A message from a Bohemian "interculture" : Patočka's translation of Durych's Boží duha

Abstract

Jan Patočka’s essay accompanying his 1975 German translation of Jaroslav Durych’s novel, Boží duha (God’s rainbow, 1969) has divided Czech critics. While some reject altogether his association of the novel with the post-war expulsion of the Bohemian German population from Czechoslovakia, others criticize the effect his essay has had in reducing the novel to this context, undermining its more universal message of reconciliation, and others objected to the co-opting of the conservative Roman Catholic Durych into a secular liberal agenda. This article approaches the translation venture and its reception as a case study in translation history, in order to assess these criticisms in the light of a more accurate and detailed understanding of Patočka’s motives for publishing the translation. It focuses on both Patočka and his collaborator in the venture, the German academic, Frank Boldt, and compares his foreword with contemporaneous essays on Comenius and on Czech history. It argues that the real difficulty is not so much Patočka’s interpretation of Durych’s novel as their long-standing inseparability in translations and Czech editions, which disrupts the careful balance in the novel between history and universality and between didacticism and aestheticism.