Kniha překladatelky Kathleen Hayes přibližuje čtenáři vůbec první anglické překlady povídek doposud neprávem spíše opomíjených českých autorek přelomu 19. a 20. století. Soubor osmi povídek tak nespojuje pouze osoba překladatelky, ale i doba vzniku, počátek ženské emancipace na začátku 20. století. Zdařilost výběru povídek je podpořena precizním a čtivým překladem povídek Boženy Benešové, Růženy Jesenské, Marie Majerové a dalších. Kniha je doplněna životopisy všech osmi autorek.
The presence of women
The Czech Republic still has a long way to go, baby. When the prime minister can make dismissive remarks about gender equality to little public outrage, and when many women refuse to acknowledge International Woman's Day due to its mandatory celebration under the old regime, it seems history and culture have combined to stunt the growth of post-communist feminist consciousness.
A World Apart and Other Stories: Czech Women Writers at the Fin de Siecle, A recently published collection of Czech women writers from the turn of the 19th century highlights the opposite trend from a bygone era. In an excellent introductory essay, editor Kathleen Hayes details the flowering of progressive sexual politics - and letters - that occurred in the Czech lands during the late Victorian period. Journals published under the Habsburgs such as Zenska revue, Lada and Nova zena argued for a new morality that accepted women as equals in public and private life. This activity continued into the First Republic (1918-38), when the fight for suffrage took place at all levels of society, from socialist workers' groups to aristocratic drawing-room committees. Who knew that T.G. Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, was an outspoken crusader for women's rights? Or that his American wife Charlotte first translated John Stuart Mill's The Subjugation of Women into Czech? One can imagine what she might have to say to some of the cruder sexists that belong to today's Czech political class.
But female writers of the period were not known for manifesto writing as much as for popular fiction, and the authors in A World Apart were widely read and admired by mass audiences. The themes surrounding the "woman question" with which these writers dealt were popularized in plays, novels and short stories, just as they were elsewhere by their better-known male contemporaries such as Ibsen, James and Wilde.
A World Apart includes stories dealing with themes such as homosexuality and the social anxieties surrounding changing sex roles, and the anthology is far more interesting as a historical document than it is for any intrinsic literary value. The passage below, from the title story, offers a frank portrayal of lesbian intrigue that was brave for the popular journals of the day. Here a young girl recounts an older woman's attempt to seduce her:
"You hardly speak at all," she said [to me], "but that is beautiful. The return ..." she closed her eyes, "because of you life is returning to me again, you don't have any idea that it's because of you." And she said very quietly: "Will you like me?" [Her] eyes were fixed on me in strange expectation; I sensed that her question was not motivated by the simple kindness of a woman who thought I was nice and longed for my friendship. Something deeper sounded in that tone, like a lifelong goal.
Hayes' translation is competent but does not always sparkle, and the stories are generally on par with what one would expect from popular magazine fiction of the time - which is to say, they are mildly entertaining at best and unbearably wooden at worst. The darker stories influenced by the Decadent School (an early modernist movement influenced by the work of Freud) make the best reads, but the translation of even the weaker voices is an admirable and long-overdue project that should be appreciated by social historians of the period.
(...)
Alexander Zaitchik, The Prague Post, č. 33/2001, s. A13
