Abstract
Edited by Alice Flemrová and Záviš Šuman, the collective monograph Růže je rosa è rose est růže / On Translation, Adaptation and Interpretation features the work of twenty-five scholars from the Czech Academy of Sciences, five Czech and three international universities. In individual chapters devoted to translation as an important cultural phenomenon from Antiquity up to the present day, they reflect both on narrowly and loosely based issues relating to literary translation and its reception.
The inspiration and addressee of their reflections is the Romance literature expert and translator Jiří Pelán, whose 70th birthday was the main impetus for this publication. The book is divided into three main sections: Translation (I), Adaptation/Translation into a new context (II) and Interpretation (III).
Translation is first examined in detailed case studies and chapters devoted to the critique of literary translation (I); these have been written by Pavol Koprda, Josef Prokop, Vlasta Dufková, Kateřina Bohadlová, Jan Čermák, Václav Jamek, Josef Fulka, Pavel Štichauer, Petr Kyloušek and Alice Flemrová. Next, translation is considered chiefly from the point of view of its reception in the context of national literatures and authors' individual bibliographies (II), a perspective chosen by Dalibor Tureček, Xavier Galmiche, Eva Voldřichová Beránková, Annalisa Cosentino, Dalibor Dobiáš and Zora Obstová.
Finally, translation is assessed in interpretational studies (III) whose authors, Martin Pokorný, Catherine Ébert-Zeminová, Magdalena Žáčková, Jan Herůfek, Záviš Šuman, Eva Blinková Pelánová, Dagmar Mocná and Jiří Špička, focus on the topic of adapting literary material and that of interpreting and understanding a literary text from the point of view of its recontextualisation in a new historical and cultural code. The timeframe of the monograph spans some sixteen centuries.
Its themes include: Augustine's Confessions; the Arthurian cycle and troubadour poetry; Dante's Paradise, Folgore da San Gimignano's sonnets; Pico's Heptaplus; Vicente's Act of the Ship of Hell; Rademin's parodies of Italian opera seria; Czech 19th-century translations of French classical novels; reception of the Hradec Králové and Zelená Hora Manuscripts in France; Lönnrot's collection of Finnish folk poetry Kanteletar; French translations of Hegel's philosophical works; Flaubert's novels; Neruda's Friday Songs; Stuparich's book on the Czech nation; Gide's Counterfeiters; Spitzer's controversial analysis of Racine's Phèdre; Merleau-Ponty's and Barthes' essays in Czech translation; the Italian reception of Bohumil Hrabal in the 1960s; Jiří Gruša's translations from German into Czech; the Czech translation of Eco's Kant and the Platypus; a corpus analysis of the phraseology in the Czech translations of Calvino's The Cloven Viscount; issues pertaining to the translation of the French-Canadian sociolect joual; and the Czech rendition of the genius loci of present-day Naples. Despite their diversity, the individual chapters demonstrate well the thesis of the leading figure of the Tel Aviv school, Itamar Even-Zohar, presented in his "Polysystem Theory", according to which translation, which plays a key role in literature from both diachronic and synchronous terms, must be apprehended as a dynamic activity whose form depends on relationships within the literary-cultural polysystem of which it is an integral part.
The monograph is supplemented by the editors' foreword, Czech and English abstracts of individual chapters, a bibliography and an index nominum.