On November 28, the IWM Library witnessed the annual workshop of Patočka scholars, editors, and translators. This year’s meeting served as an overdue opportunity to pay tribute to the eminent merits of French translator and editor Erika Abrams. Former IWM Permanent Fellow Klaus Nellen delivered the laudatory speech for Abrams, praising her as “the translator,” whose outstanding efforts made it possible for Patočka’s thought to have a profound impact on French contemporary philosophy, incomparable to the reception of his work in any other language.
Erika Abrams was a visiting fellow of IWM already in its very early years in the 1980s. This was a crucial time not only for the newly established Institute but also for the editorial and scholarly work on Patočka’s writings, which has been a pillar of the Institute’s activities from its very beginning. Erika Abrams’s translations served as the springboard for a booming French reception of Patočka, which found its most vivid expression in Jacques Derrida’s Donner la mort.
During the workshop, Abrams reported on her current work and gave an overview of new plans for necessary re-editions and adaptations of her extensive translatory oeuvre. Nathalie Frogneux, professor of philosophy at UC Louvain, added to this by referencing the many new research projects, dissertations, and publications in the French-speaking world that attest to the broad reception of Patočka’s work in contemporary philosophy.
The complete program of the workshop can be found here.
Jan Patočka is considered one of the most influential thinkers of 20th-century Central Europe. He was also the first spokesperson of the Czechoslovakian human and civil rights movement Charter 77. The IWM has held an archive of his writings since the early 1980s. As the establishment of the Patočka Archives in Prague became possible only after 1989, the IWM archive was the first systematic and official collection of his works.
