The Reception of Czech and Slovak Literature in 20th -century Portugal 101
lisher, soon started looking for a suitable translator of Ha sek's novel into German. Given the initial misgivings of Czech literary critics, the search was protracted until Synek found a Prague German-language translator who was willing to take up the challenge: Grete Reiner-Straschnow (1892-1944). The German translation of Svejk was of fundamental importance not only because it became the source text for the rst translation into Spanish by Alfosina Janes (as late as 1980), but primarily because it had a considerable impact on the reception of the novel in Czechoslovakia, as Hartmann reminds us: Grete Reiner's translation introduced Svejk to German-speaking audiences and even in uenced the perception of the novel in Czech culture, which was then forced to react to the success of Svejk abroad (Hartmann 2009: 192). In other words, the translation (and its success) in uenced the reception of the original (and its canonisation). Alongside the aforementioned `agitprop brochures', that is yet another instance of a cultural fact which disproves Toury's assumption that translation is as good as initiated by the target culture (Toury 1995: 27). The sheer number of Czech names among the translators of Czech literature into foreign languages (by no means a rarity among `small' and medium-sized lingua- and socio-cultures) attests to the tendency of such cultures to seize the initiative and translate their own literature into other languages instead of waiting to be discovered one day. As regards the Portuguese translation of Svejk, the following are the principal results of the micro-textual comparative analysis of the Czech original, the French mediating text and the Portuguese target text (cf. Spirk 2011: 247-280): (a) First and foremost, the Portuguese version of the novel is the translation of only Part I (out of four parts in total), distorting the target reader's image of the novel already by presenting him/her with an amputated, mutilated text. (b) The Portuguese translation of the novel was made from the French translation by Jind rich (Henry) Ho rej s (1886-1941), a Czech author known for his proletarian poetry and a translator from and www.lusoso a.net