Translation and the Global Fifties: When the African American Radical Left Came to Prague

“Every educated person in Czechoslovakia,” wrote one of his Czechoslovak translators to the African American poet Langston Hughes in 1961, “knows the name of Langston Hughes.” Hughes’s name was not the only one. In the previous decade, Prague hosted the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, the activist and educator Charlotta Bass, the singer Paul Robeson, and the lawyer William Patterson. In the 1950s, these and other African American leftist cultural and intellectual figures traveled to Czechoslovakia, were translated into Czech, and engaged in a debate with their Czechoslovak counterparts. In Czechoslovakia, the 1950s brought repressions and control by the state socialist government, but it also witnessed a conversation over the decolonizing, Cold War world. It is this conversation that the talk focuses on, foregrounding the story of Abraham Chapman, a US Communist living in Prague undercover at the time, and his 1958 poetry anthology Černošská poezie: světová antologie [Black poetry: a world anthology].

Františka Schormová is a researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and an assistant professor at the University of Hradec Králové. She is interested in the connection between literature and migration, including translation and multilingualism. Her monograph When African American Radical Left Came to Prague: Translation and the Global Fifties is forthcoming this year. She is visiting researcher at the Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University during the month of May.