Slovenska Literatura (May 2023)

Srečko Kosovel: a poet of the Slovenian Karst and the avant-garde in Czech and Slovak translation reception

  • Špela Sevšek Šramel,
  • Jana Šnytová

DOI
https://doi.org/10.31577/slovlit.2023.70.3.2
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 70, no. 3
pp. 244 – 259

Abstract

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The article presents the Slovenian poet Srečko Kosovel (1904 – 1926) in the context of his entire poetic oeuvre, from impressionism and expressionism to constructivism, in a complex understanding of time, space, and inter-literary contacts, with an emphasis on his individual poetic expression. In the analytical part of the article, we focus on the reception of translated Kosovel’s poetry in the Czech and Slovak cultural space during the 20th and 21st centuries. Through an annotated bibliographical survey of published works, we identify three phases of the reception of his poetry in Slovenia, which are also reflected in three stages of translations into Czech and Slovak language: the first one is connected to two anthologies of Slovenian poetry published during the Second World War (1940), the second one is linked to two selections of his poetry that came out in response to the new reception and perception of Kosovel in the 1970s, and the third stage concerns translations published after 2000. We analyse the reception of the poet in translation by both looking into particulars of the selection of poems and composition of individual poetry collections and close reading of selected translations and observing translation strategies of individual translators. In doing so, we draw on analyses of poems that exist in several translated versions or in translations by different translators.

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