Shakespeare's Young Man behind the Iron Curtain: Censorship of Same-sex Affection in Czech and Slovak Sonnet Translations

The potential for queer readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets has caused controversy amongst literary scholars almost from the moment of their birth, and likewise inspired centuries of various forms of censorship, especially in their translated form. The question of how to deal with homoerotic subtext was particularly sensitive for translators working under totalitarian regimes where sexuality itself was a taboo subject, but also in countries undergoing sudden shifts in the names of democratisation and westernisation. Czech Republic and Slovakia went through a series of such regime changes throughout the 20th century, and the Sonnets have been regularly and frequently translated in all these periods. My work is comparing how each of the translators addressed homoerotic subtext in their work, and traces the connection between their individual approaches and the political and social changes they were a part of.