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If Sorrow Smouldered

Illustration
  • Where: Václav Havel Library, Ostrovní 13, Prague 110 00
  • When: November 19, 2018, 19:00 – 21:00

The occupation of Czechoslovakia through the eyes of Finnish poet Eeva-Liisa Manner.

Anxiety, despair, the arrival of Barbarians, spent shells. The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 shocked the entire world and also found a response in international literature. The major Finnish modernist poet Eeva-Liisa Manner addressed the tragic event in intensely lyrical form in the collection If Sorrow Smouldered (Jos suru savuaisi) published in 1968. She dedicated it to her friend Václav Havel, whose plays she had translated into Finnish in the 1960s and about whose fate she received only fragmentary, unverified reports in the first days of the occupation. The context in which the collection was written and reactions to it in Finland, Eeva-Liisa Manner’s unique relationship to Czech and Slovak culture and Finnish political, social and cultural responses to the occupation of Czechoslovakia will be discussed by translator Michal Švec and historian Barbora Skálová. The evening will be complemented by readings from the collection If Sorrow Smouldered, which will be heard in Czech for the first time, 50 years after their publication.

During the evening there will also be a presentation of the Czech novel V domě básnířky (In the Poet’s Home)in which author Helena Sinervo takes on Eeva-Liisa Manner’s life story in a poetic manner. 

Event organised by the Václav Havel Library in cooperation with the Finnish Embassy in Prague as part of the year-long Scandinavian House project Northern Literature in the Heart of Europe 2018, which has been supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the City of Prague.

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