Featuring Ludvík Kundera
Ludvík Kundera is a renowned Czech literary theorist and critic, poet, novelist, playwright and translator. He was born in Brno in 1920.
He began his studies at Charles University in Prague, but due to the Nazi shuttering of all institutions of higher education in Czechoslovakia, he was forced to abandon his initial course. He completed his education eight years later in Brno.
During World War II he was forced to work in the Third Reich as part of the Totalansatz. Upon his return, and together with Otto Mizera, Zdeněk Lorenc, Vratislav Effenberger and Zbyněk Havlíček, he co-founded the Czech Surrealist group Ra. Kundera made his literary debut in the 1946 with a book of poems, Demons in Us. At that time, he worked for the Brno-based daily Rovnost, and the magazine Host; he had also started translating Christian Morgenstern and Gottfried Benn (from German), and Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard and Guillaume Apollinaire (from French). However, he sometimes strolled into languages he could not speak, and experimented with the translation. He also wrote a number of essays on contemporary literature, including pieces on Bertolt Brecht and the renowned Czech poet František Halas.
Over time, Kundera became interested in the Dada movement. In the 1980s, he published a breakthrough samizdat anthology of Dada writings and its influence on the Czech literary milieu, called simply DADA.
Kundera has written almost thirty plays for theatre, radio and television, more than twenty books of poems, dozens of essays and eight books of fiction. In 1993, he received the State Prize for Translation. His collected works will have seventeen volumes.
Kundera’s latest published work to date is a selection of his poems Overwintering (2004), also published in English.
Ludvík Kundera lives in the small town Kunštát na Moravě.
During World War II he was forced to work in the Third Reich as part of the Totalansatz. Upon his return, and together with Otto Mizera, Zdeněk Lorenc, Vratislav Effenberger and Zbyněk Havlíček, he co-founded the Czech Surrealist group Ra. Kundera made his literary debut in the 1946 with a book of poems, Demons in Us. At that time, he worked for the Brno-based daily Rovnost, and the magazine Host; he had also started translating Christian Morgenstern and Gottfried Benn (from German), and Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard and Guillaume Apollinaire (from French). However, he sometimes strolled into languages he could not speak, and experimented with the translation. He also wrote a number of essays on contemporary literature, including pieces on Bertolt Brecht and the renowned Czech poet František Halas.
Over time, Kundera became interested in the Dada movement. In the 1980s, he published a breakthrough samizdat anthology of Dada writings and its influence on the Czech literary milieu, called simply DADA.
Kundera has written almost thirty plays for theatre, radio and television, more than twenty books of poems, dozens of essays and eight books of fiction. In 1993, he received the State Prize for Translation. His collected works will have seventeen volumes.
Kundera’s latest published work to date is a selection of his poems Overwintering (2004), also published in English.
Ludvík Kundera lives in the small town Kunštát na Moravě.
