The first Nordic literary salon (online) in 2021 is going to welcome the Czech translator from Lithuanian, Věra Kociánová. The topic is an extraordinary, crude book In the Shadow of Wolves (original title Mano Vardas – Marytė), written by Alvydas Šlepikas. The book takes its reader to the end of WWII, to Eastern Prussia and Lithuania, and depicts the fate of the so-called “Wolf Children”. Moderated by Michal Švec.
The debate is going to be streamed on our Facebook page on Thursday 14th of January 2020 from 8 pm, later it is going to be available on our Youtube channel, too.
Free admission, no reservation needed.
Jmenuji se Maryte (Odeon, 2020; original title Mano vardas – Marytė; English translation In the Shadow of Wolves) – the Lithuanian sentence that a six-year-old Renata learns, and repeats it as a counter-course to everything evil. She was born in a town in Eastern Prussia (today’s Kaliningrad), and unfortunately for her, she is German. Shortly after the war, she is taken to a foreign country, gets a new name, identity and hope for a better life. This book about the so-called wolfskinder (“wolf children”), who are living in Lithuania until these days, became a great success and was named the Lithuanian book of the year after its publishing in 2012. The author depicts the story with passion, writing in a short, yet poetic language: showing how easily one could get lost during the harsh winter of 1946.
Věra Kociánová studied Czech and Lithuanian language at the Faculty of Arts in Prague. Afterwards, she worked as a journalist for several years. In 2015, she founded the publishing house Venkovské dílo, whose production is aimed at small nations’ literature, and the Czech authors from Krkonoše mountains. Her translations include Litevské pohádky (Lithuanian Fairy Tales), Tūla by Jurgis Kunčinas (which brought Věra Kociánová an award from the Czech Literary Translators’ Guild) and, as the newest addition, Jmenuji se Maryte. She lives in a small town named Pecka, where she runs a bistro, and where she worked as a castle manager on the local castle.
The partner of the event are the Czech translators of the North – an organisation uniting the translators from the Nordic languages in the Czech Republic.
