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Kmen: A Faraway Magazine About Which We Know Nothing

Kmen: A Faraway Magazine About Which We Know Nothing Anne Jamison Why Kmen? Why should we read Kmen [The stem], a small, leftist Czech cultural magazine of the early 1920s? The journal's pages are crumbling in ill-funded Prague archives and, even where accessible, remain written in Czech. As with most literary magazines, most if not all of the contributions by notable writers--Franz Kafka, Roman Jakobson, Jaroslav Seifert, Franz Werfel--have been published elsewhere in multiple languages, almost all of them more widely spoken than Czech. Many of these notable contributions, furthermore, appear in Czech in translation only--we don't need to turn to Kmen's yellowing pages to find these texts in some original, native environment or to gain access to the modernist quasi-aura of a text's first mass-reproduction. Kmen was short-lived or, rather, its quality and purpose radically changed course several times before it petered out; its circulation was never large. Even if critical attention were to turn to the "minor literature" Kafka actually referenced in a well-known journal entry, Kmen falls short of the mark since a primary purpose of the journal was to represent texts originally written in German, English, French, and Russian.1 Inconvenience and these arguments for its continued obscurity aside, however, there are reasons to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Studies Penn State University Press

Kmen: A Faraway Magazine About Which We Know Nothing

Jamison, Anne Elizabeth
Comparative Literature Studies , Volume 44 (1) – Sep 13, 2007
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Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.
ISSN
1528-4212
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Abstract

Anne Jamison Why Kmen? Why should we read Kmen [The stem], a small, leftist Czech cultural magazine of the early 1920s? The journal's pages are crumbling in ill-funded Prague archives and, even where accessible, remain written in Czech. As with most literary magazines, most if not all of the contributions by notable writers--Franz Kafka, Roman Jakobson, Jaroslav Seifert, Franz Werfel--have been published elsewhere in multiple languages, almost all of them more widely spoken than Czech. Many of these notable contributions, furthermore, appear in Czech in translation only--we don't need to turn to Kmen's yellowing pages to find these texts in some original, native environment or to gain access to the modernist quasi-aura of a text's first mass-reproduction. Kmen was short-lived or, rather, its quality and purpose radically changed course several times before it petered out; its circulation was never large. Even if critical attention were to turn to the "minor literature" Kafka actually referenced in a well-known journal entry, Kmen falls short of the mark since a primary purpose of the journal was to represent texts originally written in German, English, French, and Russian.1 Inconvenience and these arguments for its continued obscurity aside, however, there are reasons to

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Comparative Literature Studies – Penn State University Press

Published: Sep 13, 2007

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