writers initially set their novels abroad or wrote them under English pseudonyms such as Edgar Collins and Leon Clifton. For example, the first detective novel which Eduard Fiker – one of the most prolific (and certainly one of the best) writers of crime fiction – set in Czechoslovakia was his thirty-first book, Her Game (Její hra) from 1939.

Eduard Fiker. Photo source: Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague.

The first and for a long time the only person to successfully marry the detective novel with a Czech setting was Emil Vachek, who also created the first Czech detective to feature in more than one book. However, the patient and insightful Inspector Klubíčko only appears in three of his classic novels: The Portrait Gallery Mystery (Záhada obrazárny, 1929), Man and Shadow (Muž a stín, 1932) and A Minute of Evil (Zlá minuta, 1933). Although the author brought the character back at the start of the 1960s, the tales of espionage he featured in were weaker, simply “churned out” by Fiker. However, towards the end of his life he managed to write another three novels featuring the believable character of Major Kalaš, who for a socialist policeman was not overly encumbered by ideology (though more so in The Golden Four (Zlatá čtyřka), the opening novel, from 1955). Thanks to their momentum and tension, Fiker’s books represent some of the best Czech thrillers, worlds apart from the usual tranquil atmosphere of the popular “neighbourhood” short stories by Karel Čapek and Jiří Marko or indeed the majority of books published in this country.

During these years, Czech crime fiction followed the model of the traditional British whodunnits with their calm investigations by amiable police officers. In any case, private detectives did not exist in a country governed by communism. In addition to this, for forty years (1948–1989) authors had to reconcile themselves to the reality of a totalitarian police state which carefully monitored their work to see if the propaganda image of its repressive elements had been challenged or even maligned in literature (and in art generally).

Detective novels for elderly and less-demanding readers

After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, it appeared that interest in the escapist genre of crime had waned, but it was more that it had fallen off the media radar: thrillers by Pavel Frýbort or the more traditional detective novels by Eva Kačírková and Inna Rottová, writers who had started to publish either in the late 1970s or in the 1980s, still continued to sell relatively well. For example, thanks to the enormous success of Currency Speculator (Vekslák, 1988), Frýbort published 14 novels (mainly action or political thrillers with convoluted plots) between 1990 and 2007. At the same time, however, the Czech crime-fiction genre began to fall into obscurity slightly. There was pressure from translated works, which now offered popular classics alongside new names and subgenres which were more dynamic and dramatic – usually from the Anglo-Saxon world. By the end of the 1990s, older Czech authors gathered under the wing of the Brno publishers Moravská Bastei (MOBA), whose success was based on the high number of titles published each year as well as the deliberate targeting of less demanding readers who wanted crime stories to provide them with some light reading and saw them as something between a crossword and a fairy tale for adults. However, the publishing house was also restricted by this readership: they were mainly older readers who were not looking for any experimentation and preferred to read loose series such as Murder at the Spa (Vražda v lázních). These people also make up the main readership of MOBA’s most successful current author, Vlastimil Vondruška, whose trivial detective stories from the Middle Ages directly correspond to their taste: they are sedate, straightforward and short.

However – no matter how surprising it may seem today – when MOBA tried to present the more hardboiled Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø to its readers through its translated editions in 2005 and 2008, it was a complete failure. It must have been a great surprise for the owners when the rights for his books were released to a new publishing house, Kniha Zlín, and they went on to enjoy enormous success with him in 2011.

The Scandinavians are coming

Jo Nesbø capitalized on a new wave of interest in Scandinavian crime fiction which began with the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson and his novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This was brought out in Czech by Host publishers, who had previously concentrated on more demanding contemporary Czech prose, poetry and literary criticism. Because of this, the literary critics, who traditionally monitor Host’s output very carefully, also started to take an interest in Larsson and were quickly followed by the mass media. With this, Larsson also came to the attention of a different readership than the one MOBA had previously appealed to with its light-reading fiction. It was not that the other two novels in the Millennium series had much in common with realistic prose (unlike the first one), but more that the detective genre had suddenly been discovered by young, educated readers. The books also became fashionable with intellectuals and even managers – or more precisely with female intellectuals and managers, because an important element of Millennium’s success was that the series appealed to a female readership, which is key for fiction. Larsson came up with an unconventional heroine who is a computer whiz, can defeat two experienced brawlers with her bare hands and can rise from the grave after being shot in the head (which makes her more of a comic-book superhero) – all of which helped to attract female readers between the ages of twenty and forty.

The Czech edition of the ‘Millennium’ trilogy. Photo: Nakladatelství Host.

His success with this readership also had a knock-on effect for his fellow Scandinavians, even though this Scandinavian wave did not bring anything fundamentally new to the crime genre. But at least some of these authors managed to inject the popular crime novel with phenomena which were the focus of media attention at the time, including corruption, racism and domestic violence. They do not shy away from lengthy and complex stories, the psychological examination of the characters, action scenes, extremely brutal crimes or intimate dialogue – in the best cases, all of these are thrown into the mix.

The popularity of Scandinavian detective novels also showed that even the countries with the best quality of life and the lowest crime rates in the world can produce believable, dramatic stories about sadistic murders with ambiguous endings. The younger generation of Czech authors (and their publishers, of course) have shown that the atmosphere of American metropolitan life is not essential for readers. The Czech Republic has also demonstrated itself to be a sufficiently realistic setting: business elites and politicians very quickly became associated with organized crime, while the reputations of the police force and the justice system have also been tarnished by countless scandals in the media.

Crime and postmodernism

All of this ferment contributed towards a renaissance in the detective genre amongst Czech writers. And in recent years a number of new, mainly young authors have appeared who have greater ambitions than merely helping the reader kill time at the beach or spa. This is probably the only common denominator as otherwise it is impossible to find many shared themes. They have obviously been brought up on the current trends influencing the contemporary detective novel, which is more like a social critique than an adult fairy tale; however, each of them approaches it in a slightly different way. Although their books are certainly not in the same league as the world’s best detective novels, they stand up against other above-average works in an international context. Young authors are no longer ashamed to publish detective fiction as their debut work, especially when these are novels which happen to have a crime-centred plot rather than the traditional whodunnit with a murder at the start and the detective triumphant at the end. In many cases they lack skill in their craft and the reader identifies the culprit too soon. The portrayal of the characters becomes more important than the plot and the subject matter is toned down, as though a large number of corpses and brutal crimes did not belong in a Czech setting.

At the moment, crime fiction is one of the liveliest genres in Czech literature and also attracts mainstream writers. Perhaps the very best and boldest at handling the plots and techniques of the crime genre is Miloš Urban (who is not one to shy away from a high body count and extremely bizarre murders), even though his postmodern books cannot exactly be categorized as crime fiction – with the exception of the full-blooded detective novel She Came from the Sea (Přišla z moře, 2014), which contains clever plots and unpredictable characters reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith. The satirical thrillers The Mafia in Prague (Mafie v Praze) and A Frost from the Castle (Mráz přichází z hradu) by Michal Viewegh were weakened by the author’s desire to comment on actual events in Czech politics. In her novel Tsunami Blues, Markéta Pilátová introduced a spy story in the style of Graham Greene. Crime (and in part espionage) motifs are also central to the three-part series Out in the Sticks (Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc) by Chaim Cigan (pseudonym of the writer and rabbi Karol Sidon).

Markéta Pilátová. Photo: Jiří Sobota.

New discoveries

So who are the bright young things in Czech crime fiction? The first person deserving of a mention is Michaela Klevisová (born 1976), who published her first detective novel The Steps of a Murderer (Kroky vraha) in 2007. As with the subsequent book, The Story Thief (Zlodějka příběhů, 2009), it is a very traditional detective novel with a police investigator and suspects, who in the case of The Story Thief find themselves enclosed within an isolated rural setting. However, Klevisová’s next detective novel, The Secluded House (Dům na samotě, 2011), marked a shift in emphasis: the character of the police commissioner is made almost irrelevant while the role of the individual suspects becomes more important. Instead of searching for the culprit behind a double murder, Klevisová plays around with a psychological thriller in which the different ambitions of the characters frequently clash. Each has a secret – usually a plan to acquire something important (money, stature or a partner). Although the novel ends with the uncovering of the perpetrator, the reader is at least as interested in whether and how the plans of the other characters come to fruition.

