(Post-)Socialist Shakespeare (Eva Spišiaková)

What can translations tell us about the societies in which they are published? In this episode, moderated by Rosamund Johnston (RECET), Dr. Eva Spišiaková (University of Vienna) reflects upon one hundred years of Shakespeare's sonnets in Czech and Slovak translation. Spišiaková uses the "love poems of all love poems" to uncover shifting attitudes towards gender and sexuality in Czechoslovakia, and measure changes accompanying the country's Velvet Revolution in 1989.




Eva Spišiaková is a REWIRE postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna's Center for Translation Studies. She is the author of Queering Translation History: Shakespeare's Sonnets in Czech and Slovak Transformations (Routledge, 2021). Her current research explores how disability has historically been represented in translation.