Edith Södergran och hennes efterföljare i översättning i före detta Tjeckoslovakien

Abstract

This article describes chronologically Edith Södergran's and partly also her Finland-Swedish poet colleagues' canonization in the form of translations in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia. The poetry has been translated there into three languages: Czech, Slovak and Hungarian. Södergran's Czech canonization began in the 1930s and reached its peak by the edition of her collected works (1987). In Slovakia, the peaks are two: 1969 (the first anthology) and 2008 (the second one). The article follows which publishers – as the Czech Odeon – or which publications were active in issuing of the translations as well as how the canonization was motivated ideologically. Especially it explores what kind of persons (ie translators) took part in the process. In their professions, many of them combined their translation activities with others, often poetic and in particular academic ones; in Slovakia, translators and poets collaborated with each other rendering the poems. J. B. Michl represents an interesting personal link between the Czech and Slovak canonization processes.