The subject of this master thesis is a comparison of four Czech translations of Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger (Sult, 1890) - from 1902 (Hugo Kosterka), 1932 (Milada Lesná-Krausová), 1959 (Milada Lesná-Krausová) and 2016 (Helena Kadečková). The thesis consists of a theoretical part, dealing with the analysis of the original text and the historical context of trends in translation, and a practical part, analysing and comparing the translations. The aim of the thesis was to assess the adequacy of the translations and the correlation between the methods and the corresponding contemporaneous trends. As we expected, the language and methods applied in the translations correspond with the practices in the respective periods. In terms of the method consistency and thoroughness, the versions of Kosterka and Kadečková proved to be the most adequate.

A une période où la Norvège cherchait à affirmer son identité, les auteurs du romantisme national comme Wergeland, Bjørnson ou Ibsen ont largement puisé dans une tradition qui faisait du paysan (bonde) le représentant le plus typique de l’Histoire nationale. Ils ont toutefois instrumentalisé cet héritage culturel, tout comme les auteurs de la génération suivante, Hamsun ou Olav Duun, et l’importance qu’ils ont accordée à la nature invite à considérer celle-ci comme la « matrice » des œuvres de cette époque. Une lecture chronotopique inspirée de Bakhtine permet de mettre en évidence cette mise en scène du passé et de la nature. L’illusion d’authenticité historique cache un travail d’écriture novateur qui ouvre des perspectives vers un monde imaginaire et apporte un réconfort face à la mort. / At a time when Norway was trying to assert its identity, authors of national romanticism such as Wergeland, Bjørnson or Ibsen widely took their inspiration from a tradition which made the peasant (bonde) the most representative icon of national History. They however manipulated this cultural heritage, as have authors from the next generation such as Hamsun or Olav Duun. The predominant role these authors attributed to nature brings us to consider nature as the “matrix” for the works of that time. A chronotopic analysis inspired by Bakhtine brings into perspective this staging of the past and of nature. The illusion of historical authenticity hides a creative exercise on writing that opens to an imaginary world and brings a spiritual relief to those facing death.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. My doctoral thesis considers the reasons for and development of this previously little-explored trope, arguing that hunger becomes a focal point for modernism’s complex relationship to aesthetic autonomy. I identify a specific tradition of writers, beginning in the nineteenth century with proto-modernists such as Melville and Rimbaud, flourishing in the pivotal figures of Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and expiring with modernist-influenced contemporary writers such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. Although these writers are avid readers and devoted disciples of one another, mine is the first study to read them alongside one another as a coherent literary tradition. Reading them in this way, I am able to trace the development of the ‘art of hunger’ as a locus for a crisis in aesthetic autonomy that spans the twentieth century. I develop this line of argument in two phases. In the first, I trace the emergence of an art of hunger out of modernist engagements with philosophical aesthetics and its notions of aesthetic autonomy. Readings of the “art of hunger” in Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett’s post-war work reveal that starvation carries autonomy to an extreme and hyper-literal endpoint, revealing both its desirability as an aesthetic ideal and the impossibility of art’s complete autonomy from the body, the market or the social dimensions of language. In the second phase, I consider how this trope has animated later twentieth-century engagements with modernism. For authors writing in the aftermath of modernism, hunger provides a way of considering new complications to aesthetic autonomy in the light of both their debt to modernism and their specific historical circumstances. In this light, I consider three different extensions of the modernist art of hunger: its absorption into high formalism in Beckett’s late prose; its collapse in the face of an emerging concern with the social in Paul Auster; and its transformation into an ethical aesthetics of food taboos, restriction and asceticism in J. M. Coetzee.