Abstract
The objective of this book is to describe the reception of Czech literature in Spain between 1900 and 2015 with a special emphasis on German as a mediating language for translation between Czech and Spanish, placing Czech research of this phenomenon into a broad international context of investigating the role of languages and cultures in multilingual communities. The book further explores issues partially covered by previous research (Uličný 2005, Špirk 2011, 2014, Cuenca 2013).
The theoretical part first provides a short historical context of both countries, commenting on their bilateral relations during the 20th century, analysing the publishing sector and describing the official censorship. It then provides a detailed investigation of indirect translations and introduces diverse methods in which they can be explored, highlighting the importance of paratextual material, that is paratexts (Genette 1982, 1987) and metatexts (Popovič 1975, 1983), and the influence of censorship and dominant ideology (Abellán 1980, 1982, 1987; Neuschäfer 1994).
Methodologically, the present work relies on Czech and Slovak translation studies (Levý, Popovič) and the Spanish TRACE project (Rabadán, Merino). The empirical part uses the methodological tools of critical discourse analysis, author's introspection, oral history and micro-textual analysis to analyse censorship reports obtained from the AGA archive, reviews, peritexts, interviews (or correspondence).
The corpus contains 18 second-hand translations of Czech fiction translated into Spanish via German. The case studies are devoted to Jaroslav Hašek's novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války (1920-1923) and Milan Kundera's novel Žert (1967), applying macro-textual and micro-textual analysis.
The conclusion summarises and discusses the findings and outlines the possible lines of future research. The research introduced in the present book follows the trajectory of Czech literature in other cultures and describes the impressions and reactions it provoked in the target culture.
Simultaneously, the research aspires to contribute to the explanation of Czech-Spanish literary relations in the 20th century, discussing the potential of German as a mediator between cultures.