Lit_cast Slovakia

In Lit_Cast Slovakia #10, James Sutherland-Smith talks to Julia Sherwood about his own poetry and the intuitive link he feels with the poets he translates, why he doesn’t believe in creative infidelity and why he finds translating prose more difficult than poetry and why he feels that being a man is no hindrance to translating women poets.

In Lit_Cast Slovakia #9, Nataša Ďurovičová talks to Julia Sherwood about exile as the point of no return, reveals how creative writing came to be one of Iowa’s main exports alongside corn and pork, explains the different social need fulfilled by creative writing in the US and the rest of the world, and unpacks the writing and translation workshops at Iowa University.

In Lit_Cast Slovakia #8 writer and journalist Michael Stein talks to Julia Sherwood about Central European sensibility, the surreal sight of a tourist-free Prague and the unforced surrealism in the writing of Uršuľa Kovalyk as well as subtle irony of Jana Juráňová, and recommends his other favourite Slovak writers Pavol Rankov, Dušan Mitana, Peter Karpinský and Ondrej Štefánik.

In Lit_Cast Slovakia #7 literature scholar Katarina Gephardt talks to Julia Sherwood about intrepid women travellers who helped shape an ambivalent image of Central and Eastern Europe in 19th century Britain, about generational memory and productive nostalgia in the writing of Verona Šikulová and Maroš Krajňak and her plans for a Companion to Contemporary Slovak Literature.

***

Background notes

Katarína Gephardt

The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives 1789 – 1914

Productive uses of nostalgia in contemporary Slovak fiction: Veronika Šikulová’s and Maroš Krajňak’s experiments with generational memory

Veronika Šikulová

- Miesta v sieti

Maroš Krajňak

- Excerpt from Carpathia

Silvester Lavrík

- Posledná k. & k. barónka

See also:

10 Slovak Women Writers We’d Love to Read in English

Svetlana Boym: The Future of Nostalgia

In Lit_Cast Slovakia #6 Jonathan Gresty talks to Julia Sherwood about his British DNA and going native in Slovakia, about translating two very different books – Anton Baláž’s Camp of Fallen Women and Jana Bodnárová’s Necklace/Choker and explains what is skopos theory, and what is wrong with English-language information for tourists and why some Slovak books would benefit from some serious editing.

World traveller and translator Janet Livingstone talks to Julia Sherwood about reinventing herself in Seattle after living in Bratislava for 16 years, picking up foreign languages, translating Slovak women writers, cultural differences between Europe and the US, and praises the politeness of the Slovak people.

In Lit_Cast Slovakia #4, American literary scholar and translator Charles Sabatos talks to Julia Sherwood about searching for his Slovak roots, the Pittsburgh University’s Slovak studies programme and the legacy of Martin Votruba, about translating Pavel Vilikovský’s „Evergreen is...“ – “a side-splitting satire on totalitarianism, spy mania, Slovaks and nationalism” as well as Dominik Tatarka and Gejza Vámoš.

In the third episode of Lit_Cast Slovakia, literature scholar and translator Magdalena Mullek talks to Julia Sherwood about living between three countries and two languages, the joys of translating living authors, cooperative translating and forging links with publishers.

In our second Lit_Cast Slovakia, Rajendra Chitnis talks to Julia Sherwood about teaching Czech and Slovak in the UK, why Vladimír Mečiar was good for Slovak literature and Franz Kafka is the biggest problem for literatures of small European countries. Also: is knowledge of history needed to understand older Slovak literature and would the world think as highly of Milan Kundera if Ján Johanides had been translated into English.

Julia Sherwood in discussion with the translator and publisher Donald Rayfield.