Překlad jako experiment v pojetí Josefa Hiršala a Bohumily Grögerové

This article considers how the joint translation work of Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová may be seen as an attempt to undermine the communist regime’s political slogans by implementing changes in the language, and to promote change in the collective worldview. These efforts are first examined in the broader (international) context of concrete and experimental poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, whose transformations of language were a response to political propaganda and its abuse of language. The article then demonstrates, on the basis of interviews and Hiršal’s paper Několik poznámek k překládání Morgensternových Šibeničních písní (‘A few notes on the translation of Morgenstern’s Songs from the gallows’), how Hiršal and Grögerová conceived of translation as a form of linguistic experiment. Finally, by examining three poems from the translation of Šibeniční písně (‘Songs from the gallows’), the article shows the specific ways in which these subversive aims were carried out: by the practice of free translation; by emphasising language play, puns, and grotesque aspects of language; and by facilitating language modernisation. The primary aim was to detach oneself from ideas associated with official Czechoslovak literature by modifying and updating the language.