A Political Choice. Czech Translations of Flemish Literature during WW II

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15210%2F23%3A73620219" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15210/23:73620219 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

A Political Choice. Czech Translations of Flemish Literature during WW II

Original language description

This chapter provides insight into the role Dutch-language literature played for Czech publishers during the Nazi occupation of the Czech territory (1939-1945). It makes use of sources that so far have hardly been studied, namely the archive of the editorial board of the moderately progressive publishing house Družstevní Práce [Cooperative Labour, hereafter DP]. It is known from previous research by Czech literary historians (Poláček, 2004; Šímeček &amp; Trávníček, 2014; Wögerbauer et al., 2015) that literature from peripheral nations, whose countries were occupied by Nazi Germany, played a role among Czech publishers to fill the gaps in their series as a result of the Nazi ban on ‘enemy’ literature. Moreover, Flemish and Scandinavian regional literature was a good alternative that enabled Czech publishers to avoid publishing so-called Blut-und-Bodenliteratur that the occupation forces expected from them. The considerations of the editorial board of DP give an insight into how the Czechs adapted their publication policy to the changing political norms that modified the framework of the translatological system (Toury, 2012, pp. 62-65). The aim is to investigate, in documents ‘from within’, as Kate Sturge (2014) has done for translations in Nazi Germany, how the Czechs dealt with censorship. The editorial minutes and decisions of the censorship bodies preserved in DP’s archive show that until 1942 DP managed well to withstand the German political-ideological pressure, partly by emphasising Dutch-language regional literature. When the censorship passed into the hands of a committee strictly controlled by the Germans, this escape route was blocked and the management of DP decided to limit production rather than to publish ‘Nazi-freundliche’ literature.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60204 - General literature studies

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Translating Minorities and Conflict in Literature. Censorship, Cultural Peripheries, and Dynamics of Self in Literary Translation

ISBN

978-3-7329-0742-7

Number of pages of the result

48

Pages from-to

155-202

Number of pages of the book

362

Publisher name

Frank &amp; Timme GmbH

Place of publication

Berlin

UT code for WoS chapter

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