Character psychology is also the strong point of another distinctive contemporary figure from the Czech crime-fiction scene, Michal Sýkora (born 1971). The writer – literary critic, lecturer at Olomouc University, author of a two-part literary monograph on Vladimir Nabokov and two other literary-history studies – surprisingly published a detective novel in 2012 entitled A Case for an Exorcist (Případ pro exorcistu), to which a further two novels were added: Blue Shadows (Modré stíny, 2013) and It’s Not Over Yet (Ještě není konec, 2016). All of these books feature a team of Olomouc detectives led by Commissioner Výrová, and Sýkora carefully constructs the private and professional backgrounds of her and her colleagues. This also plays an important role in Blue Shadows during the search for the murderer of a university professor, as the (partly calculated) behaviour of a spurned police officer begins to undermine the entire investigation. A Case for an Exorcist alternates between the humorous twists and turns of an investigation in a typical Haná village and the dark case of a brutal murder. This does not serve the atmosphere of the novel particularly well, but the result is a traditional detective novel which is solid, exciting and believable and keeps the reader guessing to the end. It also contains many of the elements used by contemporary international authors, in particular the attempt to get as close to reality as possible. In contrast, Blue Shadows is more of a political thriller about corruption and politics, even though at first it seems to be a crime story set in a university. Gelnar is a caricature of a former minister of the interior, Ivan Langer, whose integrity was often questioned by the Czech media, while the villainous bursar at Olomouc University was also inspired by a real-life character. Sýkora manages to keep all of this within the confines of his fictional novel and does not try to explicitly castigate all the abuses as Michal Viewegh had done before him. Sýkora also attracted the attention of Czech Television, which has taken a long-term interest in the crime genre (with at best fluctuating success), and the result was a three-part series The Detectives of the Holy Trinity (Detektivové od Nejsvětější Trojice).

Michal Sýkora’s ‘It’s not over yet’. Photo: Nakladatelství Host.

Writing the script for the television series The Zodiac Murders (Vraždy v kruhu) also represented a new departure for the famous author of children’s books Iva Procházková (born 1953). While the series was being shown, she also published her first detective novel, Man at the Bottom (Muž na dně, 2014), which was a prequel to the series. The clever, believable, expertly structured and unusual plot is one of the best to have appeared in Czech crime fiction in recent years. The reader does not only follow the case from the perspective of the investigator, but also finds himself rooting for some of the suspects and searching for someone else who might fit the description of a cold-blooded murderer. But there is no such person, because the only truly monstrous villain was the murder victim. This brings another new element to the Czech crime genre: the murder victim as a classic example of a corrupt policeman, who besides indiscriminate extortion also drank, took drugs and raped the women he had in his power. After finishing the book the reader feels sorry for the characters who had to pay so dearly for such minor misdemeanours.

Newcomers to crime

Over the past three years, several authors have appeared who have chosen the crime genre for their literary debuts. B. M. Horská is the pseudonym of an author living in England who adheres to the style of the modern classics from the British school of P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. Her novel The Smell of Death (Pach smrti) incorporates Czech elements into a British setting in an inventive yet natural way (the murder victim is a Czech biologist with links to a university in the small English town where she lives as well as a university in Czechia), while the thriller-style finale is a vain attempt to improve a rather unsurprising denouement. In her other novels, her British detective of Czech extraction, Ellen Jolly, travels to unusual destinations in Europe: to the Finnish island of Ukko Kokko in her novel The Beetle (Brouk, 2014), and to Sicily in the novel Gloves of Death (Rukavičky smrti, 2016).

In contrast, Nela Rywiková (born 1979) set her novel House Number 6 (Dům číslo 6, 2013) in a rundown area of the former industrial town of Ostrava, and the story centres on the conflicts surrounding an apartment building which is threatened with demolition. Her crime fiction has a strong social element, though nothing as superficial as poor tenants suffering due to pressure from developers, and it is also very well structured. The author presents the tenants in the threatened building as fatalistic, selfish and dimwitted people, and even the murder is not the work of a clever, sophisticated killer. However, this does not detract from its horror. Her next novel, Children of Anger (Děti hněvu, 2016), is again based on the author’s local knowledge (linking the poorest people with the local business and political elites). It has a solid plot with a horrible discovery at the start, well-drawn characters who have something to hide, and a devastating climax, which is extremely uncharacteristic of Czech detective novels.

Nela Rywiková’s ‘Children of Anger’. Photo: Nakladatelství Host.

One problem with Nela Rywiková’s work is its literalism. The same can also be said of another interesting debut by Jiří Březina (born 1980), On the Hill (Na kopci, 2013). The novel begins with an investigation into a supernatural phenomenon (an angel appearing to a schoolgirl), but then gradually turns into the search for a criminal. Again, Březina’s strength lies in character psychology and in constructing individual scenes rather than the main storyline. Following the conventions of the genre he spends a long time sending the reader on false trails, but after the identity of the culprit is revealed two-thirds of the way through the book, the remainder is then devoted to two people (an ex-policeman and a university student) trying somewhat laboriously to find a way to convict him. It is a pity that the newcomer’s manuscript was not entrusted to an experienced editor as the result could have been an excellent psychological thriller.

In his subsequent novels the author appears to be more knowledgeable and technically adept – Time-barred (Promlčení, 2015) concerns an old murder case in the mountains of a border region, where the culprit is not revealed until the end and over considerably fewer pages. Time-barred also features a young police inspector whose next case is in the subsequent novel The Noonday Witch (Polednice, 2016), which would suggest that the author is attempting to produce a series with the same investigator.

Hardboiled realism in a Czech setting

Martin Goffa is the pseudonym of a former policeman (born 1973) who has already written six novels and one book of short stories in quick succession. His first two books, The Man with the Tired Eyes (Muž s unavenýma očima, 2013) and A Christmas Confession (Vánoční zpověď, 2013), offered a convincing psychological profile of a criminal and his crime. In the case of The Man with the Tired Eyes, this develops rather artificially from a haphazard take on the detective novel with a policeman as the main character. A Christmas Confession has a better structure; once again, the all too obvious intention is to defend an unfortunate man whose desperation leads him to take revenge on a fraudulent moneylending firm. But in both cases there is a valuable analysis of the Czech underworld (including the fact that the culprit in The Man with the Tired Eyes is Ukrainian), which demonstrates that the author is familiar with this material from his previous occupation. He also draws on this in the pitaval The Living Dead and Other Police Stories (Živý mrtvý a další policejní povídky, 2015). The main series featuring the detective Mike Syrový – who we first meet when he has left the police force, although he later returns to his outfit – is a Czech variation on the hardboiled crime novels by American authors.

But true hardboiled realism did not arrive in Czech literature until 2015 with the novel Quick-fire (Rychlopalba). Its author, Štěpán Kopřiva (born 1971), had previously published exceptionally brutal action novels incorporating parody and very dark humour with elements of sci-fi and fantasy. The beginning of Quick-fire is initially restrained as its main character, an ordinary policeman, takes up a previously abandoned search for a twelve-year-old girl. Gradually, however, the action intensifies and the unnamed investigator begins to break both service regulations and the law – from breaking into a rural cottage to shooting four people. However, he is not a corrupt police officer; he just has to solve the case using his own distinctive methods, and when it is all over he remains an outsider without any recognition or promotion. In the best traditions of hardboiled realism, the author blends together two mutually unconnected cases. Neither of these is brought to an entirely satisfactory conclusion for the characters and even the reader shares that bitter “noir” feeling with them.

A detail from the cover of Štěpán Kopřiva’s ‘Quick-fire’.

Most of the new authors in Czech crime fiction need time (and perhaps also editorial guidance) in order for their writing to mature. They have mastered the art of shortcuts, exaggeration and a dispassionate overview, as well as some of the stylistic tricks and subterfuges used by authors in thrillers. Their attempts so far have also been very valuable due to the natural and confident way they introduce motifs and elements of contemporary reality into the somewhat artificial environment of Czech crime fiction, including social tension, avaricious materialism in interpersonal relationships and the unpunished machinations of white-collar workers.

Translated by Graeme Dibble

Cover image: An illustration by Martin Svoboda from the Prague Noir anthology of Czech crime fiction (Paseka, 2016).

The present and the prospects

Introduction

Historically, Czech literature has always been relatively well represented in bookshops throughout the English-speaking world, with “Bad Bohemian” Hašek’s Švejk, the Čapek brothers’ original robots and the unbearable lightness of Kundera, Havel, Hrabal, Škvorecký, Klíma and Lustig, to name just a few (could you name so many recent famous Italian, French or German authors??), now giving way to contemporary successful authors who have built on these solid literary traditions and have been published abroad, such as Ajvaz, Ouředník, Topol, Hůlová, Hakl, Hostovský, Zmeškal, Balabán, Pilátová, Šindelka, Androniková, Brdečková, Kolský, Boučková, Nosková, Pekárková, Ráž, Toman, Bellová, Denemarková, Dousková, Neff, Hájíček, Kratochvil, Němec, Komárek, Soukupová and Viewegh, and that is not to mention genres such as Czech detective fiction (now being exported to Scandinavia), science fiction and fantasy (popular in Central Europe), women’s writing, drama, classic literature, comics and the wonderful Czech (and Slovak) tradition of illustrated children’s and young adults’ fiction.

