The engines of global literature churn on amidst a summer full of suspensions, and our editors on the ground are here to bring you the latest in their developments. Though the Czech Republic and El Salvador mourn the losses of two literary heroes, their legacies are apparent in the multiple peregrinations of their works, continuing. Furthermore: an exciting new Moldovan translation and a resurfaced scandal implicating the widely-lauded Milan Kundera.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Czech Republic
Poet and essayist Petr Král, who died on June 17 at the age of seventy-eight, was not only an original poet continuing the surrealist tradition, but also a distinguished translator who moved freely between his native Czech and French, the language he adopted after emigrating to Paris in 1968, following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Král’s translations introduced key poets of the French avant-garde to Czech readers, and the three anthologies he translated and published also helped to put Czech poetry on the map in France. After 1989, he moved back to Prague, and in 2016 was honoured with the Czech State Prize for Literature, while in 2019 he was awarded the Grand Prix de la Francophonie by the Académie française. His loss is mourned equally in Prague and in Paris.
Just over ten years ago, another great Czech-born writer who has made Paris his home, Milan Kundera, was embroiled in a huge controversy after an article in the Czech weekly Respekt alleged that, as a student and an ardent communist, the future writer had denounced another young man to the secret police, resulting in the latter’s arrest and years spent in labour camps. These allegations, which Kundera has always strenuously denied, reared their ugly head again last month, when Czech-American writer Jan Novák published Kundera’s unauthorized biography. As the title suggests, Kundera. Český život a doba (Kundera. His Czech Life and Times) concentrates on the writer’s early life and career before his emigration to France and purports to lift the veil further on “the moral relativist’s” infatuation with communism. The book has caused quite a stir, with some critics hailing it as well-researched and highly readable, while others, including journalist Petr Fischer and author and former Asymptote contributor Radka Denemarková, regard it as little more than a hatchet job, questioning Novák’s use of secret police files as a reliable source of information. Milan Kundera has maintained silence.
On the other hand, underground writer and philosopher Egon Bondy (1930–2007), the enfant terrible of Czech literature and lyricist for the punk band Plastic People of the Universe, never denounced his left-wing beliefs and took revelations of his collaboration with the secret police on the chin. In protest against the splitting of Czechoslovakia, Bondy moved to the Slovak capital, Bratislava, where he devoted himself to the study and translation of Chinese philosophy. In 1997 he wrote his final book, inspired by the life of Lao Tzu. Dlouhé ucho (The Long Ear), which had long been considered lost, was finally published this May, thirteen years after Bondy’s death in a fire that broke out in his flat when he fell asleep with a burning cigarette.
In other news, Czech poetry is the focus of the summer issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, while this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival (which will be held digitally this year), will highlight Czech comics, which are also a priority for the Czech Literary Centre. Ones who wish to catch up on the classics of Czech literature will surely find something worthwhile in this compilation of Top Ten Czech Books in English. Finally, the latest installment in the lively series of recommendations by writer and translator Pavla Horáková on Radio Prague introduces Ota Pavel’s short story collection How I Came To Know Fish.
Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Moldova
Moldovan authors do not have it easy when they want to be published in English: they are generally little known, and often overshadowed by Romanian authors—with whom they share the same language—in the eyes of foreign publishers. So when a Moldovan author writing in Romanian manages an English-language release, there is ground for celebration.
In May of this year, Chișinău-based author Iulian Ciocan published his novel Înainte să moară Brejnev, translated as Before Brezhnev Dies by Alistair Ian Blyth, via the renowned Dalkey Archive Press. The book tells the story of post-independence Moldova, formerly one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, which embarked on a bumpy economic and social transition in the 1990s. The country remains to this day deeply affected by massive migration, low income, and a separatist movement that de facto controls a significant part of its territory.
