Abstrakt
So far, 19 books by one of Brazil's greatest novelists, Jorge Amado (1935-2001), have been translated from Portuguese into Czech, of which 17 were published between 1948 and 1989 in communist Czechoslovakia. Although published during all the decades of the communist period in the country, most of the Czech translations were born at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, during the Brazilian author's stay in Czechoslovakia.
A member of the Brazilian Communist Party, Jorge Amado was forced to spend part of his life in exile. Between the 1950s and 1952, he resided with his family in Dobříš Castle, located in Central Bohemia, less than 50 kilometres from Prague.
This stay led to the establishment of contacts and friendly relations between him and several important Czechoslovak writers and intellectuals. However, his knowledge of the communist reality and daily life led him to give up his political career.
The number of copies of Jorge Amado's books translated into Czech was high, for example, the first Czech edition of the novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (Mulatka Gabriela, 1960) had 121,000 copies (before 1989, the average was 18,000 copies, today it is usually a few thousand or hundreds of copies). In addition, some of the novels were published several times.
There have also been adaptations for radio and television. What was behind the success of these Brazilian novels in Czechoslovakia? To what extent were readers' preferences important and what power did the political influence on Czechoslovak literary culture have in this case? We will bring a presentation of the reception of the writer's literary work based on the analysis of Czechoslovakian periodicals.