Translating Intimate and Public Majakovskij into Czech Again: Why, and How?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study focuses on a new translation of selected poems of Vladimir Majakovskij into Czech and analyses it – after a brief summary of the characteristic features of Majakovskij’s poetry and his poetics. The new Czech translation, prepared almost 70 years after the last one, seeks, among other things, to challenge the image of Majakovskij as a servile follower of communist ideology and the bard of the Russian revolution, which persists in the Czech literary community and which has been reinforced by the controversial personality of the earlier ‘canonical’ Czech translator of Majakovskij, Jiří Taufer. The study seeks to identify the main points of departure of the new Czech translation and confronts it with the previous translation by Taufer, paying attention to its several problematic aspects. It is argued that the main ambition of the new Czech translation was to present Majakovskij unbiasedly as one of the most original figures in modern Russian/Soviet and world literature, while at the same time trying to rehabilitate Majakovskij in the eyes of Czech readers. The paper concludes by offering a new perspective on Majakovskij’s later, ‘revolutionary’ poems, which, despite their often highly political content, have lost none of Majakovskij’s typical qualities.