Abstract
The study deals with the fact that the history of literature is not only the history of the domestic production, but also the reception of foreign production in translations. It is not "only" about art: in this way, society absorbs even hitherto unusual political aspects of art and culture as a discursive carrier of non-political politics as well as an opponent of official politics.
From the point of view of the political guard that established itself in Czechoslovakia as a result of the Soviet occupation of 1968, it was therefore essential that the contacts of Czech society with, among other things, the major world literatures be severed. Milan Šimečka called the period of so-called normalization, i.e. the demolition of the democratic profits of the Prague Spring after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, "the restoration of order", and Louis Aragon called it "the Biafra of the Spirit". 750,000 citizens of the republic were dismissed from work, banned from working in their field of specialization and, thus, included among the "citizens of the second category".
With family members also affected by the repression, the purges had an impact on more than 2 million people. Especially in the Czech part of the republic, the field of art and culture, science and education was drastically affected.
As our basis for research and at the same time an exemplum, we chose a poet, writer, essayist, but above all (in the perspective of the normalization period) a genius expert and translator of Russian, French and Anglo-American literature - Jan Zábrana. Zábrana did not suffer from the feeling that an extraordinary catastrophe had fallen on society in the form of occupation and normalization, but was rather shocked by the return of a situation which he considered to have been historically overcome.
He reflected this in his diaries and correspondence. Despite social problems and depression, however, Zábrana continued both in writing poetry and, above all, in translating key works of Russian and American literature.
Numerous official and party bans on individual works and their authors, among other things, hit the publishing economy hard and affected the earning potential of hundreds of translators, editors and editors. A weapon of defense was the samizdat, but above all an extensive system of "camoufleurs", i.e. people who lent their name to someone who was not allowed to sign his work because he was on the list of politically condemned people.
The key role in this semi-legal literary operation belonged to publishing editors. It is precisely on Zábrana's example that it is possible to study well how he fought for the possibility of translating and publishing a number of politically problematic authors and how he covered the translations of his friends who were banned from work.