Discussion
I will explore Libuše Moníková’s debut novel, Eine Schädigung, published first in German in 1981. The novel recounts the rape of a Czech student in totalitarian Prague and, according to many scholars, allegorizes the 1968 Soviet invasion. Eine Schädigung received acclaim in the West for its feminist themes, yet the novel has never appeared in Czech to date. However, the Bratislava feminist publishing house Aspekt issued the Slovak translation Ujma by Jana Cviková in 1999 (Moníková served on the editorial board of Aspekt).
Although the novel has never appeared in Czech, Moníková admitted that she began the novel in Czech yet switched to German to establish a linguistic separation from the traumas recounted: “The recollection of the sweating, sadistic, illiterate policeman, whom the law permitted to demand to see your ID and bully citizens at any time – it was in the middle of that scene, which brought to the surface all my fear and disgust at the socialist police, the informer types who never change and who are now blithely finding themselves a niche here again, that I went over to German – in Czech the scene was unbearable” (translated by Ilona Bílková, Graham Jackman and David Short for Libuše Moníková in Memoriam, published originally as“Spisovatelství je vražedné povolání”, Týden, 5/7 (9 February 1998), 52-56). This essay will explore this question of translingualism as a liberating strategy to narrate national and personal trauma. Moreover, I will examine how Czech and Slovak critics understood this German-language text.
This conference paper will focus on the Slovak publication of the German-language novel about Czech history. Thus, this essay will explore how Moníková’s “peripatetic perspective” destabilizes the borders of national literary traditions.
