Abstrakt
The article deals with the Scottish poet, critic and journalist Edwin Muir and his two stays in Czechoslovakia (first one in 1920s, second one in late 1940s, including February 1948). In their autobiographies, Edwin Muir and his wife Willa, herself a novelist and translator, reflect on two important periods of Czechoslovak history.
The Muirs were acquainted with the Čapek brothers and they later became the first translators of Franz Kafka into English. The article compiles information from various sources (autobiographies, poems, memoirs of Czech scholars) in order to point out how influential the two stays in Prague were for Edwin Muir's own writing, how he responded to the events of Czechoslovak history, and how the activities of the Muirs as translators influenced the literature of central Europe.