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Bronislava Volková

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Bronislava Volková (born Bronislava Fischerová; May 15, 1946) is a Czech-American poet, translator, scholar and collage artist. She emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1974 and spent more than forty years in the United States.

Bronislava Volková
Volková in 2014
Volková in 2014
BornBronislava Fischerová
(1946-05-15) May 15, 1946 (age 78)
Děčín, Czechoslovakia
Occupationsemiotician, poet, literary historian, translator, scholar
Website
bronislavavolkova.com/eng/

Life and work

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Her father Štěpán Fischer was a machine engineer.[1][2] and her mother Markéta Morenová (pseudonym Gita Morenová) was a violin virtuoso.[3] Volková grew up in Prague, where she went to primary and secondary school. In 1969, she graduated the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University with an M.A. in Russian and Spanish.[4] A year later, she obtained a doctorate from Slavic and General linguistics. Because she refused to enter the Communist party, she was forbidden to defend her dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Sciences.[5] This was one of the reasons she opted to leave for exile.[6] Between 1974 and 1976, she lived in Cologne, West Germany. Later she moved to the United States of America. She was condemned to year and a half in prison for leaving Czechoslovakia without permission.

She taught at six universities in three different countries, e.g. University of Cologne, University of Marburg, University of Virginia and Harvard University. Her home university eventually became Indiana University Bloomington,[5][7] where she taught since 1982 in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and for thirty years led the Czech program.[7] She became a Full Professor in 1991.

She is the author of many academic articles and two monographs from linguistic and literary semiotics: Emotive Signs in Language (1987)[8] and A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (1997).[9][10] Her newest work is a book of essays Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought:Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America (2021),[11] Czech version Podoby exilu v židovské literatuře a myšlení: Střední Evropa ve dvacátém století a přesun do Ameriky (2022).[12] Between the years 1976 and 1992, her work appeared under the name Bronislava Volek.[7]

Volková contributed to theory and structure of emotive signs and meanings,[13] developing differences between emotivity, expressivity, intensity and values, to Russian word-formation, pragmatics, etc. She has also worked on functions of linguistic repetition in Russian and Spanish dialogue, levels of emphasis in Russian, Spanish and Czech syntax and other semiotic topics.

Apart from her linguistic analyses, she has applied her semiotic theory to the work of important Czech authors[14] (Mácha, Kundera, Němcová, Hrabal,[15] Čapek, Havel and others). Her literary analyses focus on gender, responsibility, guilt, innocence, racism, nationalism, eurocentrism, relationship between private and public sphere, escape and vision, death and other topics.[7] She also analyzed poetry on the basis of emotive signs and meanings, characterizing the poetics of individual authors or poems via typology and frequency of emotive signs used. Her work was reviewed in a number of countries and parts of it were translated into Czech, Russian, German and Spanish.

During her academic career, Volková taught courses and led investigations from many different fields,[7] including general linguistics, Slavic studies, theater, comparative literature, philosophy, history, folklore, Jewish studies, communication and culture, semiotics, cognitive linguistics and literary translation.

Besides her scholarly work, Volková is also a poet. Her poetry appears in journals, anthologies, websites, as well as poetry collections. It has existential, reflective and spiritual character. Since 1999, her poetry appears in bilingual, Czech-English form.[16] She has also participated in many international anthologies of poetry and lectured at many universities around the world. Her poetry was reviewed by famous authors of various nationalities, e.g. Bohumil Hrabal,[17] Miroslav Holub, Arnošt Lustig, W.S. Merwin, Willis Barnstone, Petr Král, Igor Hochel,[18] Atanas Zvezdinov, Aleksandr Karpenko and many others.[19][20][21]

Another area of Volková's work is poetry translation. She has translated many poets from Czech to English, from other Slavic languages into Czech and from Spanish into Russian or Czech. She has authored two books of translations of her own poetry from Czech to Russian and an extensive anthology of Czech poets in English (Po hřbetě ďábla / Up the Devil's Back).[22]

She has also authored stories and essays, especially on the theme of exile in both languages. Volková is a member of Czech and American PEN club[23] and a recipient of various international cultural and literary awards.

Apart from literary and scholarly work, she engages in creation of collages, which she uses both as illustrations and covers of poetry books, as well as in exhibitions and multimedia shows.

Selected literature

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Poetry

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  • Motáky do uší pěny (1984), bilingual edition Prison Notes Smuggled into the Ears of Sea Foam (1999)
  • Dům v ohni (1985)
  • Vzduch bez podpatků (1987)
  • Jistá nepřítomnost (1990), bilingual edition A Certain Absence (2003)
  • The Courage of the Rainbow (Selected Poems, 1993)
  • Proměny/Transformations (2000), bilingual edition
  • Zranitelnost země (1992)
  • Hluchoněmá dlaň (1993)
  • Roztříštěné světy (1995)
  • Vstup do světla/Entering Light (2002), bilingual edition
  • Ze tmy zrozená (2004), English edition Born out of Darkness (2005)
  • A pít budem ze studní lahodných (2010), English edition And Drink We Will from Delectable Wells... (2011)
  • Vzpomínky moře (Collected Poems, 2011)
  • Az sym tvoiata sydba (Bulgarian, 2013)
  • Neprinaležnisť (Ukrainian, 2014)
  • Šepot vselennoj (Russian, 2015)
  • Být stromem, který zpívá/Being a Tree that Sings (2016), bilingual edition
  • Z druhej strany duše (Slovak, 2016)
  • Viter na kolinax/Vítr na kolenou (Ukrainian-Czech bilingual edition, 2019)
  • Heimkehr/Návrat (German-Czech bilingual edition, 2019)
  • Lučše čem tišina zvučať… (Russian, 2020)
  • Mirando las aguas (Spanish, 2020)

