Abstract
How was African American poetry translated to Czech in the early years of the Cold War? In my contribution I read several translations from an anthology of black diaspora Černošská poezie: světová antologie (Praha: Naše vojsko, 1958) alongside the original poems, focusing on the images of black bodies. Through Walter Benjamin's concept of translation as an afterlife and Jacques Derrida's ideas on translatability, combined with the historical, political and literary context of the anthology, I want to raise questions about translation, appropriation, and, more broadly, how can our readings as Central European scholars of American literature and culture contribute to the field.
Exploring the forgotten early Cold War networks and literary geographies brings new readings and contexts for African- American poets in the 1950s and presents yet another case for enlarging the reference frame of American literature. The transnational and transnational turn is one of the developments in North American studies that I follow in my dissertation entitled "African-American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia." By mapping the to-and-fro of texts across national and linguistic borders, I try to avoid both a purely comparative perspective and the solely Anglophone focus.
Furthermore, I am building on the reconsiderations of the 1950s US poetic canon, and also the recent attention to the interconnections of the Cold War, Civil Rights movement, and poetry.