Marie Voslářová, a translator from Swedish, will be the (online) guest of the April Nordic Literary Salon. Her task will be to introduce The Reddest Rose, the new Czech translation of a comic book written and drawn by Liv Strömquist. The event will be streamed on Thursday, April 8, on our Facebook. After the event, the recording will be available on our YouTube channel.
In Czech.
Free admission, no reservation needed.
The Reddest Rose: Romantic Love from the Ancient Greeks to Reality TV
The deceptively simple through-line for Swedish media personality and activist Liv Strömquist’s The Reddest Rose is the question: Why does Leonardo DiCaprio date an endless string of 20-something models? Her answer — in the form of this collection of well-researched, humorous comics essays — tracks how philosophers and artists, from the Ancient Greeks to Beyoncé, conceptualized romantic love. Strömquist’s signature characters, drawn in a flat, blocky style, ask each other questions and offer sharp commentary as they guide readers throughout history and the change in societies’ values, from showing love / loving to getting love / being loved. (Poet Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle — who was so love-stricken by a man taking off his glasses that she believed they viewed dolphins together in another dimension — lends the book its title.) Lord Byron, Socrates, Byung-Chul Han, Ezra Pound, Slavoj Žižek, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ariadne, and many others have cameos. In a rationalist, consumerist world, can romantic love survive? (source)
Marie Voslářová studied Swedish and German translatology at the Faculty of arts of Charles University. Since her studies, she has mostly been working as a translator. She cooperates with the magazine iLiteratura, she is a board member of the Czech Translators of the North association and in 2020 she started working in AMU publishing house. Her first experience as a translator was with crime stories and self-development books, later she switched to working mostly on books for children, prose for adults and – especially lately – popular science books about nature. In 2020, she was awarded the Tomáš Hrách translation prize.
The partner of the event are the Czech translators of the North – an organisation uniting Czech translators from Nordic languages. The event is a part of a year-long project of the Scandinavian House: “Nordic literature in the heart of Europe 2021”, which has been supported by Prague municipality and the Czech Ministry of Culture.