But how can Anglophone publishers find out more about Czech authors who are doing so well on other markets?

For a long time translated literature was the Cinderella of the book market in the English-speaking world, with large publishers steering clear of it until quite recently. But over the last few years we have seen a plethora of new independent publishers taking up the cause, and the percentage of translated work has been creeping inexorably upwards as readers slowly realize what they have been missing. AmazonCrossing’s recent initiative indicates that this interest is set to continue…

With the densest network of libraries in the world and a cultured readership that is among the largest per capita anywhere to be found, the Czech Republic traditionally has a vibrant literary scene that might make some larger countries appear a little backward. Interest in visiting the Czech Republic has long been on the rise, as tourist figures clearly indicate. Bohemia is for booklovers. But how can Anglophone publishers cash in on this? Why are they missing out on what other European publishers in general and German-speaking publishers in particular have been capitalizing on for years? For example, Europeana by Patrik Ouředník had been published in nine languages (now 29) before it saw the light of day in English, while Sedmikostelí (The Seven Churches) by Miloš Urban has sold some 60,000 copies in Spain. Where are the bottlenecks and how can we unblock them?

The Spanish edition of ‘Sedmikostelí’ translated by Kepa-Lluís Uharte-Mendikoa

Czech literature in English translation is becoming increasingly accessible. Over the last few years a growing number of award-winning works have been translated, and with the advent of e-books this trend is surely set to continue. In this article we shall briefly describe the resources currently available for those interested in publishing Czech literature of any kind in English (or any other language for that matter), and we shall be discussing the ways that access to this literature in translation is set to improve in the near future.

Present situation

At present, those interested in translated Czech literature have various resources at their disposal and a broad range of specialists ready to deal immediately with enquiries. For example, there are the literary agencies, the translators themselves, the Institute of Czech Literature, CzechLit (formerly the Czech Literature Portal), the literary journals and the literary awards panels.

There are currently several large agencies dealing with Czech authors’ rights. Pluh run by the recent winner of the Letterenfonds Vertaalprijs Award, Dutch Bohemist Edgar de Bruin, Aura-Pont, Dana Blatná’s literary agency and the theatrical agency Dilia. These are all experienced agents in other markets, with a good command of English and a solid knowledge of publishers’ needs and award-winning works.

The Institute of Czech Literature at the Czech Academy of Sciences has for many years been providing detailed information on both contemporary and classic literature. The Institute provides bibliographical and library services to researchers and students of Czech literature and other associated disciplines, and it is a centre of information and inspiration for Bohemists and publishers abroad. The staff all have a good command of English and will go out of their way to steer you in the right direction.

There are quite a few Czech-English literary translators who might be described as “activists” and who are very willing to provide assistance and advice on Czech literature. To name just a few of them, Alex Zucker, Gerry Turner, Andrew Oakland, Václav Pinkava and Stacey Knecht are all experienced and very active on the scene. Check them out at Czechlist, where they interact daily with agents, authors and other translators.

There are several major Czech literary awards, most of which have a website offering details of the latest, most popular works. Magnesia Litera, the Jiří Orten Award, Josef Škvorecký Award, Czech Book Award, Franz Kafka Award (for non-Czechs too), Karel Čapek Award, State Award for Literature and Translation, Lidové Noviny Book of the Year and the Jaroslav Seifert Prize. Although the importance of these awards in publishers’ decision-making is a matter of some debate, the prizewinning works are often snapped up in the German-speaking world and elsewhere. Their websites are some of the first places to look for the latest Czech bestsellers.

Also of great interest is the European Union Prize for Literature, won by Tomáš Zmeškal with his Milostný dopis klínovým písmem (Love Letter in Cuneiform) and by Jan Němec in 2014 with his Dějiny světla (A History of Light), which many European publishers clearly do take very seriously.

The Jiří Theiner Award for Bohemists promoting Czech literature is also worthy of note.

CzechLit (formerly the Czech Literature Portal) is a one-stop virtual shop for all your literary needs. Financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture and managed by the Arts and Theatre Institute, it focuses in detail on books of all genres from Central Europe, particularly newly published ones in Czech and recently published translations, as well as literary events and criticism. There is also a rich seam of classic Czech literature that has not yet been tapped in the English-speaking world. Those Czech, German and Jewish writers who rubbed shoulders with Hašek and Čapek (portrayed marvellously in Derek Sayer’s Prague: Capital of the Twentieth Century), as well as the earlier Decadents and Symbolists, are often still waiting to be discovered by the English-speaking world, though that too is changing by degrees. This wonderful heritage, along with the long legacy of Czechoslovak science-fiction and children’s literature is also examined at CzechLit, as well as at the Museum of Czech Literature, where experts are on hand to assist. Other Czech literary organizations can be found here.

Future situation

How can this situation be improved? What kind of initiatives should we be looking forward to in the near future?

Alex Zucker sums up the situation among translation activists: “There is a *ton* of activism going on, both here [in the US] and in the UK (a little less in Canada, or at any rate it’s less visible). Most of it that I’m aware of has less to do with increasing the proportion of translated literature as such — although there are people who believe that is a worthwhile goal, and even if my energy is focused elsewhere I certainly think we could stand to have more of it — than on increasing the visibility of the translations that exist and on raising awareness of what goes into a literary translation.”

So awareness is so important, but how can awareness in general be raised in future? Translator Julia Sherwood, who is very active on the Slovak scene, has a good overview of the Central European sphere in general and the opportunities that exist for Czech literature within that framework:

“Maybe putting together a more comprehensive version of Finnegan’s List – approaching more writers, literary critics and academics perhaps?”

Here Julia is referring to an initiative from the European Society of Authors, which publishes an annual list of under-translated or forgotten works comprising recommendations from ten prominent writers. These lists are sent out to publishers and cultural institutions worldwide.

Julia brings up some other ideas: “Another thing worth trying longer term might be some kind of Visegrad cooperation – using the Visegrad Fund perhaps, and maybe building on the idea started by Větrné mlýny […] (of publishing a book by an author from these four countries in all four languages in parallel) – and getting those books into English as well.”

“Also more systematic cooperation with outlets such as Visegrad Insight would do no harm, they already review Czech and Slovak books regularly, and I think Polish and Hungarian as well.”

Here Julia is alluding to several other sites that deal with Central European literature, such as Literalab and perhaps literary translation sites with a more open focus, which often include reviews of Czech works, e.g. Asymptote, which also runs an important international translation competition.

“And last but not least – but this is pie in the sky: I’ve been following with great envy the fantastic boost Bulgarian literature has received since it found a rich and influential champion in the US. The writer Elisabeth Kostova has set up a foundation to promote Bulgarian lit, she started by giving Open Letter, an independent US publisher, a grant that enabled them to publish several translations from the Bulgarian. And a few days ago I met a US editor who spent a week at the seaside in Bulgaria, where the Elisabeth Kostova Foundation organized a seminar involving US publishers and translators, and Bulgarian writers.” Pie in the sky? Surely not. There is room on the coast of Bohemia for a Literary Centre to offer hospitality (amongst many other things) to publishers, translators and Bohemists, as we shall see…

Julia Sherwood. Source: juliaandpetersherwood.com

As for the agencies, these are to be joined by a relative newcomer to the field, the Prague Literary Agency run by Maria Sileny. Prague-born Maria has spent several decades as an editor in Germany, which is often the first port of call for a Czech novel on its way up in the world, but she also has an excellent command of English, which she put to very effective use at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. She already has several award-winning authors in her stable, such as Tereza Boučková, Věra Nosková, Iva Pekárková, Roman Ráž and Marek Toman, so we shall be hearing a lot more from her in future. She is also involved in promoting short stories in magazines abroad – another avenue to be explored more.

As for the awards, few of the literary award sites currently have an English version of the panels’ reasoning behind their findings. This is clearly due to change in the very near future. And do we have enough awards? Julia does not think so: This kind of award is another that might be introduced.

Is CzechLit doing all it can to reflect the vibrant literary scene here in the Czech Republic? Complaints are sometimes heard that its articles can be too critical. Others argue that it is somewhat difficult to fairly present Czech literary criticism without being a little critical, and non-stop positivity might after all get a little tedious. Perhaps a more balanced presentation of critics’ views does always need to be maintained. Maybe its role is yet to be stabilized. We shall see when its new format comes out of beta mode.

