Milada Součková, Amor a Psyché (Amor and Psyche)
JTožička, 1937
 
Amor and Psyche is a fascinating experimental prose work structured as two diaries and a short novel. Using the diaries of two women, the student Augustina and the teacher Alžběta, to create a kind of double exposure, the novel playfully reflects the author’s own experience both as a student and as a beginning writer in search of new literary forms. Like most of Součková’s work, this novel blends unusual compositional techniques with historical and autobiographical qualities, inviting the reader to engage in a fascinating literary experience.
 
Why [we want to] Translate Součková
 
Milada Součková (1899-1983) was associated with the Prague interwar artistic avant-garde and the famous Prague Linguistic Circle. After her immigration to the United States in 1948, she was best known for her work as a literary historian. Her prose and poetry became available to a broader Czech audience only when her writing was republished in Prague after 1989.  Součková’s innovative style, which consciously works with the modern tradition of Woolf, Joyce and Proust, emphasizing the text as such, is an important antecedent to the work of several major contemporary Czech women writers, notably Věra Linhartová, Sylvie Richterová, and Daniela Hodrová. It is also a small but important part of the larger European 20th-century modernist tradition, which deserves to be available to the Anglophone reader.
 
–Elena Sokol
 
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