Bohuslav Mánek

The Czech Reception of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry 

The proposed paper will outline the Czech reception of MacDiarmid’s poetry in translations (V. Závada, J. Valja, J. Levý, Z. Hron) and essays and articles (J. Levý, J. Valja, F. R. Willets, J. Marek, M. Procházka, Z. Hron) in the period from 1946 to the present in the political context of the period and in relation to Czech translations of other British poets, focusing on the selection of texts and the  issue of rendering poems written in Scots into Czech. At the beginning it will briefly outline the Czech tradition of studies of Scottish literature (F. Chudoba). The final part of the paper will discuss the role of great writers in cultural and literary revivals, i.e. the formation of standard literary languages in Czech and Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively.

Bohuslav Mánek, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic