Place: Czechia

A Literary Cocktail of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Autofiction: On After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová

October 3, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Platzová options a radical methodology of writing that reveals the unanswerable questions composing our present. . .

Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, Bellevue Literary Press, 2024

Collage is perhaps the best term to describe Czech author Magdaléna Platzová’s Life after Kafka (Život po Kafkovi), recently translated into English by Alex Zucker. The cover of the book distinguishes the text as a novel, yet its two hundred and fifty pages are in effect an intricate labyrinth of letters, diaries, interviews, fictions, and the author’s own descriptions of working on the book, all blurring the boundary between fact and imagination. Bringing these myriad fragments together is a common thread: the life of Felice Bauer, one of Kafka’s many women. To Platzová, she remains a mystery: “Who really was Felice Bauer? Who was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture, and precisely set watches? . . . Little is known of her life after Kafka. She got married, had two children, and immigrated to America. Did she leave any traces behind?”

This erasure in the numerous works of Kafkology inspired Platzová to spend ten years writing about Bauer, and the resulting text finally appeared in Czech in 2022 (with the English edition coincidentally being published this year, the one hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death). Kafka’s life—a short one of forty years—was shared by at least six very different women, mostly Jewish, verging from Austrian, Czech, German, to Polish: Hedwig Weiler, Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenská (the only non-Jewish exception), and Dora Diamant. Academia and popular culture have mostly retained Jesenská—herself a prolific journalist and writer—and Diamant as the main feminine figures in Kafka’s life, but Bauer, who hailed from Berlin, was Kafka’s first fiancée. They first met in Prague in 1912, and maintained a relationship until 1917, when Kafka broke their engagement for the second time. Grete Bloch, who was a friend of Bauer’s, met Kafka in 1913 and ended up playing a major role between the two. Kafka also wrote letters to Bloch, and she later intervened in the relationship between him and Bauer, at a time when the couple was drifting apart. Platzová centers her narrative around these two female figures, telling the story of how their lives intersected in the shared link to Kafka, and how his letters became a focal point of their complicated existences in exile, haunting them to their last days. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

September 13, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Ian Ross Singleton, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Stanyon

Kaufman’s film strikes me as an example of domestication masquerading as foreignization. . .

When Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published, readers lauded the Czech writer’s delicately choreographed story of individual lives pulsating through social and political forces, and soon, the book was hailed as a classic. Philip Kaufman’s adaptation, written with the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, was released four years later, in 1988—despite the director admitting that he had considered the book’s “elaborate, musical structure” to be “unfilmable.” In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, our editors take a look at the works of Kundera and Kaufman in a discussion that ranges over domestication, kitsch, and the two artists’ respective treatments of “lightness” and “weight.”

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Let’s clear the elephant out of the room; Milan Kundera famously disowned the film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being as “[having] very little to do with the spirit either of the novel or the characters in it.” In other words, Kundera felt that his novel’s “aura,” his authorial intent, was not translated well to Philip Kaufman’s screen. Much has already been said about the differences between the two works, especially in Patrick Cattrysse’s analysis of the adaptation. For one, the film elides the novel’s heterodiegetic narrative voice, instead inserting three expository intertitles at the film’s opening. It then never uses intertitles again. As such, the film’s narrative movement takes place at a distance, never immersing itself in its characters’ interior moral or emotional discontinuities. For me, this perspective erases a significant part of what makes reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being such a scintillating pleasure. The novel reads like a mirror, a commentary on the kitsch and contradictions inherent in human nature; the film reads like, well, a screen, projecting an image of kitsch without penetrating it.

The film’s chronological order also undermines that omnipresent, digressive, ironic voice, which swerves between focalizations and temporal frames to reveal the mind behind the speaker. I visualize it as a white expanse of space in which Kundera’s narrator, leaning forward on the edge of a stool behind a control panel, holds forth on the dialectics of “einmal ist keinmal.” In my view, the film opts for what we might analogize as a domesticating approach; it mechanically “reproduces” Kundera’s Czech novel in the traditional codes and modes of a Hollywood production, complete with primarily Western European actors. Kaufman’s direction untethers his film from the burdens of voice, nonlinearity, and metaphor, resigning the narrator’s ponderings on eternal return to a few hasty lines of dialogue. What does the novel’s aura, and its reproduction in the film, mean to you both? Is the film a product of lightness or of weight?

Ian Ross Singleton (IRS): I’ll start by answering your last question; I think the film is more of a weight, while the novel’s aura is, on the other hand, one of lightness. I agree with you that we can put aside a more superficial discussion of the differences between the film and novel—a friend of mine said that no film can ever reproduce a novel well, and I have to admit that any exception I can come up with is rare. It is interesting, nonetheless, to discuss, as you do, the quality of the transmutation (in the sense of Roman Jakobson’s idea of intersemiotic translation—that of verbal signs by means of a nonverbal sign system) of the novel into film. READ MORE…

KHER, A Home For Roma Literature: In Conversation with Radka Patočková and Karolína Ryvolová

April 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

We have to keep exploring the potential of Roma literature so that we are still here in the years to come.

Roma literature has long been suppressed, persecuted, and overlooked in the Central European literary scene, despite its wealth of stories and importance. Founded in 2012, KHER—which means a house or a room in Romani—is the only independent publishing house in the Czech Republic to focus exclusively on the publication and promotion of Romani authors, a homeland for the support and respect of Romani writers’ creative endeavours. In this two-part interview, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood has spoken to KHER’s co-founder and director Radka Patočková, and one of its editors, Karolína Ryvolová, first on the founding and development of KHER as a renowned publishing house, and then on Roma literature and identity in the broader literary scene.

