Publication details
"Ein Dichter, den wir nicht verstehen könnnen?" Zur tschechischen Rezeption von Paul Celan
| Title in English | "A poet we cannot understand?" On the Czech reception of Paul Celan |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive Akten des XIV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) (Bd. 11) - Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik - Beihefte |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://www.peterlang.com/document/1277914 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b20297 |
| Keywords | Paul Celan, reception studies, paratexts, Czechoslovakia, literature in the totalitarian regime. |
| Description | The reception of Paul Celan's work in Czechoslovakia, like that of many modern German poets of the post-war period, was complicated. The communist regime with its censorship apparatus largely determined cultural life at all levels, and the reception of Celan's work suffered from the fact that the regime was fundamentally anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic in orientation. Despite this, Celan's poems were translated into Czech and his texts found their readers. The Brno poet Ludvík Kundera has done a great job in the Czech Republic for the reception of Celan's works. Like other Celan translators, he not only had to translate Celan's texts congenially, but also be able to assert himself convincingly in front of the censorship apparatus of the totalitarian regime. This article analyzes forewords and afterwords to Czech translations of Celan's texts and reviews in literary journals. Strategies are examined that the respective authors of paratexts have chosen to make Celan's texts possibly acceptable to the censors on the one hand, and on the other hand not to reduce their literary value for Czech readers to meaningless phrases belonging to the regime. |