The Black Tree’s Memory (Černá paměť stromu)

Abstract

About the Author: Lumír Čivrný (1915–2001) was a Czech journalist, writer and translator. He was born in Červený Kostelec in East Bohemia as the son of a dyer in a textile factory. He studied law, French, German, comparative and aesthetic studies at Charles University in Prague. From 1936 to 1938 he was a member of the Communist-oriented literary group Blok (The Bloc). During World War II he was active in the resistance, he was imprisoned by the Gestapo. After the war, he occupied various political functions in the parliament and the Communist government, among others as a Deputy Minister of Education or Deputy Minister of Culture. Since 1954 he became a freelance writer and translator from Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Bulgarian (Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, Rutebeuf, Charles Cros, Rainer Maria Rilke etc.). During the Prague Spring, he was engaged in political reforms; this is the reason he could not publish in the 1970s and 1980s.