A Changing View on Diversity in Czechia

Diversity concerned initially the ethnic other. In the 1930s, Czechs became interested in the Dutch East Indies because the shoe firm Baťa started importing rubber from there and also built a factory in Java. Whereas the Czechs themselves had actually been a sort of colony of Austria-Hungary, there was a certain distrust of colonial states. Hence, for example, Madelon Székely-Lulofs’ novels Rubber (1931, Rubber, 1987; Czech translation Guma klesá, 1935), Koelie (1932, Coolie, 1987; Czech translation Kuli, 1937), and De Hongertocht (1936, The Hunger Trip; Czech translation Hladová výprava, 1939), which showed negative sides of Dutch rule in the Dutch East Indies, were successful in Czech translation.

The decolonisations of the 1940s and 1950s, and especially the Dutch so-called ‘Politionele acties’ (Police Actions) of 1946-1948 in Indonesia (basically a last Dutch colonial war) sharpened the critical eye of the Czech reading public. The Czechs sympathised with the new Republik Indonesia. This is visible in the preface to the first complete Czech translation of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, made by ex-diplomat and freemason Rudolf Jordan Vonka, published in 1947. Yet the picture remained strongly an Eurocentric one, partly because several colonial novels by the popular Dutch writer Johan Fabricius (1899–1981), such as Het Eiland der Demomen (1941, Island of Demons, Czech translation Ostrov démonů, 1947) or Halfbloed (1947, Halfblood, Czech translation Z dvojí krve, 1948) were among the widely translated and widely read Dutch-language authors.

The Caribbean only came into Czech view under the Communist regime, particularly because of its strong ties with revolutionary Cuba. In the 1950s, for instance, several collections of poems by the poet Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989), who had been exiled from Cuba on the eve of the Cuban revolution and was a guest in Czechoslovakia for a while as a refugee, were translated. The Dutch Caribbean remained relatively out of focus.

It is noteworthy that the important anti-slavery book Wij slaven van Suriname (1934, English We slaves of Suriname, 2022) by Anton de Kom (1898–1945) was never translated into Czech, although it was considered at least twice, as evidenced by two presentation copies of, respectively, the German translation Wir Sklaven von Surinam (1935) published in the USSR and the Spanish translation Nosotros, esclavos de Surinam (1981) of the book published in Cuba, in the National Library in Prague.

After the Communists took power in February 1948, the number of translations from the ‘capitalist countries’ fell sharply. However, zo meet the interest of the reading public (and to exercise control over what was published), the journal Světová literatura (World Literature) was founded in 1956. Until its dissolution in 1996, it came out six times a year, publishing Czech translations of poems, short stories and extracts of novels by writers from all over the world. The print run grew from 4,000 in 1956 to 26,500 by the end of the 1960s. Until the 1980s, this print run remained fairly stable (Zelinský 2007).

At the time, ‘the other’ was mainly former colonised people in the Third World. In September 1963, for instance, the Prague professor of Anglistics Zdeněk Vančura (1903–1974) devoted a long article to English-language literature in the Caribbean. By far the best-known Caribbean writer, V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018), was featured in the June 1976 issue, which, in addition to another review article on Caribbean literature by the Orientalist and Africanist Vladimír Klima (born 1936), also contained articles on Angolan and Ghanaian literature, and a short review article by the most important translator from Dutch Olga Krijtová (1931–2013) on Dutch literature from Vondel to Frans van Isacker. From the then Dutch Caribbean, a piece from the 1976 debut by Sonia Garmers (born 1933), Lieve Koningin, ik zend u hierbij mijn dochter (Dear Queen, I hereby send you my daughter), was published in Světová literatura as late as in 1989.

Concerning ‘the gender-different other’, the communist regime was by no means positive towards homosexuality. Nevertheless, Czechoslovakia was among the first European countries to decriminalise homosexuality - homosexual relations were removed from the penal code in 1961. Yet even in a rather progressive magazine such as Světová literatura attitudes towards homosexuality remained somewhat uneasy. A good example is the review of the well-known black American civil right’s activist and writer James A. Baldwin (1924-1987) who played an important role in the gay liberation movement in an article from 1965 about four then most important American writers. The article discussed his then published novels Go, Tell it to the Mountain (1951, Czech Jdi a hlásej to z vrchů, along with If Beale Street Could Talk in Beale Street Blues, 1974), Another Country (1962, Czech Jiná země, 1988) and Giovanni’s Room (1956). The latter was the most overtly homosexual of his early novels, focusing on an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men in his life, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar. The novel provoked many discussions about homosexuality, bisexuality and problems with homophobia

The name PLAV is an acronym of Překladatelé – Literáti – Autoři – Vykladači (Translators – Literati – Authors – Interpreters).The journal was set up in 2005 to replace Světová literature but focusing more on translation issues. It is published ten times a year. The issues are arranged either geographically (e.g. no. 7/8 of 2007 with the title Obrázky z Nizozemska a Flander – Pictures from the Netherlands and Flanders – was devoted to Dutch-language literature) or thematically (thus, no. 5 of 2022 Zeměkrev – The Land of Blood – was devoted to literature by female authors on menstruation, for example). The tone of the magazine is always nuanced, as the introductory word by editor Eva Marková in the menstrual issue shows:

In terms of sexual diversity, PLAV devoted an entire issue to queer for the first time in 2011 with the slightly provocative title God Save the Queer. From the introduction, it is clear that the editors were aware that this was still a fairly controversial topic in the Czech Republic at the time (Handl 2011: 1):