Jiřina Hauková was a Czech

Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and translator. She was a member of the Group 42

Group 42

Group 42 was a Czech artistic group officially established in 1942 . The group's activity ceased in 1948, but its influence on Czech literature and Czech art was still evident in further years....

 (Skupina 42), together with her husband Jindřich Chalupecký.

Biography

Having graduated from a grammar school in 1939, she started to study philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 in Brno

Brno

Brno by population and area is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Brno is the administrative centre of the South Moravian Region where it forms a separate district Brno-City District...

, where she stayed until the Nazi occupants closed all universities. After that she worked as an editor in Obzor (The Horizon) in Přerov

Prerov

Přerov is a town in the Olomouc Region of the Czech Republic where the Bečva river flows through. Přerov is a statute town . It has population of about 47,373 to January 2, 2008. Přerov is about 22 km south west of Olomouc. In the past it was a major crossroad in the heart of Moravia in the...

. She finished her studies in 1949 at the Charles University in Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

. Until 1950, when she started career as a professional writer, she worked for the Ministry of Information. After 1968

Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and her main satellite states in the Warsaw Pact – Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic , Hungary and Poland – invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to halt Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring political liberalization...

 she was banned to publish and some of her works were published abroad. Apart from her own books of poetry, she was a celebrated translator from English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

. She translated The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

(together with her husband) in 1947, and also books by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

, John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

, Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

 or Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

. In 1996 she received, together with the poet Zbyněk Hejda

Zbynek Hejda

Zbyněk Hejda is a Czech poet, essayist and translator , generally recognised as one of the most important Czech writers after the Second World War. He studied philosophy and history at the Charles University...

, the prestigious Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert was a Nobel Prize winning Czech writer, poet and journalist.Born in Žižkov, a suburb of Prague in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, his first collection of poems was published in 1921...

Award for the outstanding lifetime contribution to the Czech literature.

Poetry

• Přísluní, 1943
• Cizí pokoj, 1946
• Oheň ve sněhu, 1958
• Rozvodí času, 1970
• Spodní proudy, abroad 1988, in the Czech republic 1992
• Motýl a smrt, 1990
• Světlo září, 1995
• Mozaika z vedřin, 1997
• Básně, 2000 (Collected Poems)
• Večerní prška, 2002

Memoirs

• Záblesky života, 1996