It has also been pointed out that CzechLit does not yet have a section focusing on translated Czech literature in foreign publications. This will also be remedied in due course. Another criticism is that information on grants is not readily visible and should be made more accessible. Easily done. Space should also be given over to the possibility of residential stays for translators and plans for a Czech Literary Centre (of which more anon). More information should also be provided on annual meetings of Bohemists arranged by the Czech Ministry of Culture. Some complain that the bios are not updated quickly enough. All this and more is in the pipeline…

Another method of promoting translated literature nowadays is that of reading clubs. For several years now independent publishers And Other Stories have been promoting foreign literature through online and meatspace groups that come together to discuss promising works. Publisher Stefan Tobler says this helps him to get a good idea of what is worth publishing. When I approached him at the European Literature Night Translation Pitch he welcomed the idea of a Czech and/or Slovak group, and others are clearly interested too. Incidentally, competitions of that kind (co-organized by the Czech Centre in London) can be entertaining as well as educational, so they are surely only to be encouraged.

Other ideas raised by translators to improve public awareness include “Czech week“-style campaigns in bookshops and libraries. There is a growing collection of Czech books not a million miles from St. Pancras station in London which might be put to good promotional use at some time.

The quality of translations is an important factor. Alex Zucker stresses the need for translator mentoring programmes, which clearly have an increasing role to play here: “More mentoring would be good. They’ve got a good mentoring program going in the UK. We’re just starting one up here [in the US] ourselves. I think it’s absolutely essential.” These are sometimes funded by national literary foundations , but individual arrangements will often do the trick, as Alex points out. His story is perhaps typical of many experienced translators: “I agree that competence is an issue, particularly for translators who haven’t been edited early in their development by someone who knows both languages and knows what they’re doing. I benefited *enormously* from the edits Paul Wilson did on my contributions to the anthology he put together in 1996. Also, I studied Czech for two years with Peter Kussi, and we did a lot of translating in class, so I got to see and hear how he approached the task, and ask a lot of questions.”

Translator David Livingstone adds: “I think we should always encourage literary translations, even if the results are never published or read by many. I encourage my students to do so, even if it’s not genius work. Poe’s The Raven has been translated into Czech countless times as have Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Why not? […] I read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the Constance Garnett translations as a teenager and they blew my mind. Since then I have read that they are problematic. Still grateful to her though.” He goes on to say: “I think there are plenty of people, me and my colleagues, for example, who would love the opportunity to translate more Czech literature into English if we could get at least paid decently.”

Adequate pay for translators is clearly a vital issue that needs to be addressed. Alex Zucker, who co-chairs the Translation Committee at PEN America, points out: “The rates for literary translation, though somewhat higher in, say, France or the UK than here in the States, are, as far as I know, universally lower than for commercial or technical translation, and certainly not enough for anyone but a select few to make a living from. This is the other area where there is considerable activism. For those who are curious, the organizations besides the ATA that have been involved in all of these issues, to varying degrees at different times, are the American Literary Translators Association and the Translation Committee at PEN America (which I currently cochair). Here is an interview I did earlier this year that covers some of this stuff. Meanwhile I just recently persuaded the Authors Guild here to establish a Translators’ Section, analogous to the Translators Association within the Society of Authors in the UK. The AG has been engaged on issues of authors’ rights, both moral and economic, for over a hundred years, so my hope is that they will be more effective in advocating on our behalf than the other organizations, whose missions are less clear in this regard. (Again, not to be excessively self-promoting, but I also wrote a blog post on this.) For info on the situation in Europe, see this report from CEATL. And for the latest update from the UK, see this report from Literature Across Frontiers, run by Alexandra Büchler.”

Alex Zucker. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Source: pen.org

Sales of around 5,000 copies have become a yardstick for the successful translation of a foreign novel. Yet this figure has also come to reflect the sad reality of publishing translations in English. In 2002 Christopher MacLehose, formerly director of the Harvill Press, observed that “for the most part now the majority of even the finest books that are translated find their way to sales between 1,500 and 6,000.” This creates a gap which must be bridged, and translation publishers are forced to find this bridge-money from third parties. Translation publishing is very often subsidized publishing. Where does this money come from? Grants and subsidies, e.g. from the Ministry of Culture and the Czech Literary Fund, an independent organisation partly funded by the Ministry of Culture, for the publication of original fiction and translations. The Fund also provides grants to authors. Here are the books supported by the Ministry in recent years. Every year, the Department of Arts and Libraries issues a call for proposals to support the translation and publication of Czech literature abroad. This year the successful proposals include six English translations. Note the special position of Jantar Publishing, who specialize in Czech and other Central European literature. Also watch out for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, supported by Amazon.

One agent also referred to the possibility of obtaining support from private enterprise. This is certainly an avenue worth exploring further. One example of corporate backing of this kind is the children’s book The House Beyond the Mist, which came out this year thanks to Koh-i-Noor funding. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. The same agent also referred to the Visegrad Fund site, where an interesting collection of parallel Czech>English translations is kept.

Another option worth considering is that of publishing a translated work on your own. A print run of 2,000 copies of an average-sized novel can cost in the region of 40,000-50,000 Kč. Is this an investment that will ever pay off? Gale A. Kirking thinks it might well…eventually. He translated and published Jiří Hájíček’s award-winning Selský baroko (Rustic Baroque), and believes that if the translator and author are committed to working together on promoting the book then the dividend can be worthwhile:

“A special relationship with a translator and/or publisher can make the difference between that author’s remaining isolated locally or finding an audience in the wider world.

In our case, I originally took on the translation on a speculative basis. There was no advance and no guarantee that I ever would earn a penny of profit on the Rustic Baroque project. I still have no such guarantee, and I ultimately undertook also to publish the novel through my own small press. If I did not feel that the author stood ready to go the distance with promoting the book to make it a success in English, I surely would not have taken this second step.

Fortunately, Rustic Baroque has gotten a good reception since its release in the closing weeks of 2012. Moreover, Jiří Hájíček was recently named to Finnegan’s List 2013 [see above], whereby the European Society of Authors designates those writers whose recent work makes them most worthy of translation into world languages. It is encouraging to know that the keepers of Finnegan’s List now share my view as to the worthiness of the author who is my partner.”

Jiří Hájíček’s ‘Rustic Baroque’ translated by Gale A. Kirking

Gale says that Czech literature in English has two natural markets to be targeted. Firstly, there are millions of people in America with Czech ancestry. In Nebraska, Texas and Wisconsin, for example, there are Czech communities that go back at least to the 19th century. These people are often interested in anything to do with the homeland, as can be attested by their very vocal online presence in Czech-related forums. Britain has also witnessed several waves of immigration from Czechoslovakia and the descendents must number in the tens of thousands.

Secondly, this is no faraway country of which we know little. Millions of people in the English-speaking world have some connection with the Czech Republic, whether it is through a spouse, a good friend, a neighbour, a holiday, a job or just fleeting curiosity. These links get stronger by the year as inexpensive transport makes even commuting an option, so as time goes by, Czech realia comes to be part of our common European heritage.

I asked Gale a little more about his translation project. Does he expect the financial investment to ever pay off?

“If we mean by paying off to receive back all of my out-of-pocket costs (and those of my company) plus make a reasonable return as a financial investor would see it on my labors, cash costs, and risks undertaken, well, then certainly not in the near, medium (already past) or long term. In the very long term, well, I hope so. I strongly believe in the literary value of Jiří Hájíček’s work. He is a big talent, in my opinion, albeit one that has not yet been much visible and appreciated outside of the former Czechoslovakia. I am optimistic that he will one day be widely recognized. I should note, though, that expectations of potentially great financial return ranked no higher than 3rd place on my list of reasons for translating Selský baroko.”

In conclusion, plans are now afoot to tie up the various loose ends in a new Czech Literary Centre, co-financed by the Ministry of Culture along with other local and national bodies and private organizations. This Centre will bring together all the activities involved in the promotion and presentation of Czech literature, both at home and abroad. It will provide a focus for a nationwide network of “literature houses”, including the literary cafe and bookshop that is being planned by the recently formed Association of Writers for Prague, and it will provide a home for literary organizations, public seminars, lectures and readings. Not least, there will be several apartments for writers, publishers and translators from abroad. The Centre will also serve to operate CzechLit, arrange grants, produce television and radio programmes and coordinate policy on literature.

Here we have barely skimmed the surface of the opportunities available. Readers are invited to send their ideas, brickbats and bouquets to me (zehrovak@gmail.com) or to Czechlist.

Following an absence of two decades, the Czech Republic has returned to the International Book Festival in Budapest with its own stall. Let’s take this opportunity to look back at what has been happening on the Hungarian book market in recent years and which works of Czech literature are being translated, published and read.

