The melody of distant things: Johan Fabricius as a Czech window on exotic worlds

Abstract

From an international point of view, Dutch-written literature is a periphery literature for some 24 million native speakers. Nevertheless, a fair amount of Dutch-written works have been translated into foreign languages, especially since World War II. Johan Fabricius (1899–1981) was during his life one of the most widely read popular Dutch authors. His works, especially his ‘immortal’ novel De scheepsjongens van Bontekoe (1924) is still edited in Dutch as well as abroad (the last Czech edition dating from 2012), are ranked among the most popular at home as well as abroad. However, in Central Europe his works were translated mainly into German and into Czech. This is no coincidence as Czech is one of the languages into which a good number of Dutch-written works are translated. Czech translations offer a mix of popular authors and typical ‘canon’ writers. In this article, the Czech reception is divided into several periods: between the World Wars, during the German occupation, the democratic years 1945–1948, the Communist period, and after 1989. The article provides information about the translators, (Lída Faltová (1899–1944) and Olga Krijtová (1931–2013) being the most important ones), publishers, print runs, and the reasons why certain books were not published in Czech. This occurred primarily in the periods 1945–1948 and 1949–1989. For each period, a short description of the background is provided. In the appendix, a complete survey of all the translations of Fabricius’ works is given in accordance with the most recent situation.