Now, things you don’t own, things you don’t possess

An evening of Czech poetry. Original recitations accompanied by violin and guitar music.

Project co-financed by the European Union from the European Regional Development Fund under the INTERREG V-A Program Czech Republic-Poland 2014-2020 and from the state budget of Poland

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The evening will be hosted by Jiří Macháček, editor-in-chief of the Protimluv magazine from Ostrava. The guests will be poets of the middle and the youngest generation: Ondřej Hložek, Petr Ligocký, Radovan Jursa and Oskar Mainx.

The poems will be read in Czech and then translated into Polish by the poet Franciszek Nastulczyk.

The event will be accompanied by a concert by the duo Jiří Macháček (violin) and Pavel Johančík (electric guitar, sampler, effects).

The magazine Protimluv was founded in 2002 in Ostrava by Jiří Macháček who became the editor-in-chief. Protimluv is a quarterly devoted to poetry, prose and professional literature, but the main ambition of the magazine is to create space for diversity, “a mix of all forms of art.” The original idea behind the magazine was to focus on current events in literature and other fields of art. In addition to numerous writers from Ostrava, the first editorial team included artists, musicians, playwrights, etc. The magazine contained an insert or two devoted to music or visual arts, and sometimes both.
A regular column of translations from the Polish language was created in 2005, and a section of texts by other foreign writers was added in 2006. Books have also been published by the editorial team since 2011.
Protimluv differs from other Czech literary magazines in its openness to various fields of arts, and places greater emphasis on the diversity of genre of the published works. The quarterly focuses on Czech literary work which is complemented with texts by authors from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and other countries. This profile of the magazine results from the specificity of the place in which it appears. Ostrava has always been an international melting pot. In addition to Czechs, Vietnamese and Roma population, the inhabitants also include Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Greeks and other communities. With this in mind, Protimluv appears as an "intersection" of various genres of art and literature, which also symbolically reflects various areas of creativity represented by the different nations and nationalities that live in the city.
Since 2007, the editorial staff, supported by students of Bohemistics from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Ostrava, organize a regular ProtimluvFest literary festival. The festival, which is held in October each year, features authors whose texts have been published in the magazine. These include Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian and American writers.