What does it take for a book by a Czech author to be published in Hungary? Determination. Someone has to really want the translation to come about, because publishing Czech authors is rarely a profitable venture for publishers. Of course, I’m not talking about the three great figures of Czech literature that almost everyone in Hungary has heard of. If you stop a Hungarian on the street and ask him whether he knows any Czech writers, ninety percent of the time the answer will be: Hrabal, Hašek or Kundera. The more knowledgeable might supplement the famous trio with the following: Čapek, Havel and Holan. The connoisseurs include members of the Bohemia Friendship Club (Bohemia Baráti Kör). This association of Hungarian friends of Czech literature was founded in 1993, is in constant contact with the Czech embassy and the Budapest Czech Centre, and is actively involved in promoting Czech culture in Hungary. The society’s activities include organizing regular themed trips to the Czech Republic, publishing the Bohemia magazine (twice a year), publishing books with Czech subject matter, and organizing the annual Czech Ball in Budapest. In 2003 the Bohemia Friendship Club was awarded the Gratias Agit prize for promoting the good name of the Czech Republic abroad.

The cult of Hrabal is very strong in Hungary. It can be stated without hesitation that his work is constantly read in Hungary. There is even a Bohumil Hrabal Table Society (Asztaltársaság), which meets in the Hrabal Pub. A few months ago, a commemorative plaque to Bohumil Hrabal was unveiled in that very place – in accordance with the author’s instructions, of course (i.e. at the height at which dogs pee). In 2014 many events were held in connection with the centenary of Bohumil Hrabal’s birth, including a conference whose participants included Hrabal experts from Hungary and abroad. To mark the occasion, the Európa publishing house prepared a reissue of seven volumes of Hrabal’s best-known work. A renaissance in the publishing of Kundera’s work can also be witnessed over the last three years. Owning these volumes is now very fashionable in intellectual circles, so publishers have no trouble selling these books. The same cannot be said of other classic writers or contemporary authors – publishing their work does not pay off for any publisher from a purely commercial point of view.

Why is this the case? Why haven’t other authors entered into the consciousness of Hungarian readers? Is there any point in trying to promote the dissemination of the literature of our nearby neighbours? In one interview the poet, translator and Bohemist István Vörös formulated his opinion on the subject thus: “Our two nations both seem to get along all too well without the other’s values. However, that ‘all too well’ is just an illusion – we are suffering from a serious vitamin deficiency which results in chronic diseases. The complications of these diseases are a lack of contact with reality, unrealistic ideas about the world, self-hatred which turns into xenophobia, self-deception stemming from stupidity, nationalism and an absence of humanity.”

Finding the pearls of the deep

So how can readers and Hungarian publishers who are open to new things and are not afraid to take a risk find genuine Czech literary pearls? There are a few possibilities – in the first scenario, the publisher either already speaks the local language or has learned it and is able to keep an eye on the Czech book market himself. In the second scenario, the publishing house will employ an editor with a good command of the Czech language and place the burden of this worthy task upon his shoulders (see, for example, Kalligram, Európa, Ulpius-ház). In the third scenario, publishers will go round international book fairs (e.g. Frankfurt, Bologna) or follow the awarding of literary prizes. As far as these prizes are concerned, the one with the greatest international renown is the European Union Prize for Literature. After Tomáš Zmeškal was awarded it in 2011 for the novel Love Letter in Cuneiform and Jan Němec in 2014 for the novel A History of Light, Hungarian publishers fell over themselves to secure the publishing rights to these works.

Tomáš Zmeškal speaking at the 21st International Book Festival in Budapest. Photo: Jaroslav Balvín.

I hope I’m not selling a pig in a poke when I say that those who are pushing hardest for the popularization of Czech literature are its translators. Among them we find a good few campaigners who spend a long time knocking on publishers’ doors with one book or another that they consider worthy of publication (whether it is a new or classic work) before one of them finally takes the bait and publishes it. Another factor that facilitates the publishing of Czech fiction in Hungary is the existence of all kinds of grants, which provides a strong argument for the translators making the rounds of publishing houses in this way.

The form of grant that Hungarian publishing houses are most familiar with is the one offered by the European Union. In the past, the grants to support the translation of Czech literature offered by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic were mostly taken up by the ‘big publishing houses’ like Kalligram and Európa. Smaller players rarely applied for this subsidy. However, these days the structures of the publishing industry are undergoing a transformation and a growing number of smaller publishing houses are opening up to Czech fiction (e.g. Typotex, Galaktika, Noran Libro, Napkút etc.). Indeed, this was one of the main reasons for the launch of a project entitled Translate It! at the Budapest Czech Centre in the autumn of 2015.

Translate It!

The annual Translate It! exchange is a forum where Hungarian publishers can meet with translators. Translators pitch selected works of Czech literature from various genres (by classic and contemporary authors) directly to publishers in the form of a presentation and extracts from a translation. The first gathering, which was held on 12 October 2015 at the Budapest Czech Centre, also involved the personal participation of two Czech authors: Marie Iljašenko and Marek Toman. This year’s guest at the exchange, which is to take place on 5 October 2016, will be Petr Stančík. The first year has already borne fruit – twice as many publishers applied for the Ministry of Culture’s translation grant for the year 2016. And the results suggest that this will be a record year in terms of the number of Czech books published. Thanks to this gathering, a number of books found a publisher or obtained financial support. The real success stories include the Anthology of 19th Century Czech Poetry which was created at Eötvös Loránd University and edited by Veronika Hée, as well as A Winter Book about Love by Dora Kaprálová and Petr Stančík’s novel Mummy Mill. The translator of this last book, Gábor Hanzelik, described the meeting with publishers thus: “It is an unprecedented event which sets off a process that results in a Hungarian readership that is acquainted with Czech literature.”

Translate It! 2015. Photo: Czech Centre Budapest.

Thanks to this exchange of ideas and in connection with the presentation of the Czech Republic as part of the Book Festival in Budapest, a Translate It! brochure was created in the spring; it contains a representative sample of as yet untranslated works from contemporary Czech literature published in the last 15 years. This overview, which aims to encourage the creation of translations, includes authors who have already had some of their work published in Hungarian translation (e.g. Patrik Ouředník, Kateřina Tučková, Miloš Urban), and whose names are therefore known to Hungarian readers, as well as authors whose books are still awaiting translation. The majority of the more than sixty selected works (novels, collections of short stories or poems, essays, biographies, comics, books for children and young adults) have been awarded one of the prestigious literary prizes (State Prize for Literature, Magnesia Litera, Josef Škvorecký Prize), have had exceptionally positive reviews or have already been translated into other foreign languages and thus have a good chance of also appealing to the Hungarian reader. This is a unique guide for publishers and others in the trade, which they can use as the basis for decisions about which works to include in their publishing plan and where and how to secure financial support for the publishing of a Hungarian translation. Through this publication, the Budapest Czech Centre hopes primarily to raise interest in publishing Czech literature within the country. However, the guide is also a unique source of information about contemporary Czech literature and anyone with an interest in the subject can enjoy leafing through it. It was the work of sixteen translators, who wrote brief profiles of the individual authors (and illustrators) and translated short extracts from works they had chosen. In addition to bibliographical information, it also provides publishers with contact details for copyright holders and translators.

Lost in Babylon

How does someone actually become a translator of literary texts? At present there are two universities in Hungary offering courses in Czech Studies: at the University of Szeged those interested in Czech culture can obtain a Bachelor’s degree, and at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where the Czech Studies department celebrated the sixtieth year of its existence last year, those interested in the Czech language can pursue their studies all the way to PhD level. Unfortunately, the Czech Studies section at the Péter Pázmány Catholic University was closed down several years ago, even though a good few members of the current generation of young translators of Czech literature were educated there (e.g. Márton Beke, Borbála Csoma and Zsuzsanna Juhászné Hahn). In the Hungarian–Czech language combination, the teaching of translatology or literary translation is only carried out on a theoretical level (i.e. not at all); these two minor languages are not able to generate a sufficient number of students to make it worthwhile offering a specialism of this type. In most cases, therefore, translators learn the profession by themselves, trying it out first-hand in practice, since in the course of their university studies they have the opportunity to take part in at most a few specialist seminars focused on translation. And yet, despite all of this, for the time being there are still plenty of skilled translators from Czech!

This year, with the aim of establishing a tradition, the László Németh Translation Camp, focusing on literary translation, was held for the first time at the Folk High School in Lakitelek. “In individual workshops divided according to European languages (Czech, Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian) the young translators participated in seminars where they worked under the guidance of renowned literary translators on works of fiction which had not yet been published in Hungarian translation. During the afternoon they then had the opportunity to attend specialist lectures on subjects like the literature of Central and Eastern Europe or the theory of translation. The translations which were created as part of the camp, together with the texts of the lectures, will be published in an anthology,” explains Andor Mészáros, a historian and Bohemist who, together with Csaba G. Kiss, was one of the professional guarantors of the camp.

