2013-09-21T02:01:00+02:00 Radio Prague http://radio.cz/en/section/books/irena-eliasova-a-song-to-raise-your-spirits urn:uuid:b0a3b083-277f-55a1-8f52-57de8d8dcd56 2013-09-21T02:01:00+02:00

The poet, playwright and novelist Irena Eliášová spent her early childhood in a Romany village in south-western Slovakia. The memory of this time has become the defining experience in her writing. But Irena does not write just about the lost world of her childhood in the 1950s and 60s. She has also written powerfully and poignantly about the life of Roma in the Czech Republic today. Yet even when she writes about the present, her work is permeated with a sense of family and community that also draws us back to an older world of Roma tradition. David Vaughan meets one of the Czech Republic’s foremost Romany writers.

urn:uuid:de464187-9e38-5fd6-93ad-2da2ab4d5905 2013-09-07T02:01:00+02:00

There was much sadness last Friday at the news of the death of the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. He will be missed in the Czech Republic: his poetry was widely read here and the poet had a fondness for Central Europe that went back several decades. David Vaughan takes a look at Seamus Heaney and the Czechs.

urn:uuid:3bef3e79-ecd9-5083-99f0-42da622d18af 2013-08-24T02:01:00+02:00

Anyone interested in the history of athletics will have heard of Emil Zátopek, the greatest Czech long-distance runner of all time. His life story is the subject of a short novel by the Prix Goncourt winning French writer, Jean Echenoz, called simply “Running” – “Courir” in the original French. The book is an account of the life of an athlete whose quiet, determined attitude towards his sport contrasted with the complex political dramas going on around him in mid-20th century Europe. David Vaughan looks at the book and at the life of Emil Zátopek.

urn:uuid:02a11d7d-de7c-5851-be4c-5e6506043f30 2013-07-27T02:01:00+02:00

If you are drawn to the rich Czech tradition of legend and fairytale, Marcela Sulak’s new translation of one of the classics of 19th century Czech poetry is a must. Karel Jaromír Erben’s collection of ballads, “A Bouquet” was first published in 1853, and since then has been read by generations of Czech children and parents alike. David Vaughan talks to Marcela Sulak about a translation that brings out the freshness, sensitivity and humanity of Erben’s poetic world of spinning wheels, water-sprites and witches.

urn:uuid:becdab25-3adb-5a56-97d1-da15c530f348 2013-06-29T02:01:00+02:00

The White Carpathian Mountains, straddling the border of Moravia and Slovakia, are one of the most beautiful and rural parts of the Czech Republic. Towns are few and far between and for centuries local people would take their aches and pains to old women renowned in the region for their special healing powers. They were known as “goddesses” and passed their knowledge from generation to generation. But Czechoslovakia’s post-war communist rulers saw the world these women represented as a threat and within two generations they were wiped out. Their tragic story is the subject of the excellent novel “Žítková Goddesses” by the young Moravian writer Kateřina Tučková. David Vaughan meets her.

urn:uuid:e5afd0d8-b387-580b-9c31-74449cc07f2c 2013-06-15T02:01:00+02:00

Last week Prague hosted an international conference that looked at the role played during World War Two by the London-based governments in exile of occupied countries. These included not just Czechoslovakia, but also many other European states, among them the Netherlands, Poland, Yugoslavia and France. The exile politicians played a complex, sometimes tortuous role in shaping not just the course of the war, but also the political order that followed. David Vaughan reports.

urn:uuid:260e9339-5eba-567c-af84-a7c2877cb13b 2013-06-01T02:01:00+02:00

With the economic crisis and countries becoming increasingly introverted, you might expect this to be the worst of all possible times for getting Czech books published abroad. But that is far from being the case. In this week’s Czech Books, David Vaughan talks to Edgar de Bruin, who runs a literary agency from Amsterdam and promotes Czech writing all over the world.

urn:uuid:356b4e69-9c47-5d4d-b184-99d708baf4e8 2013-05-11T02:01:00+02:00

The Czech Republic and Hungary are countries of similar size with plenty of history in common, whether we look back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the common experience of invasion in more recent decades: in 1956 for Hungary and 1968 for Czechoslovakia. And you don’t have to look far to find parallels in the literature of the two countries. In Czech Books, David Vaughan looks at some of these Czech-Hungarian literary links from the point of view of a Czech who is steeped in contemporary Hungarian writing.

urn:uuid:bd44e097-9f90-5b13-a382-74ebfa66aeec 2013-04-13T02:01:00+02:00

Until the middle of the 20th century, the territory of today’s Czech Republic had always been bilingual and the country has a huge German literary legacy. Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Werfel, Max Brod and Franz Kafka are just a few of the best known writers, but there are hundreds of others, many undeservedly neglected or even quite forgotten. David Vaughan looks at an initiative to kindle interest in this country’s German literature and to revive Czech-German literary ties.

