Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought

Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collagist, essayist and Professor Emerita of Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, where she was a Director of the Czech Program at the Slavic Department for thirty years. She is a member of the Czech and American PEN Club. She went into exile in 1974, taught at the Universities of Cologne and Marburg and subsequently at Harvard University and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has published eleven books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and seven bilingual editions illustrated with her own collages. She is also the author of two books on linguistic and literary semiotics, Emotive Signs in Language (John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1987) and A Feminist’s Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (Edwin Mellen Press, N.Y., 1997), as well as the leading co-author of a large anthology of Czech poetry translations, Up The Devil’s Back: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry (with Clarice Cloutier, Slavica Publishers, 2008). Her scholarly publications include topics of Czech poetry, Czech popular culture, issues of exile, gender, implied author values and emotive signs. Her poetry has been translated into twelve languages and her selected poems appeared in book form in six of them. She has also received a number of literary and cultural awards.