Translators at the László Németh Translation Camp. Photo: Czech Centre Budapest.

Grants and competitions for translation contribute significantly to allowing talented young translators to present themselves to the public. One of them is the Susanna Roth Award, which is open to translators up to forty years of age who have not yet had a translation of a book published. The prize is offered jointly by the Czech Centres and the Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture. The Hungarian winner in the first year was Zsuzsanna Juhászné Hahn, who has made a name for herself thanks in part to the prize. In April of this year, her translation of Petra Soukupová’s book To Disappear (Eltűnés) was published as part of the 23rd international book fair in Budapest, followed by her translation of Dora Kaprálová’s A Winter Book about Love (Egy férfi. Válasz Esterházy Péternek) in June. She is currently busy working on a translation of Jan Němec’s book A History of Light (A fény története), which is due to be launched in the spring of 2017. “As someone starting out as a translator, I would prefer it if the interest in Hungarian literature was as great as at the height of Hrabal’s fame. Those days will never return, but I think that the subsequent downturn is also a thing of the past. There are more and more publishing houses which are making the decision to publish Czech books, which is due in large part to grants provided through the Czech Ministry of Culture’s programme and the EU’s Creative Europe programme. Another encouraging aspect is the proactive approach taken by the Budapest Czech Centre, which issued its first publication at the Book Festival – the Translate It! brochure, which offers a Hungarian presentation of approximately sixty Czech books which are worthy of attention.” We believe that the translating career of the second year’s winner, Anna Steinbachné Bobok, is set to take off in a similar way.

2016 Susanna Roth Award workshop. Photo: Czech Centre Budapest.

In this context we should also mention the competition held annually by the National Library of Foreign Literature (Országos Idegennyelvű Könyvtár, OIK) to mark the International Day of Languages, in which a different language takes centre stage each year. The only condition is that entrants have not yet had a translation published in book form. In 2011 a jury mainly consisting of poets assessed the translation of Karel Šiktanc’s poem The Second Day from the cycle Adam and Eve. The winner from 42 entrants was Sándor Szalay, and all the translations which came out of the competition were then published in a supplement to the September 2011 issue of the art and literature journal Napút.

It is possible to apply to the arts foundation Cédrus Művészeti Alapítvány on an ongoing basis for financial support for literary works or translations of them or related academic research. Twice a year, applicants can seek support for work of theirs which has not yet been published in book form. The work submitted is assessed by a jury composed of section heads from the journal Napút. The work of selected applicants is then published on the magazine’s website. Every year in November the foundation also holds a competition with a prize for the best piece of work, and the Napút publishing house then publishes some of the submitted works at its own discretion, sometimes even in book form.

The Mihály Babits Translation Grant is offered with the backing of the Ministry for Human Resources by the non-profit organization Magyar Alkotóművészeti Közhasznú Nonprofit Kft. Young translators can apply for financial support for the translation of a work of fiction (prose or poetry), a critical essay, or a paper from the field of sociology or philosophy, from any source language into Hungarian. The professional guarantor of the grant is the Petőfi Literary Museum, which is responsible for its implementation.

Another option for Bohemists, more specifically those who are already working as translators of Czech literature, is the Bohemistics Seminar, which this year also played host to four Hungarian participants. There is also the residency programme Prague City of Literature, in which one foreign writer or translator comes to Prague every second month for an eight-week stay.

Online vs offline

And where else can translations be published? In addition to book publishing, it is also worth discussing the various possibilities offered by online or offline publishing. Surfing the Slavonic waters, we come across the website Szláv Textus (Slavonic Text), established in 2013. In the form of a blog, it tells you “everything you wanted to know about Slavonic literature, films, music and culture.” The main authors of Czech-themed articles are Gábor Hanzelik and Radmila Hrisztov. The website also offers excerpts from literary works, most of which are from recently published books.

The literary portal Litera has been providing cultural content for fourteen years now. It is a public-service initiative whose main aim is to publish high-quality literary, critical and journalistic texts, i.e. reports from the web aimed at connoisseurs and lovers of literature. In 2005, the creative team behind this website were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. They regularly publish interviews and recommend articles, including reports from the field of Czech culture. The editor-in-chief of the website is Gabriella Nagy, who is also the curator of texts for the literary event Literature Night.

The objective of the Bábel Web anthology and its sister website Magyarul Bábelben (Hungarian in Babylon) is to allow users to sample literature from various countries around the world through translations into different languages. On this website we can read parallel excerpts of prose or poetry in the original language and in translation. The content of the website is the responsibility of volunteers – editors, authors and translators who post original texts or translations for which they have either obtained copyright permission or own the copyright themselves. Here we can find texts by the likes of Markéta Pilátová, Emil Hakl, Petr Bezruč and Jan Werich alongside each other.

The website Versum describes itself as an online platform for international poetry which follows contemporary trends, voices and directions in world poetry, as well as the most interesting contemporary foreign poets. It is an online literary magazine which gives readers an insight into contemporary international poetry and, in doing so, keeps revisiting the theme of the translation and translatability of poems from many different angles. The Czech poets whose poetry is cited here include Petr Hruška, Jan Skácel, Egon Bondy, Michael Lorence, Oldřich Mikulášek, Jiří Orten and Lenka Kuhar Daňhelová.

In addition to publishing poems, short stories or extracts from novels, printed literary journals also frequently bring out special issues dedicated to specific themes or the literature of a particular country. Special editions dedicated to Czech literature were published in 2012 by the poetry journal Parnasszus (Parnas), in 2004 by the journal Jelenkor (The Present), in 2007 by the journal Nagyvilág (The World), and in 2014 by the journal Helikon. In 2006 the journal Csodaceruza (The Magic Pencil) introduced its readers to the world of Czech children’s literature.

Another journal which deserves a mention is the Hungarian version of the cultural review Lettre Internationale, which sadly brought its 25 years of operations to a close this year with a symbolic final 100th edition. This literary quarterly provided writers and translators with an opportunity to publish their work; it played an important role as an intermediary between publishers and writers; it was a discussion forum and a common platform for the activities of various creative groups; and it helped to give the wider community of readers a grounding in Hungarian and international literature and culture. “Over the years we presented Czech authors in Lettre in the context of Visegrad. We regularly published excerpts from forthcoming translations by well-known translators (Zsuzsa V. Detre, Márton Beke, Borbála Csoma and István Vörös). One of our longstanding authors and translators, István Vörös, also recommended to us one of his students, Zsuzsanna Juhászné Hahn, with whom we went on to work with regularly. For a number of years Mrs Otília Barna, living in Prague, would recommend authors who had just published their first books and translate excerpts from their work for our journal. On the last occasion she provided us with an overview of the work of Filip Topol and wrote a major essay about him. The translator of Topol’s books was Péter Koleszár, who we got to know thanks to these translations, and – alongside Flóra Peťovská, who came to public attention through her translation of Dora Čechová’s work – he became one of our best translators from Czech,” commented the former editor-in-chief of the journal, Éva Karádi, on working with translators from Czech. “Often it’s the translators themselves who choose and recommend a work by a contemporary author they are interested in. Over the years we published overviews of contemporary Visegrad literature in the winter editions of Lettre, and on occasion we would also publish the work of writers participating in the Visegrad residency programme (e.g. Dora Kaprálová). Quite often, authors would come to the attention of publishers precisely because we had published some of their work in the journal.”

On to the festival!

The idea for the First Novel Festival (Európai Elsőkönyvesek Fesztiválja) was the brainchild of Mrs Éva Karádi. It is a gathering, organized as part of the International Book Festival in Budapest, with guest writers from across Europe who have already published their first novel or book of short stories, and who are destined for great things according to the critics. In past years, guests from the Czech Republic have included Viktorie Hanišová, Dora Čechova, Tomáš Zmeškal, Jaroslav Žváček, Petr Čichoň, Jan Nĕmec, Marek Šindelka, Markéta Pilátová, Jonáš Tokarský, David Zábranský, Jaroslav Pížl, Hana Andronikova, Petra Hůlová and Ivan Krejčí. It has also become customary for the most important literary/social journal Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature) to publish a special supplement dedicated to first-time authors a week before this event. This allows readers to familiarize themselves with the works of these authors, who they can then meet in person at the panel discussions or numerous other events held as part of the Book Festival. The fact that many of the authors who had excerpts of their work read in Hungarian at the event went on to be published is testament to the success of this initiative. Examples include David Zábranský’s novel A Weakness for Every Other Beach (Mindig más strandra vágyik), translated by László G. Kovács and published by L’Harmattan as part of the Valahol Európában (Somewhere in Europe) series, Petra Hůlová’s novels Through Frosted Glass (Homályos üvegen át) and All This Belongs To Me (Nagyanyám emlékezete), and Marek Šindelka’s prose debut, The Mistake (Hiba), all of which were translated by Otília Barna and published by the Európa publishing house.

