The guest on the moderated interview with literary historian Jan Malura will be Jiří Pelán, one of the most prominent contemporary Czech translators, a Romanist, and a literary historian.

We will focus on translation as a distinct part of national culture. Jiří Pelán is among those translators who, for decades, have fundamentally influenced the way Czech readers encounter European literature. The interview will therefore also touch on his work as a translator and the question of what it means to retranslate authors who already have a long tradition in Czech. The discussion will focus in particular on his latest translations of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud—and, more generally, on translation as interpretation, as a dialogue with previous translators, and as a means by which foreign literature enters the Czech cultural sphere.

The discussion will also touch on a reexamination of established literary-historical concepts, such as Parnassianism, Classicism, and, above all, Naturalism. This is the subject of the new book Czech Literary Naturalism (Host, 2026), which Jiří Pelán co-authored with Dalibor Tureček.