urn:uuid:1c640375-d25b-5d69-af0b-9e45702fc309 2013-03-30T02:01:00+01:00

At a crossroads in Europe, the Czech capital has always been an international city and has attracted writers from many parts of the world. But, despite the rich historical links between the two countries going back to the 16th century and beyond, we would not normally associate modern Prague with Spain. One person who has been building literary Spanish-Czech bridges for the best part of two decades is the Prague based Spanish poet, Elena Buixaderas. She is David Vaughan’s guest in Czech Books.

urn:uuid:d9965f15-b680-5244-a29d-f918efba0c28 2013-03-16T02:01:00+01:00

If you have ever used a computer translation program you will know what curious things machines can come up with, as they try to cope with the complexities and ambiguities of the language we use. So how are machines finding their way through the labyrinth of the Czech language? In this week ‘s Czech Books, David Vaughan talks to Ondřej Bojar from the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Prague’s Charles University.

urn:uuid:84a2ac0c-efae-59fa-8cf0-cf01af91d566 2013-03-02T02:01:00+01:00

Even if you have never read anything by the great German novelist Thomas Mann, you will almost certainly have come across Visconti’s film of his most famous novella, “Death in Venice”. Thomas Mann is the best known member of one of Germany’s most celebrated literary families. Several of his children also had literary careers, but it is the family of Thomas Mann’s elder brother Heinrich, born in 1871, that is the focus of this week’s Czech Books. Also a novelist, he had close associations with Czechoslovakia. David Vaughan explores the Czech branch of the Mann family.

urn:uuid:d3377372-6778-5294-86c6-58a95ab62884 2013-02-16T02:01:00+01:00

Did you know that one of Norway’s popular writers is actually Czech, or that in the mid 1930s Karel Čapek fell in love with the forests and skies of Scandinavia? And do Czechs and Danes have more in common than just beer? David Vaughan looks at Czech-Scandinavian literary links.

urn:uuid:60cdf8ec-5e2d-51fc-909a-9003da619476 2013-02-02T02:01:00+01:00

For some years after the fall of communism, Czech audiences avoided any kind of theatre that might have been perceived as political. After decades of putting up with politics at every level of life, they had simply had enough. But today political drama is back with a vengeance. With a mixture of masochism and schadenfreude, Czech audiences are relishing new plays and productions that comment on contemporary political life with biting satire. David Vaughan reports.

urn:uuid:6d8705bf-389d-51b3-9c37-fc0072a3d677 2013-01-19T02:01:00+01:00

If Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ivana Trump were locked up together in one room, what would happen? In the world of theatre, anything is possible, and in Radka Denemarková’s “Spací vady“ (Sleeping Disorders) this is exactly what happens. David Vaughan talks to the author about her remarkable play.

urn:uuid:6d9eed63-715e-55a7-baef-2833ee3587fb 2013-01-05T02:01:00+01:00

How have Czechs and Slovaks got used to the border between their two countries twenty years after the split of Czechoslovakia? A British journalist decided to find out by travelling the length of the border last summer by bicycle and producing a book on his experiences. In Czech Books, David Vaughan finds out more.

urn:uuid:789b661c-4c95-5af7-a8be-a77d844cc0bb 2012-12-22T02:01:00+01:00

A month ago the English translation of Rustic Baroque by Czech writer Jiří Hájíček came out in the Czech Republic. The book won the prestigious Litera Magnesia prize in 2006, and has received international recognition as well. A historical novel that reveals the complexities and struggles of the time of collectivization in Czechoslovak countryside in the 1950’s, Rustic Baroque also shows how modern Czech society is still influenced by those events.

urn:uuid:fce5bee9-0f42-5c8a-ab41-252b2f9962d0 2012-12-08T02:01:00+01:00

Ever since Jaroslav Hašek first thought him up in the early 1920s, the “Good Soldier Švejk” has been one of the best loved characters in Czech literature, as he undermines the authority of the Austrian monarchy through his feigned stupidity. In Czech Books this week, David Vaughan meets one of the foremost Švejkologists from outside the Czech Republic.

urn:uuid:9a302359-17be-51ab-bea1-16ed39e71593 2012-11-24T02:01:00+01:00

On 24 January 1935 one of the pioneers of radio in Germany was found lying in a pool of blood in a hotel room south of Prague. His story is one of the strangest and least known episodes in the years running up to WWII. In this week’s Czech Books, David Vaughan picks up the story.

urn:uuid:e3ceb389-a4f6-5588-81f3-de7b5b34bfb3 2012-11-10T02:01:00+01:00

We have featured plenty of contemporary Czech novelists in this programme over the last decade, but we should spare a thought for their translators, patiently working at home alone, struggling at a craft every bit as challenging as alchemy. In Czech Books this week, David Vaughan talks to a translator who has done more than any other to bring the middle and younger generation of Czech novelists to English-speaking readers.