In de marge van het socialistisch realisme : de literaire vertalingen van Ella Kazdová

The Czech translator Ella Kazdová née Kučerová (1909–1982) didn't acquire the fame of her academic colleague and multi-award-winning literary translator Olga Krijtová (1931-2013). Nevertheless, with 19 literary translations, of which 17 were published, between 1947 and 1982, she built up a relatively large literary translation oeuvre from Dutch. Two factors played an important role in her relative unfamiliarity: Kazdová translated mainly for the Catholic publishing house Vyšehrad (Lidová demokracie) and because of her husband's persecution by the political system, her translations often did not pass censorship, or were published only after a long time. For instance, her 1948 translation of A. den Doolaard's Het Verjaagde Water (English: Roll Back the Sea, 1947) only came out 16 years later. That quite a few translations of specifically Catholic authors like Antoon Coolen, Fred Germonprez and Tom Kortooms could still come out is an indication of her perseverance. Kazdová's correspondence with the writers Johan Fabricius, Anne de Vries and especially Antoon Coolen, who was very popular in the Czech Republic at the time, shed more light on what obstacles translations of 'capitalist' literature faced under socialism and how they could be resolved.