Poetry reading by Sylva Fischerová, Charles University, Prague. Sponsors: U-M’s Department of English Language and Literature, CREES, Office of the Provost, WCED; Janey Lack; Helen Zell.
Sylva Fischerová was born in Prague in 1963. She has published six volumes of poems in Czech, including The Tremor of Racehorses: Selected Poems and The Swing in the Middle of Chaos: Selected Poems, which have been translated into English. She has also appeared in several translations and anthologies, including New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). She lived in the Moravian town of Olomouc for twenty years, where her father, a distinguished philosopher and sociologist, had been rector of Olomouc University. After 1948, his non-Marxist views prevented him from publishing in his own country. Translator Stuart Friebert writes of her work that her “knowledge of human history, the ways she moves in and out of historical events, with an understanding and loving eye turned on our frailties as well as our corruptive tendencies, against the backdrop of her commanding sense of space and time, ‘makes beauty from monsters.’” She currently teaches ancient Greek literature and philosophy at the Charles University in Prague.
