Abstract
The article consists in an thorough analysis of the various Czech translations of the early poems by a French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The main difficulties arise from Mallarmé's omnipresence in Czech literary culture as well as from the urge to adapt his poetry to the altering historical contexts and expectations.
Many Czech poets - and some of the greatest-ones - have dealt with Mallarmé's poetry, and its influence can't be thus limited to the sole translation. In fact, beside other things, it has deeply impregnated the Czech poetry in a specifically political way, as can be demonstrated for example by Hrubín's historic allocution to the Convention of Writers dating from 1956.
The overwhelming aim of the paper is nevertheless to offer a detailed examination of two Parnassian poems by Mallarmé in the translations by F. Dohnal, E.
Lešehrad, K. Čapek, V. Nezval, F.
Hrubín, O. Nechutová, V.
Mikeš and J. Pokorný.
Based on many convincing observations pertaining mainly to the semantics, prosody and translator's predominant strategies, the authors come to the conclusion that the early Czech translations depend too much (if not word-by-word) on the French original version and Parnassian poetical principals. The sensible change comes with K. Čapek.
It is, however, F. Hrubín, himself an acclaimed poet, who remains the most convincing, at least if we take into consideration such traditional or conservative criteria as precision and accuracy.