Kicking off the series of podcasts, Donald Rayfield discusses the challenges of publishing translated literature, translating Russian, Georgian and Uzbek literature, and draws parallels between Peter Pišťanek and Quentin Tarantino, and Ján Johanides and Hilary Mantel.

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Rajendra Chitnis talks about teaching Czech and Slovak in the UK, why Vladimír Mečiar was good for Slovak literature and Franz Kafka is the biggest problem for literatures of small European countries. Also: is knowledge of history needed to understand older Slovak literature and would the world think as highly of Milan Kundera if Ján Johanides had been translated into English.

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In the third episode of Lit_cast Slovakia, literature scholar and translator Magdalena Mullek talks with Julia Sherwood about living between three countries and multiple languages, the joys of translating living authors, cooperative translating, and forging relationships with publishers.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #4, American literary scholar and translator Charles Sabatos talks to Julia Sherwood about searching for his Slovak roots, University of Pittsburgh’s Slovak Studies Program and the legacy of Martin Votruba, about translating Pavel Vilikovský’s Ever Green Is... — “a side-splitting satire on totalitarianism, spy mania, Slovaks and nationalism,” as well as about translating Dominik Tatarka and Gejza Vámoš.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #5, world traveler and translator Janet Livingstone talks to Julia Sherwood about reinventing herself in Seattle after living in Bratislava for 16 years, picking up foreign languages, translating Slovak women writers, cultural differences between Europe and the US, and she praises the politeness of the Slovak people.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #6, Jonathan Gresty talks to Julia Sherwood about his British DNA and going native in Slovakia, about translating two very different books – Anton Baláž’s Camp of Fallen Women and Jana Bodnárová’s Necklace/Choker and explains what is skopos theory, and what is wrong with English-language information for tourists and why some Slovak books would benefit from some serious editing.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #7, literature scholar Katarína Gephardt talks to Julia Sherwood about intrepid women travelers who helped shape an ambivalent image of Central and Eastern Europe in 19th-century Britain, about generational memory and productive nostalgia in the writing of Verona Šikulová and Maroš Krajňak, and about her plans for a Companion to Contemporary Slovak Literature.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #8, writer and journalist Michael Stein talks to Julia Sherwood about the Central European literary sensibility, the surreal sight of a tourist-free Prague, and the unforced surrealism in the writing of Uršuľa Kovalyk, as well as the subtle irony of Jana Juráňová. He also recommends his other favorite Slovak writers, Pavol Rankov, Dušan Mitana, Peter Karpinský, and Ondrej Štefánik.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #9, Nataša Ďurovičová talks to Julia Sherwood about exile as the point of no return, reveals how creative writing came to be one of Iowa’s main exports alongside corn and pork, explains the different social needs fulfilled by creative writing in the U.S. and the rest of the world, and unpacks the writing and translation workshops at Iowa University.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #10, James Sutherland-Smith talks to Julia Sherwood about his own poetry and the intuitive link he feels with the poets he translates, why he doesn’t believe in creative infidelity, why he finds translating prose more difficult than poetry, and why he feels that being a man is not a hindrance to translating women poets.

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In Lit_cast Slovakia #11, Slovak poet and translator Mária Ferenčuhová talks with Julia Sherwood how the pandemic has made her appreciate virtual literary events and has turned her from writing straight poetry to writing texts dealing with fragility. She also talks about aging and dying, about working in an interdisciplinary and intuitive way, about translating Michel Houellebecq, and about cooperative translation of poetry. And she offers recommendations of other Slovak poets, both who have been and who ought to be translated into English.

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