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Just came across this interesting online pdf document: Review of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Czech Republic
Editorial
The Overseas Resistance on the Airwaves of the BBC
This Is the Voice of America
Halt The Jamming of the Blue Right Away
Communists before the Courts
The Gensek’s Visit Our Comrade in Havana
Karel Vaš in the USSR
We Are Where We Were
Defector in the Free World
“There Was the Tailor from Bohemia”
From War to War You Want to Rob Me...
The Greater the Pressure, the Better You Can Resist
Rejecting the Magical Power of Idols
The chapter on the BBC made me think about the Czech (Moravian) poet and BBC broadcaster, Ivan Jelínek
See also, from Radio Prague:
IVAN JELÍNEK: A POET IN THE NEWSROOM
The chapter on the BBC made me think about the Czech (Moravian) poet and BBC broadcaster, Ivan Jelínek
See also, from Radio Prague:
IVAN JELÍNEK: A POET IN THE NEWSROOM
To the Czech Language
When it rains in England
I hear from mothers’ mouths the names of their children
And my own among them in the still-life of vowels.
When it rains in England
I hear two women tenderly speaking in Czech
And the words are only another name for love.
It rains on my eyes, on the harbour, on the deck
And fishes swim and swim around the girl’s heads,
One of them with a key in its mouth, as though
It would leap the weir - longing for speech kills me.
When it rains in England
The drowned day crawls towards the dark, a body
Without a soul - as though myself were drowned.
When it rains in England
Two lovers should light on the banks of the Morava
A candle, and pray at the weir for a soul.
Translation by Edwin Muir.
From my unpublished “Czechoslovakia : Secret Journals of the Poets’ Revolution”, entry of 14.8.1988 (at a time when I knew very little about Jelínek beyond this poem):
From my unpublished “
"Who was Ivan Jelínek? He published at least five volumes of
poetry, two of them in Britain Moravia Czech.
“When it rains in England
Two lovers should light on the banks of the Morava
A candle, and pray at the weir for a soul.”
The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, An Annotated Edition edited by Peter Butter, Aberdeen, 1991.
Four poems translated into English.
Obituary from The Times, October 9, 2002:
Ivan Jelinek, Czech broadcaster and poet who remained a distinctive voice in London exile
"THE CZECH poet and broadcaster Ivan Jelinek spanned in a single cultural life the worlds of Habsburg tradition, Czechoslovak resistance to Nazism, and the determination of exiles from postwar communism to keep the spirit of free Czech culture alive. His poems were finely crafted mystical creations, products of a meditative mind steeped in everything from Classical Greek mythology and Indian literature to the folk culture of his native Moravia. His broadcasting brought this rich cultural sense to bear on the dramas of 20th-century Czech political life. And his autobiography, published after he had seen Czechoslovak communism overthrown in the late 1980s, bequeathed to his readers a vivid portrait of their own history seen through the shrewdest of eyes...He published a first volume of poetry in 1933, and worked with a local theatre company on translations of works by authors including W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. And he began writing for the famous Czech newspaper Lidové Noviny."
Another book (Hutchinson and Co, London, 1943) found in a second-hand bookshop:
Obituary from The Times, October 9, 2002:
Ivan Jelinek, Czech broadcaster and poet who remained a distinctive voice in London exile
"THE CZECH poet and broadcaster Ivan Jelinek spanned in a single cultural life the worlds of Habsburg tradition, Czechoslovak resistance to Nazism, and the determination of exiles from postwar communism to keep the spirit of free Czech culture alive. His poems were finely crafted mystical creations, products of a meditative mind steeped in everything from Classical Greek mythology and Indian literature to the folk culture of his native Moravia. His broadcasting brought this rich cultural sense to bear on the dramas of 20th-century Czech political life. And his autobiography, published after he had seen Czechoslovak communism overthrown in the late 1980s, bequeathed to his readers a vivid portrait of their own history seen through the shrewdest of eyes...He published a first volume of poetry in 1933, and worked with a local theatre company on translations of works by authors including W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. And he began writing for the famous Czech newspaper Lidové Noviny."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ivan-jelinek-r36zwk5t6p5
A rare pamphlet of poems (1000 copies printed), bought in an antiquarian book shop in Prague, circa 1988, with poems by Ivan Jelínek, Jiří Mucha and other Czechoslovak Brigade servicemen fighting alongside the British in World War II, printed by Unwin Brothers in London, 1941.
A rare pamphlet of poems (1000 copies printed), bought in an antiquarian book shop in Prague, circa 1988, with poems by Ivan Jelínek, Jiří Mucha and other Czechoslovak Brigade servicemen fighting alongside the British in World War II, printed by Unwin Brothers in London, 1941.
Another book (Hutchinson and Co, London, 1943) found in a second-hand bookshop:
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