The Czech Center New York will host European Literature Night 2021, an evening where 11 books from 10 European countries will be presented through readings and discussions. The event will take place on November 22, 2021, in the Bohemian National Hall.
The Czech Republic will be represented by Daniela Hodrová’s trilogy City of Torment, published in 1999 in Czech and recently translated into English by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol, who will be also present at the European Literature Night evening.
From Introduction: Reading City of Torment by Elena Sokol:
The city is part of me and I am part of it, we are one being. – Daniela Hodrová*
“When Daniela Hodrová (b. 1946) began writing her first novel in December 1977, the mood in her hometown of Prague was bleak. Nearly a decade had passed since ’68 Prague Spring and its brutal suppression by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of that year. Soon afterwards, in January 1969, a university student, Jan Palach, immolated himself on Wenceslaus Square in protest against the people’s seeming acceptance of their government’s growing ‘normalisation’, which represented a return to strict, pre-reform communism. Further repression occurred after the publication of the human rights document Charter 77. Then finally, in November 1989, came the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of the Communist regime, which brought an exhilarating sense of renewal to the nation. By that time Hodrová had already written three novels.
Unlike that of many of her fellow Czech writers, Hodrová’s work appeared neither in unofficial samizdat editions, nor in the exile press abroad. Her first novel Podobojí (In Both Kinds), which did circulate clandestinely among a small circle of friends and colleagues as an anonymous manuscript, was finally brought out by a provincial publisher in 1991. Then in quick succession her second and third novels – Kukly (Puppets) (1991) and Théta (1992) – were published in Prague. These three novels would later appear as a loose trilogy in one volume – Trýznivé město (City of Torment) – in 1999 and 2017. This English version of the trilogy was preceded by earlier translations in French, German and Bulgarian. To date Hodrová’s novels have appeared in twelve European languages.”
November 17, 2021, marks the long-anticipated U.K. / E.U. release of the English translation of Daniela Hodrová’s complete City of Torment trilogy, which includes In Both Kinds, Puppets and Theta (City of Torment U.S. release date: 31 March 2022). Join translators Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol in conversation with Andrew Singer, talking about Daniela Hodrová and elements of her writing style, sources of inspiration that appear throughout the texts, and the rewards and challenges of the translation process. Information on how to order a copy of Hodrová’s City of Torment will be available.
* Daniela Dražanová, ‘An Interview with Daniela Hodrová,’ The Prague Review 2 (Winter 1996), p. 104.
Daniela Hodrová, born in Prague on 5 July 1946, has pursued a dual career as a prominent writer of fiction and a prolific literary scholar. The recipient of the State Prize for Literature in 2011 and the international Franz Kafka Prize in 2012, Hodrová is only the second woman to receive each of these awards. Her novels have been translated into French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Bulgarian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Hungarian and Macedonian (with Hebrew and Lithuanian forthcoming).
Hodrová began writing fiction in the second half of the 1970s, yet none of her books were able to be published until after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Her first three novels appeared in rapid succession: Podobojí (In Both Kinds) and Kukly (Puppets) in 1991; and Théta in 1992. These were later published as a single volume trilogy entitled Trýznivé město (City of Torment), in 1999 and 2017. Subsequent novels published to date are Perunův den (Perun’s Day), 1994; Ztracené děti (Lost Children), 1997; Komedie (A Comedy), 2003; Vyvolávání (Evocation), 2010; Točité věty (Spiral Sentences), 2015; Ta blízkost (That Nearness), 2019; and the ‘prose-essay’ Město vidím…, 1992 (Prague, I See a City…, 2011).
As a literary scholar, Hodrová specializes in the theory of the novel. Her first published book was Hledání románu (Quest for the Novel, 1989). Among her numerous scholarly publications is a major volume dealing with narrative texts: Citlivé město (The Sensible City, 2006), subtitled ‘Essays from a mythopoetics.’ Her most recent theoretical work is Chvála schoulení (In Praise of Curling Up, 2011), subtitled ‘Essays from a poetics of transience.’
Upon completing secondary school, Hodrová worked briefly as an assistant director and script consultant at the Jiří Wolker Theatre before pursuing literary studies at Charles University. She earned a first degree in Russian and Czech in 1969, and went on to pursue graduate work in French and Comparative Literature. From 1972 to 1975 she was an editor at the Odeon Publishing House. In 1975 she continued her post-graduate studies under the auspices of the Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences, where she went on to enjoy a long and productive professional career as a research scholar in the Department of Literary Theory.
Photo credit: Elena Sokol
Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny: photo credit Yuri Popov
