Czech Literature

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Czech literature is the literature of the historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and the Czech-speaking part of Silesia, (now part of the Czech Republic, formerly of Czechoslovakia). This most often means literature written by Czechs, in the Czech language, although Old Church Slavonic, Latin, and German were also used, mostly in the early periods. Modern authors from the Czech territory who wrote in other languages (e.g. German) are generally considered separately, and their writing usually existed in parallel with Czech-language literature and did not interact with it. Thus Franz Kafka, for example, who wrote in German (though he also knew Czech rather well), falls within Austrian literature, though he lived his entire life in Bohemia.

Regardles of what Wikipedia says, I would still consider Franz Kafka to be Czech. If not in literature, definitely by nationality. But Kafka aside there are loads of Czech writers out there - past and present - that have been translated to English. It's just finding the best point to test the water before jumping in.

Names that I have on my shelves are Bohumil Hrabal, Arnošt Lustig, and, although some of his works were written in French, Milan Kundera. Yes, I've barely scratched the surface. But beyond these guys, other names do come to mind, such as Jaroslav Hašek, Jiří Weil, and Ivan Klima. And then there's Twisted Spoon Press, based in Prague, bringing out many titles of established and 'coming up' Czech literature that, having thumbed through a few titles in my local book store, all look tempting.

So, who have you read? What Czech writers are severely underlooked?

[Eric]

Kafka is one of those multi-categorisable authors. As a (non-practising) Jew, with German as his mother-tongue, some knowledge of Yiddish and maybe a lot more of Czech, he is hard to pin down in our modern categories of citizen of a nation-state. He is a product of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He falls into the same category, perhaps, as a Finland-Swede, anno 2008, who has Swedish as his mother-tongue, has a very good knowledge of Finnish (living in, say, Helsinki, where you just can't survive in everyday life without Finnish), a decent knowledge of English, but will always write his novels in his mother-tongue, Swedish.

There are many countries in Europe where there are language majorities and minorities. You can categorise writers living there by the language they write in, or by what's written in their passport. Belgium is one such country. You either write in Dutch or French - but you're still Belgian. Ditto Spain. Catalan, Galician and Basque writers are still Spanish citizens. Or those writing in Hungarian in Romania. Or Switzerland, with its four languages.

Britain is rather different. Our dominant language doubles up as an international lingua franca. This makes people in Britain think differently about writing-language and nationality, perhaps.

[Eric]

The 21st August is the day for Czech literature. Wonder how many novels there are that bring up that day. Kundera, Havel, Kohout, Vaculík and Škvorecky are likely to have done. Also non-fiction authors, such as Zdenek Mlynar. Forty years is a long time, but that date in 1968 is not entirely irrelevant to where we find ourselves today.

One Canadian book publishing venture was:

68 Publishers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia