Jiří Gruša – an Author between two languages and two cultures

Abstract

Jiři Grusa (1938-2011) was already 42 years old when he was expatriated and emigrated from former Czechoslovakia to the Federal Republic of Germany. At the age of 47, the poet dared to change the language of his writing from Czech to German. His first collection of poems, Der Babylonwald [The Forest of Babylon], was eventually published in 1990 as a result of a long and complex process. This paper analyses how Jiři Grusa shifted from his mother tongue to a foreign langage, which aspects where decisive in this change and how the two literary languages interact. The focus is on the author’s experience as a “translator” of his own literary works, which was the occasion for an intense examination of both languages and cultures. This process conferred on him the role of a “border crosser” as well as of a “cultural mediator” between two languages. Both these questions as well as the related textual shifts due to a new target readership will be discussed using his novel Mimner oder Das Tier der Trauer (1986) [Mimner or the Animal of Grief] as an example. Indeed, the author was actively involved in the translation of this work from Czech to German.