Milena Jesenská

Milena Jesenská (; 10 August 1896 – 17 May 1944) was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator. She is noted for her correspondence with the author Franz Kafka and was one of the first to translate his work from the German language. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, she joined a resistance movement to help Jews and other refugees. She died in Ravensbrück, a Nazi prison camp.

Early life

Jesenská was born in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). Her family is believed to descend from Jan Jesenius, the first professor of medicine at Prague's Charles University who was among the 27 Bohemian luminaries executed in the Old Town Square in Prague on 21 June 1621 for defying the authority of the Habsburgs King Ferdinand II. However, this belief has been challenged as unfounded. Jesenská's father Jan was a dental surgeon and professor at Charles University in Prague; her mother Milena Hejzlarová died when Milena was 16. Jesenská studied at Minerva, the first academic gymnasium for girls in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduation she enrolled briefly at the Prague Conservatory and at the Faculty of Medicine but abandoned her studies after two semesters. In 1918 she married Ernst Pollak, a Jewish intellectual and literary critic whom she met in Prague's literary circles, and moved with him to Vienna. The marriage, which allegedly caused her to break off relations with her father for several years, was an unhappy one.

Career

Since Pollak's earnings were initially inadequate to support the pair in the city's war-torn economy, Jesenská had to supplement their household income by working as a translator. In 1919 she discovered a short story (''The Stoker'') by Prague writer Franz Kafka, and wrote to him to ask for permission to translate it from German to Czech. The letter launched an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská and Kafka met twice: they spent four days in Vienna together and later a day in Gmünd. Eventually Kafka broke off the relationship, partly because Jesenská was unable to leave her husband, and their almost daily communication ceased abruptly in November 1920. They meant so much to each other, however, that they did exchange a few more letters in 1922 and 1923 (and Kafka turned over to Jesenská his diaries at the end of his life). Jesenská's translation of ''The Stoker'' was a first translation of Kafka's writings into Czech (and as a matter of fact, into any foreign language); later she translated two other short stories by Kafka and also texts by Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Upton Sinclair, and many others. Jaroslav Dohnal, the name given for the translator of the Czech edition of Kafka's short-story "Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys", is most likely a pseudonym for Jesenská.

In Vienna, Jesenská also began to write herself, contributing articles and later also editorials to women's columns in some of the best known Prague dailies and magazines. For example, she contributed to ''Tribuna'', and between 1923 and 1926, she wrote for '' Národní listy'', ''Pestrý týden'' and ''Lidové noviny''.

In 1925 Jesenská divorced Pollak and moved back to Prague, where she later met and married avant-garde Czech architect Jaromír Krejcar