Julia Sherwood: It must have taken some courage to found a press focusing exclusively on Roma writers, particularly in the Czech Republic, a country that—as you, Radka, put it in a recent interview—”has a long way to go in terms of its relations with the Roma.“ You went on to describe common reactions you received: “How many Roma authors do we have? Who would buy and read their books? What might the quality of Romani writing be like?” So my question is: What made you embark on this risky enterprise despite all these challenges, and what was the personal and professional path that brought you to this project?

Radka Patočková (RP): Let me start with the end of your question. Since the early days, when we founded the publishing house, our team at KHER has undergone some changes. In those days we were in our thirties, full of youthful enthusiasm and convinced by our previous experience that one could take action and effect change, rather than just talk about it. Had someone told us about everything this would involve over the years, and had we known what we would have to go through professionally as well as in terms of our private lives, we might have become disheartened. Some have gradually drifted away, but they continue to root for us from the sidelines and we are grateful to them for their time and enthusiasm at the start.

We met as students of Romani studies at Charles University, and our shared interest in literature brought us to publishing. Cultural and financial management, on the other hand—the nitty-gritty of publishing, marketing, and accounting—were areas we had to get into gradually. We learned that love of literature, closeness to the Roma people, knowledge of Romani and the realities of the life of the Roma, or friendly relations with authors—all of that is not enough to bring a book into the world. We had to blaze the trail slowly, one step at a time, sometimes going back or hitting a dead end, but now we feel increasingly at home in the vast area of activity that publishing entails. To sum up: in April 2023 we are much wiser but also more realistic than we were when we set up KHER eleven years ago. And that’s a good thing; perhaps too much rational thinking in 2013 could have meant that the idea would have remained on paper and in discussions in cafés.

JS: Since its inception, KHER has published over a dozen books—starting with e-books and later moving to print—ranging from history, biography, memoirs, and fiction to children’s stories, and you have also organised writing workshops and educational activities. How many people are involved in running KHER and how is your work funded?

RP: KHER is an association made up of eleven members, some with a background in Romani studies or economics, and the rest Roma professionals—an IT specialist, historian, journalist, author, and translator. However, the core group that ensures the day-to-day running of the publishing house consists of just five women. So when people want to come to see us, we tell them with a smile that they’re welcome as long as they don’t mind visiting us in our kitchens. That is another thing I think is remarkable: we don’t have an actual office, a space for working, discussing things, and coming up with creative ideas, which can sometimes be a disadvantage. Fortunately, Prague is full of cafés and some are prepared to have our group working there on a regular basis. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Julia Sherwood, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Slovakia, Czechia, Kenya, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors are providing coverage of headlining events featuring intercultural dialogues, book launches of groundbreaking texts, and political corruption. In Slovakia and Czechia, the two countries discuss the ramifications of Czechoslovakia’s breakup on the two nations’ respective literatures. In Kenya, a collection featuring the stories of women hawkers—a burgeoning national economy—is released to the public. And in Bulgaria, a beloved theatre director takes aim at the National Theatre’s “moral degradation.” Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

The thirtieth anniversary of the breakup of Czechoslovakia prompted reflections in both the Slovak and the Czech press on the legacy of the common state, and how the cultural links between the two nations have evolved since the countries went their separate ways. Summing up the literary developments in a recent episode of Knižná revue, an excellent podcast produced by the Slovak Literature Centre, the Czech literature scholar and translator of Slovak literature Lubomír Machala suggested that there are now more differences than parallels between the two literatures—although what has not changed is that the Czech reading public shows less interest in Slovak literature than vice versa. The Slovak literature scholar Magdalena Bystrzak also sees this relationship as asymmetrical, as does her colleague Radoslav Passia, who points out that the ties between the two literatures are, nevertheless, much stronger than those between either nation and any other literature, as reflected in numerous bilateral literary projects, such as a Czech/Slovak poetry competition, or the Month of Authors’ Readings.

The end of January marked the 105th birthday of Leopold Lahola (1918-1968): playwright, film director, screenwriter, poet, and essayist, whose short stories reflect his harrowing wartime experiences. Lahola’s promising postwar literary career was cut short when his plays were denounced as “existentialist” in 1948, upon which he emigrated to Israel, where he helped to launch the country’s burgeoning  film industry, before moving to Austria and Germany. Although he spent nearly half of his life in exile, Lahola never stopped writing in Slovak. In the late 1960s, Lahola began to visit his native country again but, sadly, died of a heart attack in January 1968, shortly before his fiftieth birthday. It is a pity that so far, only one of his short stories is available in English.

The 2022 recipients of one of Slovakia’s major awards, the Tatra Banka Foundation’s Arts Prize, were announced at the end of January. The prize for a debut work of literature went to Nicol Hochholczerová for Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room is Too Much to Swallow, as reported here) and the poet Mila Haugová added to her many previous accolades the main prize for literature, for her collection Z rastlinstva (From Flora). And although not strictly speaking a literary prize, it is  worth mentioning  the bank’s Special Prize, awarded to Gabriela Garlatyová for her monograph on the extraordinary visual Slovak artist Mária Bartuszová. Garlatyová was a consultant on a major exhibition of Bartuszová’s work at London’s Tate Modern, which has just been extended to June 25, and which I urge everyone to visit. READ MORE…