While Moldovans are culturally and linguistically very much part of the Romanian sphere, they retain their own distinct literary traditions; the country includes a large Russian-speaking minority, as well as other ethnic groups such as Turkic Gagauz. Thus, depending on linguistic allegiances, some of its population looks towards Bucharest and Brussels, while others towards Moscow, and some to Istanbul for cultural models. When I asked Ciocan about his own views on the characteristics of Moldovan literature, he told me: “Our Bessarabian (one of the historical names of territories inhabited predominantly by Romanian-speaking Moldovans) literature is part of the Romanian literature, yet it has its specificities: we share the same language, but have a separate historical experience. . . Our territory has been ruled by so many different masters that we, as writers, often rely on the political background in our stories. But this is not sufficient: one can write a very weak novel about deportations to Stalinist camps if the main character does nothing but cry and sees things only from the point of view of an innocent victim.”
It is precisely the conflicted ambiguity of Moldovan identity in a post-Soviet era that the novel expresses best, by telling the stories of different characters linked to each other across ten chapters. The book is almost a collection of short stories, evoking some of the Russian masters of the genre. As Ciocan admits: “Several critics have pointed out at the presence of Gogolian grotesque irony in my books. This actually makes me very happy. Gogol’s Dead Souls, along with other texts by Dostoyevsky, represent the pinnacle of nineteenth century Russian literature. We were always heavily influenced by this type of literature. In my texts, the narrator often empathizes with the characters depicted, but at some point, the reader understands that the drama gets overturned by humor.” Ciocan depicts characters who all embody different aspects of the Homo Sovieticus with a mix of tenderness and irony. Utterly disorientated, and widely unprepared for the new market economy and its many unspoken rules, the characters struggle with moral choices, nostalgia for the past, and unrealistic expectations. This traumatic experience of having to completely rebuild one’s value system, recreate social standing, and survive in the new and rarely merciful environment is what millions of Soviet citizens—including Ciocan—experienced directly in the 1990s.
As English translations of Moldovan literature remain rare, I asked Ciocan about his thoughts on how Moldovan novels could become more noticed by English-language publishers. He answered: “I want to write a few interesting novels that are not related to a specific historical period, and that can take place anywhere in the world. My last novel, Dama de cupă (Queen of hearts), is about a hole that grows in Chișinău and gradually swallows the entire city. It symbolizes the evil of corruption that has defined the post-independence years since 1991, and can only be overturned if one official manages to redeem his own sins. The role of the writer is not to change the world, but to speak about things differently and thus make them more visible.”
Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador
July 11 marked the anniversary of the death of Prudencia Ayala, a Salvadoran writer and activist who was an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, equality, and the fight against machismo in El Salvador.
A historical novel titled ¡Con las faldas bien puestas! was published last year about the life of Prudencia Ayala. In an interview, the novel’s author, Alejandro Ayalá, stated that he chose Prudencia Ayala as the subject of his novel because he greatly admired her efforts as a woman and her life-long fight for women’s rights. He also stated that, in El Salvador, there is little-to-nothing written about Prudencia Ayala’s life, or about what she achieved.
Prudencia Ayala was self-taught, wrote three novels, was a newspaper columnist, a poet, and the founder and editor of her own newspaper Redención femenina. In 1930, she attempted to run as a presidential candidate for El Salvador, despite the law forbidding a woman’s right to vote or to hold public office. Her presidential bid sparked a public debate about the political and legal consequences of allowing a woman to run for office. Although, in the end, her bid to run as a presidential candidate was rejected by the Supreme Court, her actions reignited the feminist movement. By 1950, El Salvador ratified a new constitution which included women’s suffrage.
When Alejandro Ayalá, was asked why Prudencia Ayala had gone unknown for so long, he responded that Prudencia Ayala struck and still strikes fear in men, that she was outspoken in her views of expanding women’s roles in society. She was poor. She was Black. She was a single mother. “If we don’t remember our own history, we will only repeat the vicious cycle of violence against women,” Alejandro Ayalá concludes. “Because of ignorance, misinformation, and lack of education, domestic violence against women will continue; perceptions of women as objects will continue.” And that must stop.