Posts featuring Zuzana Brabcová

Possibilities in Transformation: A Review of Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

[Ceilings] and its setting dwell in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously. . .

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, Twisted Spoon Press, 2025

In “The Aleph,” Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous narrator attempts to describe the titular object—a point in space that contains all other points—but finally articulates that he cannot truly do so: “Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south . . . Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction.” Borges is far from the only writer to fear that fiction might distort truth or one’s simple lived experience. In the way of Barthes, who wrote that “incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order,” Borges’s attempt to translate the aleph functions as a useful thought experiment: How does one coherently translate an experience or text that is fundamentally incoherent? Should one even try?

Ceilings, Zuzana Brabcová’s second novel to be posthumously translated into English, represents an aleph of sorts. It is about a woman named Emička (or Ema) who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it is also about Emička’s imaginary brother, Ash, who is committed to the same hospital—because he both is and is not Ema herself. As for the hospital, it’s certainly a hospital, but it also shapeshifts to become an aquarium, Ema’s childhood home, and an IKEA. Plenty of readers will take the easy route and try to interpret these inconsistencies as reflections of Ema’s unstable mental state, but Brabcová disrupts this reading by refusing to settle on a clear narrator. She shifts between the third person and Ema’s/Ash’s perspective, sometimes all within a single paragraph. Thus, while perhaps not as untranslatable as the aleph, Ceilings provides no shortage of challenges: its circuitous syntax, its treatment of time, its slippery subject matter. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

This week's literary updates from the Czech Republic, Iran, and England

This Friday, we present three very distinct reports from the world of literature. Slovakian Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood looks back at what was a great year of Czech literature in translation and gives us a sneak peek at what to look forward to this year. Her Iranian colleague Poupeh Missaghi reports on language-related issues in a human rights Twitter campaign. And finally, the UK Editor-at-Large M. René Bradshaw tells us where to head for great readings in London this month and next.

Julia Sherwood, our Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, has good news from the publishing world:

Last year proved to be a big year for Czech literature in English translation, with no fewer than eighteen publications from eight different presses at the latest count. They include, to mention just a few, Worm-Eaten Time, poet Pavel Šrut’s elegy for his homeland after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, translated by Deborah Garfinkle, and symbolist poet Jaroslav Durych‘s (1886-1962) 1956 novella God’s Rainbow on the expulsion of the German-speaking population from Bohemia after World War II. First published in censored form in 1969, it is now available in full in David Short’s translation as part of Karolínum Press’s Modern Classics series, which also features Eva M. Kandler’s translation of the World War II literary horror The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, a study of the totalitarian mindset that still resonates today (extract in BODY Literature), and served as the basis for one of the key films of the Czech new wave, directed by Juraj Herz.

Stoppard_and_Bajaja,_photo_by_Pavel_Stojar

On 30 November, a packed audience at the launch of Antonín Bajaja’s Burying the Season (also translated by David Short) at Waterstones Piccadilly in the heart of London included the playwright Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s father came from the town of Zlín, the setting for this novel depicting the early years of communism in Czechoslovakia. Czech literature scholar Rajendra Chitnis introduces the book as part of an Istros Conversations podcast on Audioboom, while Michael Tate of Jantar Publishing discusses on Czech radio the challenges of bringing Central European literature to English readers.

World Literature Today picked Czech writer Magdaléna Platzová’s The Attempt as one of its Notable translations of 2016, characterizing it as “historical fiction at its best”. In an interview with the Czech cultural bi-weekly A2, the novel’s translator Alex Zucker points out that while more books by Czech authors are now being published than ever before, they don’t necessarily reach many more readers since—like translated literature in general—quite a few are brought out by small independent presses and are therefore not visible in major bookshops and rarely reviewed.

In 2017, we can look forward to Zucker’s translations of two the most acclaimed contemporary Czech writers: Jáchym Topol’s Angel Station is due from Dalkey Archive in May, and Petra Hůlová’s taboo-breaking Plastic Three Rooms will be brought out by Jantar Publishing. Budding UK translators keen to be part of this unprecedented boom in Czech literature in English can participate in the fourth annual international competition for young translators, who this year are asked to tackle an excerpt from Bianca Bellová’s The Lake by 31 March (see their call for submissions). Budding Czech-to-English translators can also dip into the treasure trove of tricky issues, complete with solutions generously shared by Melvyn Clarke, in his blog post Translating Hrdý Budžes.

Acclaimed writer Zuzana Brabcová, who sadly passed away in 2015, was posthumously awarded the Josef Škvorecký prize for her haunting last novel Voliéry [Aviaries]. And as the year drew to a close, scores of students and literature lovers mourned the loss of the legendary Fišer bookstore in Kaprova Street near Prague’s Old Town Square, which closed its doors after selling books since the 1930s.

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