The International Book Festival in Budapest (Budapesti Nemzetközi Könyvfesztivál) is traditionally held in the second half of April and is only a year younger than the Prague trade fair Book World. After twenty years, the Czech Republic once again had a national stall at this event. The whole event was supported, coordinated and organized by the Budapest Czech Centre, with financial support from the Czech Ministry of Culture. The focus of the Czech participation was a stall displaying Czech books translated into Hungarian (which were also for sale), as well as outstanding, though as yet untranslated, Czech works, mainly fiction, children’s literature and comics. In addition to the Hungarian translation of Petra Soukupová’s To Disappear (Eltűnés), another two works by contemporary Czech authors were also published as part of the Budapest Book Festival: The Žítková Godesses by Kateřina Tučková (Üldözött istennők, translation by Borbála Csoma) and Darmata by Petr Hruška (Mondom neked, translation by István Vörös). Another Czech guest was Viktorie Hanišová, whose literary debut, Anežka, was presented at the trade fair as part of the First Novel Festival. There were also book signings and meetings with guest authors at a stall called #nemcsakhrabal (#notonlyhrabal). In a separate room, there was a discussion on the topic of contemporary Czech literature. Taking part in this, alongside the guest authors, were Radim Kopáč from the Ministry of Culture and István Vörös, the leading Hungarian Bohemist. There were also evening programmes: as part of the Night of the Small Booksellers some Czech literary treats were prepared – public readings of Czech literature by well-known Hungarians (e.g. the critic Géza Csákvári, the director Nemes Gyula and the young poet Kata Nagy) as well as a literary Pub Quiz (testing the participants’ knowledge of Czech literature).

#notonlyhrabal. Photo: Czech Centre Budapest.

The older brother of the Book Festival is Book Week (Ünnepi Könyvhét), which celebrated its 87th anniversary in June of this year. It is always held in Budapest, though over time an increasing number of larger Hungarian towns have gradually begun to join in the event. For the past 15 years, the Days of Children’s Books (Gyermekkönyvnapok) have run in parallel with the Book Week. It might seem strange to organize two such large book events so close together, but the enormous interest from the public suggests otherwise. Outside the hectic pre-Christmas rush, it is during this period that the greatest number of new books is published and that they find their way into households. Whilst the Book Festival contains national stalls from various countries alongside the stalls of Hungarian publishers, at the Book Week the spotlight is on Hungarian literature. Nevertheless, three publishing houses brought out translations of Czech authors: the children’s book publishers Móra published Ivona Březinová’s novella The Boy and the Dog; Galaktika publishers, who focus mainly on science-fiction, published Petr Stančík’s fantastical novel Mummy Mill; and the publishers Typotex brought out A Winter Book about Love by Dora Kaprálová, inspired by the recent death of the novelist Péter Esterházy (who was in turn inspired by the aforementioned Bohumil Hrabal, to whom he dedicated his book The Book of Hrabal).

From the list of institutions which have helped to promote Czech and other foreign literature in Hungary, it is important to mention the largest literary museum in Hungary – the Petőfi Literary Museum (Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum), which, as the Budapest host organization of the Visegrad Programme for Writers in Residence, provides successful applicants from the ranks of writers, poets, literary historians, journalists and translators with the opportunity to meet and work with each other and present their works to the public. The most recent Czech guests were Dora Kaprálová, Marie Iljašenko and Petr Maděra. This museum is also the organizer of the international literary Budapest Transfer Festival, which has been attended by guests from more than 20 countries between 2006 and 2015. As part of the festival, which is also supported by international cultural institutions, there are various literary programmes, meetings and public readings as well as organized walks around the city, light-art shows and concerts. The theme of the festival, which is different every year, determines the choice of guests – Kateřina Tučková was enticed to Budapest in 2011 by the theme of stories rewritten, Tereza Jandová in 2014 by the theme of urbanization, and Viktor Faktor, Alexandr Guha and Pavel Maurer in 2015 by the theme of gastronomy. Unfortunately, however, due to a lack of financing, this year’s festival, the 9th in the series, has had to be cancelled.

Budapest Transfer 2015

The question of how to get a book by a contemporary author to the readers themselves was one of the first to be asked by the new director of the Budapest Czech Centre, Lucie Orbók: “It’s all about the people. The promotion of a book or a contemporary author doesn’t just happen all by itself. It’s necessary to hold some kind of event which will attract a large number of people and present the literature in an unusual way. For example, through the Literature Night, which is the flagship of the Czech Centres and has expanded to include many European cities over a period of ten years. This year we were behind the event in Budapest and the results surprised even us: a total of 22 countries took part, and the city of Budapest got involved in the project as did the famous József Katona Theatre. There were queues everywhere and the average visitor age was around 35.” The Czech author chosen was Ondřej Neff with his dystopia The Darkness (Sötétség, translation: Otília Barna). An excerpt from the book was read out in a one-hundred-year-old subway train. Literature Night had been held twice before in Budapest (2011, 2012), in each case just before the book trade fair. Unfortunately, for many reasons, neither event was a success; both of them had low attendance figures and lacked coherence, which was why the Budapest EUNIC Cluster decided against continuing with the project. However, following this year’s successful restart, a date for next year’s event has already been set for 30 March 2017. The objective this time is to make contact with partners from regional towns and expand this unique event from the workshops of the Czech Centres to the whole of Hungary.

Is there life after Hrabal?

Unfortunately, in Hungary not much is known or written about contemporary Czech literature. However, this is not to say that books by contemporary authors are never published. It would appear that we are currently witnessing an upward trend. Research by the Czech Centre indicates that on average seven Czech books are published annually in Hungary. The most frequently translated living authors have been Patrik Ouředník, Jáchym Topol and Milan Kundera. In recent years the greatest successes have been Ouředník’s Europeana (translation by László G. Kovács) and Jan Novák’s novel So Far So Good (Eddig megvolnánk, translation by Márton Beke). Publishers view the publication of Czech and other foreign-language literature, in particular poetry, as a cultural mission for which they need help from various grant programmes. The books normally have a print run of up to 1,000 copies and are considered successful once half of these are sold. And what guarantees success? It is difficult to express this in universal terms, but in general it is about the right combination of the following components: the title, cover, subject matter, a visit by the author, good reviews and especially reader recommendations.

Translated by Graeme and Suzanne Dibble

Cover image: Detail from the cover of the Hungarian edition of A Winter Book about Love by Dora Kaprálová

In 2006 Dana Blatná founded a private literary agency with a focus on contemporary Czech fiction, which has a a roster of more than twenty writers. She also works in the publishing house Host where she is responsible for promotion and sale of rights.

Translators, especially in Eastern Europe, are very important. They bring the attention of publishers to Czech writers in their respective countries, often providing a free translation of a book excerpt or a selection of reviews. They thus pave the foundation for their potential future commission – translation of the whole book. Regardless, it’s still a fairly unusually friendly attitude.

In the West, particularly in larger publishing houses, copyreaders are very influential. They often commission several independent reviews of a single book. Based on these evaluations, and with the addition of a book excerpt and numerous other relevant information, a lengthy decision-making process ensues. The publisher thus invests a lot of time and money into the book even before it’s certain whether it will be published at all. In an ideal case, the chain you mentioned in your question should also encompass a state-run cultural institution that would help co-fund successful projects.

As a matter of fact, the best solution is to stand together at such a moment – for instance a Czech publisher pays for a book display by a promising author at a foreign book fair; Book World and Ministry of Culture invite the author to a local reading; an agent prepares the catalogue and arranges all the meetings; a translator, in cooperation with all of the aforementioned collaborators, delivers illustrative samples and might even partially and “independently” present these to a publisher around the same time.

Since it’s not a mathematical formula, eventually everything can end up being completely different. Whether a project is successful or not is often influenced by something rather subtle, inconspicuous – an enthusiastic editor who becomes fond of a few sentences from an excerpt, a lucky coincidence, anything.

Is it possible to trace and generalize what makes a book a success in Europe, for instance? What exactly is that defining moment from which things start developing?
In the beginning, what matters is the quality of the text itself and an interesting topic (either so general that it’s easily comprehensible elsewhere or, on the other hand, purely Czech and thus demonstrably new, different and interesting…). It’s also helpful to have a good original publisher. A great majority of foreign publishers, who are willing to discuss a potential publishing of a translation, are either already familiar with the Czech market or tend to obtain a profile of a Czech publisher. Literary awards and good reviews are also helpful.