Scholarly publications

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  • Emotive Signs in Language and Semantic Functioning of Derived Nouns in Russian (1987)
  • Czech Poets and Writers Reminisce and Envision (1991)
  • A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (1997)
  • Up the Devil's Back/Po hřbetě ďábla: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry (2008)
  • Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought (2021)

References

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  1. ^ "Záhadné FRM: zapomenuté české letadlo na kolech pohřbila válka". iDNES.cz (in Czech). April 13, 2015. Retrieved December 29, 2022.
  2. ^ Šuman-Hreblay, Marián (2018). Encyklopedie automobilů (in Czech). CPress. ISBN 978-80-264-1852-8.
  3. ^ "Morenová, Gita, nar. 1903". ipac.svkkl.cz (in Czech). Středočeská vědecká knihovna v Kladně. Retrieved April 4, 2023.
  4. ^ "Bronislava Volková". Slovník české literatury (in Czech). Retrieved November 19, 2022.
  5. ^ a b "Bronislava Volkova". Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Retrieved November 19, 2022.
  6. ^ Rosenfeld, Alvin H. (2008). The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253000361.
  7. ^ a b c d e "Bronislava Volkova: Faculty & Staff – Borns Jewish Studies Program". jsp.sitehost.iu.edu. Retrieved November 19, 2022.
  8. ^ Volek, Bronislava (1987). Emotive Signs in Language and Semantic Functioning of Derived Nouns in Russian. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co. ISBN 978-90-272-7891-3. OCLC 769341964.
  9. ^ Volková, Bronislava (1997). A feminist's semiotic odyssey through Czech literature. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press. ISBN 0-7734-8570-8. OCLC 37107142.
  10. ^ Makolkin, Anna (1999). "A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature. By Bronislava Volková. Slavic Studies, vol. 3. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. 195 pp. Bibliography. $89.95, hard bound". Slavic Review. 58 (1): 204–205. doi:10.2307/2673008. ISSN 0037-6779. JSTOR 2673008. S2CID 165041579.
  11. ^ Volková, Bronislava (2021). Forms of exile in Jewish literature and thought : twentieth-century Central Europe and movement to America. Boston. ISBN 978-1-64469-407-7. OCLC 1250439475.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  12. ^ Volková, Bronislava (2022). Podoby exilu v židovské literatuře a myšlení: Střední Evropa ve dvacátém století a přesun do Ameriky. František Jahnátek, Bronislava Translation of: Volková, Nakladatelství Pavel Mervart. Červený Kostelec. ISBN 978-80-7465-501-2. OCLC 1327595766.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  13. ^ Volková, Bronislava (1992). "Poetika emotivních znaků v díle moderních básníků". Česká literatura. 40 (6): 633–644. JSTOR 43321620 – via JSTOR.
  14. ^ Volková, Bronislava (January 1, 2015). "The Greats of Czech Popular Culture (1900–2000): Roots, Character and Genres". Russian Literature. Czech and Slovak Literature. 77 (1): 123–134. doi:10.1016/j.ruslit.2015.01.009. ISSN 0304-3479.
  15. ^ Volková, Bronislava (2006). "Smrt jako sémiotická událost: Mácha, Němcová, Neruda, Hrabal a Kundera". Česká literatura. 54 (6): 19–30. ISSN 0009-0468. JSTOR 42687219.
  16. ^ "Bronislava Volková". CzechLit (in Czech). Retrieved December 29, 2022.
  17. ^ Hrabal, Bohumil (1986). "O verších Bronislavy Volkové". Obrys. 6 (2).
  18. ^ Hochel, Igor (1991). "3 x z PmD". Romboid. 7.
  19. ^ Lee, Pearl-Angelika (1995). "Courage of the Rainbow". World Literature Today. 69 (1). doi:10.2307/40151027. JSTOR 40151027.
  20. ^ Trávníček, Mojmír (1996). "Roztříštěné světy". Proglas. 8: 47–48.
  21. ^ Levy, Alan (1994). "Bronislava Volkova: The Poet as Healer". Prague Post.
  22. ^ Up the devil's back: a bilingual anthology of 20th-century Czech poetry. Bronislava Volková, Clarice Cloutier. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica. 2008. ISBN 978-0-89357-362-1. OCLC 291193556.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  23. ^ "Bronislava Volková". penklub.net. Retrieved November 19, 2022.
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