Olbrachtův Golet v údolí ve světle románu Josef a bratří jeho Thomase Manna
Olbracht's Golet v údolí in the light of the novel Josef a bratří jeho by Thomas Mann

Summary/Abstract: During the 1930s, when Olbracht wrote all his Subcarpathian novels, he started to become involved in literary translation (basically to earn a living in all probability), translating exclusively from German and mostly from the work of Thomas Mann. This study carries on from the work of Jiří Opelík from 1967, which for the first time put forward the proposition that Olbracht’s approach to translation work was very active, so these translations acted as catalysts to hasten the qualitative transformation in Olbracht’s work. The study compares the collection of prose works Golet v údolí (1937) with Thomas Mann’s tetralogy of novels Joseph and his brothers (1926‒1942), from which Olbracht translated a total of three works during the 1930s (the first two in collaboration with Helena Malířová). A comparison of both authors’ poetics (the nature of the fictional world, their specific conceptions of myth, the narrator and the characters) indicates that between the two works there are several analogies supporting and in many respects complementing Opelík’s theory. A look at Golet v údolí in the light of Mann’s tetralogy opens up new ways of interpreting this crowning achievement by Olbracht.

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