It’s necessary to mention the genre and, as a rule of thumb, the novel has always occupied a special place in literature. Everything else has a great disadvantage from the very start. Short story collections, essays or poetry are translated very rarely. A major breakthrough comes with the first few published translations, especially translated into world languages. Those who manage to get their books published in English or German (and, as is the case with a Czech publisher, it should be brought out by a prestigious publishing house) can soon expect more success.

Such an author should already have several titles out on the local book market. This increases the chances for more substantial success. It’s also useful if someone “prominent” puts in a word  – such as Milan Kundera and his repeated praise for Jiří Kratchvil’s books. Provided during this phase (with several acclaimed books at least on the domestic markets and one or two titles translated and published abroad) the author is determined to do whatever he or she can in support of his or hers book accepting various offers for foreign presentations and is perhaps fluent in one of the world languages, everyone is satisfied.

This would be an instant recipe for success…Michal Viewegh calls it “the snowball effect”, yet the ball has to follow in the right direction and if it’s pushed a little from time to time – I would add – even better…

What role do personal relations play in this process. What is the role of inspired individuals – for instance a translator?
Personal relations are invaluable. They are part of the whole magic and can play a crucial role. That’s why book fairs still exist even though in the field of book publishing and sale of rights the year-round agenda has shifted to the internet and phones. Translators are very important – almost no literary translators would translate a book they do not respect or like.

Surely, reservations can arise, but translators spend at least several months of their lives with books they are working on. Hence these translations have to be imbued with positive emotions, you’d notice otherwise. Provided the author can meet the translator of his or hers book in person and they do get on, longstanding friendships are forged… There are several examples, such as Viola Fischerová and Dorota Dobrew, Dradka Denemarková and Tatjana Jamnik, Irena Dousková and Mirko Kraetsch, Jiří Kratochvil and Katrin Liedke with Milka Vagadyová, and so on.

Which author from your roster has received the highest acclaim abroad? What can actually be considered a success?
Even after many years, I still consider each book published in translation a success. The writing can reach new readers and that alone is very important. What authors who write in world languages can happily ignore, becomes crucial for literary works of small nations. If they want to expand the scope of their reach, it has to be through translations.

It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that the most successful writer whom I represent is Michal Viewegh – judging by the number of languages in which at least one of his works appeared. As of now, his works have been published in 21 languages. Currently the Greek, Ukrainian and Romanian editions are being prepared.

Other writers with similar levels of acclaim (using aforementioned criteria) is Michal Ajvaz (translations into 7 languages, with four other in the pipeline), Jiří Kratochvil (11 and 1), Irena Dousková (5 and 1) and Radka Denemarková (4 and 3).

Furthermore, one can take into consideration the number of titles in a certain language by an author; the number of copies and sold copies; the reception of the book, etc. It is intriguing to follow the success of single titles – with Michal Viewegh’s Výchova dívek v Čechách (Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia) unequivocally at the top with translations published in 16 languages, followed by Báječná léta pod psa (The Wonderful Years of Lousy Living, 14) and Vybíjená (Dodgeball, 10 – rights sold for two other languages).

When it comes to Michal Ajvaz, his Druhé město (Second City with 5 published translations and rights sold into another language) has proven most popular. This is similar to Jiří Kratochvil – three of his most popular books according to these criteria have been published in five different languages (Uprostřed nocí zpěv, Singing in the Middle of the Night – 5 published translations, Nesmrtelný příběh, Immortal Story, and Truchlivý Bůh, Despondent God – 4 published translations, 1 in preparation).

What’s crucial is whether a book has been translated into a world language. In particular, English or German editions can be a breakthrough. Personally, I immensely appreciate the recent success in German and English language territories. I’m very curious about the feedback in other countries regarding the German translations of Michal Viewegh’s novella Andělé všedního dne (Angels of the Everyday)and Jiří Kratochvil’s novel Slib (Promise) as well as the English edition of two novels by Michal Ajvaz..

Interviewed by Alena Blažejovská for CzechLit

After comics, the CLC will focus on another often overlooked area: poetry.Last year, the Czech Literary Centre (CLC), a section of the Moravian Library, focused its activities on Czech comics. This year, in keeping with its long-term objectives, it will concentrate on another often overlooked area: poetry. However, due to the pandemic, the CLC will have to adapt its promotion of Czech poets abroad accordingly. It will support the publication of books and journals, create digital formats (a series on Czech poetry for an international audience, online readings and discussions) and organize residencies for writers. There is a detailed description below of the different types of support.

Promoting anthologies and special issues of journals

The CLC will continue to support Czech poetry abroad through journals and anthologies. In 2020 the CLC was involved in the publication of a Czech-poetry issue of the Modern Poetry in Translation journal (you can find out more here). There will also be cooperation with the British journal in this year’s exhibition of historical issues of the journal focused on Central and Eastern Europe, which will be part of the Scottish StAnza 2021 poetry festival. In addition to the exhibition, the festival programme will also feature three online events on Czech poetry (a discussion, lecture and short documentary).

Last year, the CLC also contributed towards the Polish anthology Sąsiadki (Neighbours), which presented to Polish readers works by ten Czech poets translated by Zofia Bałdyga. A similar anthology will be published in Spain this year with poetry by seventeen Czech poets (see the list of poets here). The CLC will be heavily involved in the promotion of Polish and Spanish anthologies. Together with the poet Mario Martín Gijón, it will organize a special feature on Czech poetry in the Spanish monthly Quimera. The CLC is also co-financing a Slovenian anthology, showcasing poets from Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Czech poetry will be represented by the poets Jan Škrob, Adam Borzič and Magdalena Šipka.

Promoting new books in translation

In addition to poetry anthologies, the CLC will also promote new translations of Czech poetry books. A book of poetry by Petr Borkovec is to be published in Slovenia, where the author will appear in several cities in June and alongside Olga Stehlíková at the international Days of Poetry and Wine festival.

The 2014 Days of Poetry and Wine festival. Foto: Matej Pušnik Photo: Matej Pušnik

There is also promising news from Great Britain, where a collection by Milan Děžinský and a selection of poems by Kateřina Rudčenková will be published this year. The CLC will help introduce these books to an English-speaking readership. In Germany, the CLC will continue its cooperation with the German publishing house Hochroth, which will publish a translated collection by Jitka N. Srbová this year. She and Jan Škrob are to appear at the Leipzig Book Festival.

Neither will there be a shortage of Czech poetry at the book fair in Paris. There will be an evening of poetry as part of a programme featuring Czech writers, which the CLC is organizing in conjunction with the Paris Czech Centre and Maison de la poési. It will be dedicated to Petr Král, who recently passed away, as well as Jaromír Typlt, whose poems in French translation will soon be published by Fissile publishers.

Residences for Czech and international poets

As of this year the CLC, in conjunction with the Adalbert Stifter Association and the Bavarian State Chancellery, will be offering residences in Horní Planá to one Czech and one German writer. The residences are for the whole of June and will be exclusively for poets from the Czech Republic and Germany this year (applications from 1 February 2021). Extracts from the poetry written during the residency will be published in the Sudetenland cultural magazine. The two authors will also attend the Šumava litera festival in November.

As part of the ongoing residencies which the CLC organizes together with the Broumov Monastery Educational and Cultural Centre, two months have been set aside for poets. The two Czech residents will spend a month in Broumov with two poets from abroad. The poet Miloš Doležal and Katia Sophia Ditzler from Germany, nominated by the Goethe Institute in Prague, will be resident at the Literature House in spring. In September, one Czech and one Polish poet will meet as part of the regular cooperation with the Vratislav Literature House in Broumov. They will both be introduced to Czech and Polish readers as part of cultural events organised by the CLC.

Photo: Broumov Monastery

The translator and poet from Italy (who writes in Spanish), Ángelo Néstore, accepted the CLC’s offer of a residency in Prague. The CLC promises that his residency in September will lead to the establishment of new ties between the poetry scenes in Spain and the Czech Republic.

A booklet and series on contemporary Czech poetry

In spring the CLC will publish Czech Poetry 2010-2020, a representative cross-section of Czech poetry. This booklet in English will contain extracts from the works of some of the leading Czech poets, whose poems might appeal to an international audience. The introduction to the booklet is by the editor – the literary scholar Karel Piorecký from the Institute of Czech Literature. Each poet is presented together with their most highly acclaimed book of poetry, and there are fifteen artists from three generations. As part of the booklet launch, there will be a poetry reading featuring between three and five of the poets included in the anthology.

Along with this publication, the CLC is also preparing a four-part video series entitled Czech Poetry in the World, which will be released in March. The series aims to present new publications by contemporary Czech poets who have recently been published, or are about to be published, in the CLC’s priority areas of Britain, France, Spain and German-speaking countries.