JOSEF ČAPEK - In my Brother Karel's Wake

Josef Čapek: In my Brother Karel's Wake

Selection of Poems from a Concentration Camp  

"Thank you all for coming to this book launch,some of you as afar as the Blue Mountains, Lithgow or even Darwin. I‘d like to thank the sunny Frances Keevil for her encouragement, enthusiasm and for providing this oasis of hospitality for our event. And thank you Richard Fidler for a rich introduction to the Čapek brothers. I feel this is a very special and probably unique event, which has come together very quickly and organically, as if it was finally Josef Čapek‘s time to come to an English speaking audience – starting with you!

People have always asked mehow I came to do this translation and the answer is actually simple – the right piece of a jigsaw fell into my lap. I‘m a Speech Pathologist and I‘ve also been a translator from Czech for quite some time. My family came to Australia in 1969 following the invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia by the so-called ‚friendly‘ armies of the Warsaw Pact. In exile, my family were always involved in the Czech and Slovak community, and immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent Velvet Revolution in 1989, we were also drawn back to support the new democracy. This may sound a bit naive, but at the time it was the honest and idealistically-driven truth.

During the 1990s I worked in Prague first as a translator at the National Gallery of Prague and for example got to name a few wonderful paintings by Monet which had long been in Czechoslovak possession, but because of the Communist era had never acquired English titles. It was there that I first came across Josef’s modernistic paintings and was astounded.

Both Josef and Karel were profusely creative particularly between the wars, collaborating on plays, philosophy, ethnography, political essays - mainly warning against the possibility of another war, as well as children’s stories. They were household names and every Czechoslovak child knew of the antics of 'Doggie & Pussycat', classics of Czech children‘s literature, which were beautifully illustrated by Josef. But we weren't familiar with these earlier paintings, which literally had needed to be hidden not just from the Nazis, but then also from the Communists.

I later worked as a consultant for the European Commission and then as a truly proud diplomatic counsellor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I worked on the accession of the newly formed Czech Republic to the European Union. As Richard and others here will know, these were extremely heady times!

Back in Australia, I continued translating alongside my Speech Pathology day job and in 2018 I interpreted at a Sydney University Ideas robotics conference, attended by Ivan Havel, the brother of the former Czech president, Václav Havel, and an artificial intelligence and philosophy scientist. From there, in 2019, I was asked to translate a new book of quotations called ‘For the 21st Century‘ by Karel Čapek, who a 100 years before had written the play RUR or Rossum’s Universal Robots. This also led me to meet Josef‘s granddaughter back in Prague, the incredibly informative and humble Katka Dostálová. By the way, you might also like to hear how the word robot came into being – the brothers lived next to each other and one day Karel burst into Josef’s attic studio & and asked him what he thought of the word labor(i) being used for his artificial beings. Josef was busy painting & waved Karel away, by saying: "That’s ridiculous, why don’t you call them robot(i)“.

But now the jigsaw started to make sense. At first Katka tried to dissuade me from translating Josef’s written work, as she felt Josef’s language to be too complex and other people had for that reason already turned the translations down. But when we discussed which part of Josef‘s voluminous output I could try to translate, we decided on the concentration camp poems as being the most significant. She chose some of the ones that she felt that spoke of him to her – mainly the ones that reflected colour or the ones in which he reminisced about his home and family. The darker poems on the other hand were appreciated by his fellow inmates who felt that he was also able to express their situation and feelings. That is in fact why they were preserved - they helped to secretly reproduce them. Josef wrote them in pen or pencil on small loose pieces of paper and later, when an opportunity arose, a prisoner who worked in the camp office would type up the poems on a typewriter etc.

Josef wrote up to 120 poems over 3 years, some in solitary confinement. He also apologised that it wasn’t his usual or best genre, but evidently could not write long prose or paint - apart from paintings occasionally commissioned by
the Nazi officers, such as their family trees or standing next to stags on mountain tops. This of course attests to the idea that creativity and the yearning of the human spirit to be free just cannot be suppressed. But it also speaks to the solidarity of the inmates regardless of their race or religion. Čapek was not Jewish, nor were all of the other 1000 intellectuals targetted and arrested with him on the very first day of WWII.

And it shows that the intent of a totaliarian regimeis not only to eliminate any humans ‘in the way‘ but to eliminate the freedom of expression itself. Or said in another way, to control who can speak and what canbe said. If onewere to perhaps compare the significance of Josef’s capture to a similar theoretical event in Australia, one could surmise the same happening to the likes of Donald Horne or Xavier Hebert, but imagine the gap if all our top artists, intellectuals and journalists were arrested on the same day.

But Josef’s poems did continue to have a trajectory after his death.. they were immediately published in Czech after the war and later also in Italian and German, but never in English. Because of their complex language, I saw this as a challenge. I began to appreciate that he spoke through colour – there are other poems dedicated to the colours gold or silver etc - but the job of translation became quite difficult when he would for example come up with 20 words for the colour black.

It took a year to refine this translation and therewere times when I felt that I was sitting next to Josef on his bunk and had to have a break. But I am still loving being a part of his journey, which surprisingly is taking sudden momentum. For example, this year has been declared the year of Josef Čapek in Prague 10, with book launches and street
exhibitions, 11 of his paintings have been made into large tapestries and are currently exhibited at Prague Castle, documentaries are being made about him by foreign media and his previously banned paintings are fetching large sums.

Perhaps it is no surprise however that he is gatheringrelevance again as we start to witness the potential of another generation of young people becoming crushed in current conflicts Having experienced WW1, a repetition of another war was what the brothers had railed and rallied against.

Another piece in this jigsaw is discovering that JosefČapek was born in my father’s home town, Hronov. And so when his musings take him back to familiar places, I can also see and feel this countryside.

Last Thursday would have been the 136th anniversary ofJosef‘s birth. You may have also noticed from the posters that it is thought that he died on an unknown date in the very last weeks before Belsen-Bergen was liberated on 15 April 1945. And so we would like to commemorate his life - and to celebrate that he has not been silenced - by a special performance by members of the Sydney Great Synagogue choir after the readings of a selection of poems in both Czech and English. Thank you!"