The essay examines the importance of the so-called forbidden word “nègre”, its history, meanings, significations, and, most importantly, its translations into Czech and English. The essay will examine three Sub-Saharan novels from different eras written in French, and their translations done by different translators, to establish the general conclusion. The essay will explain, through analysis of different extracts, how the translation which is does not take the word in question into consideration is deprived of several semantic nuances.
The article deals with the issue of a new translation of V. V. Mayakovsky’s poems into Czech. It summarizes some basic facts about the author, his poems and poetics, it assesses the previous Czech translations made by Jiří Taufer, and above all it discusses various problems connnected with a new translation of Mayakovsky’s poetry into Czech. It reflects on what the translator needs to do (1) to meet the horizon of expectation of the translation’s readers (in case of Czech translation of Mayakovsky there are two kinds of potential readers: those acquainted with Taufer’s Czech translations, and new readers, unacquainted with V. V Mayakovsky’s poetry and its Czech version in general), and (2) how the translator needs to proceed especially in the aesthetic plan when creating a translation that would have the same qualities as the original text.
This paper summarizes the mediation activities of Heinrich Herbatschek (1877 Vsetín — 1956 Vienna) in both Czech- and German-language environments between Vienna, Moravia and Prague. The author concludes that Herbatschek saw the potential of this mediation especially in the cultural field, putting it in more or less sharp contrast to the antagonistic political discourse. Systems of ideas compatible with this basic attitude were pacifism, for example (the essay Unser Seelenleben im Völkerkriege, 1915), and apolitical socialism (e.g. essays in the cosmopolitan magazine Die Wahrheit in Brno around 1920). Above all, however, it presented a fundamental criticism of strategies of othering based on national self-identification (as in the Moravian novel Ist die Liebe tot?, 1921). We find this ethos, which Herbatschek came to embrace as a student and translator of Masaryk (Die Ideale der Humanität, 1902), across the various spheres of cultural and social life that Herbatschek engaged in, which is to say as translator and reviewer of Czech modernism in the early 20th century, as a networker, writer and publisher in the German-Czech Committee and the Moravian Club in Vienna on the eve of World War I, as chairman of the Austrian-Czechoslovak Society and publisher of its magazine Der Nachbar (1929–1936), and as promoter of tourism between Austria and Czechoslovakia.
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