hrvatski

Fotezov prijevod Němečekova romana "Đavo govori španjolski" (1940.) naspram njegovih putopisa iz "Theatralia" (1944.)

The translation of Němeček’s novel "The Devil Speaks Spanish", which had been banned through Franco’s personal intervention upon its publication in Prague in 1939, was published in pre-war Zagreb in 1940 and, to this day, remains the only translation of the book. The reasons behind Fortez’s decision to translate the novel and Franco’s decision to ban it can both be traced to the crucial, controversial places of Nemeček’s novel, particularly in the way the Spanish civil war is depicted. The novel is structured as a fictional diary and a travel journal/war story written by a Czech painter by the name of Miroslav Roušar. In the conventional manner of a found manuscript, the diary ends up in the hands of the Czech ambassador in Barcelona. The ambassador then becomes the fictional intermediary between the reader and the narrator, who undertakes a journey in search for the causes of the ongoing tragic events of the civil war in Spain. In the interviews which the narrator conducts with other characters (who function as representative stereotypes, or rather, exemplary figures from Spanish society) matters concerning local and national history and Spanish art heritage are discussed. In the process, a “cultural catalogue” of sorts is formed, and a preference towards Catalonia, as the centre of resistance to Franco’s forces and a patriarchal utopia facing extinction, becomes evident.“The devil’s language” in the novel’s title is an unmistakable reference to Castilian Spanish, while Catalan becomes a metonym of a superior, idealized arcadian culture which is disappearing in a process precipitated by the reduction of Catalonian autonomy. That alone surely was reason enough for Franco’s intervention. Yet, in addition to that, the novel builds value system on a discourse of gender and race discrimination, which becomes evident every time the subjects of body, ancestry, social structure and woman’s role in society are broached. From juxtaposing Catalonia to the rest of Spain onwards, the novel constructs an axiological system of binary oppositions expressed through the relationship between patriarchy/revolutionary changes, tradition/modernity, ancestral purity/mixing and hybridity. The opposition between pacifism and militarism which is indicated at the beginning transforms into a very particular understanding of war expressed by the narrator who functions as a neutral spectator while admiring the imagem of the Spaniards’ racial superiority demonstrated in the war.At the time when the novel was published, Marko Fotez was travelling around Europe, visiting theatres and writing down his impressions about the plays he had seen. By juxtaposing the two travel journals written in “the twilight of Europe” – Nemeček’s fictional, banned account of the Spanish civil war and Fotez’s real life account of his tour of wartime theatres in Italy and Germany, published in 1944 under the title of "Theatralia" – the paper analyzes the imagological discourse of a Czech writer and a Croatian translator in relation to the representation of wartime Europe.

Zdenek Němeček; Marko Fotez; Španjolski građanski rat; kulturni imaginarij; rasistički diskurs

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