3. Main part

   1. Czech fanfiction and fanfiction translation before and around 2000

One of the first media fandoms that produced fanfiction within the Czech online fan space appears to have been based on the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. A fan page Xena Fanfiction CZ¹⁷ contains several fanfiction stories dating back to 1998–2001, which are still accessible even today. Moreover, the oldest dated one (1998) is even a translation from English, with the original author properly cited. The English original, called “A Warrior Princess in King Arthur's Court,” is also still available online¹⁸, but not dated.

It’s likely there were other webpages dedicated to other fandoms, some perhaps even older than 1998, run by individual fans who also created or collected fanfiction, but the vast majority of these webpages do not exist anymore. The above mentioned example however illustrates how from the very beginning, both writing and translating could be seen as just different facets of fanfiction as an activity and a way of relating to the original official work in a creative manner.

This allows us to look for fanfiction translation “where there was fanfiction” back in the pre-Harry Potter decade, identifying possible themes or details that expand on previously established points or that can be contrasted with what will be discussed later.

For this purpose, three fandoms in particular will be used as examples – Star Trek, the Tolkien fandom and Star Wars.

Star Trek was already introduced as central not only to the development of the modern media and fanfiction fandom but to the development of fan studies in general. Henry Jenkins’ foundational work on participatory culture (1992) was largely a study of the Star Trek audience. The first Czech Star Trek club was founded in 1990 (Šimečková, 2016) and the fandom is still active today, with fans organized in several clubs and producing fanfiction posted online¹⁹. In 2001 Věra Ježková, editor of the Czech publishing house Netopejr, translator and a Star Trek fan²⁰, wrote an article ‘Svět klasického Star Treku ve fanzinech’ (‘The classic Star Trek universe in fanzines’), conceived as an introduction (presented originally as a talk at a fan convention) to the world of fanfiction stories from the classic English Star Trek fanzines. This article, published on a Czech Star Trek fan club CZ Kontinuum’s website²¹, offers a very apt summary of many of the previously mentioned aspects of fanfiction: “Fanzine is a space for imagination without borders, where technical details usually only serve as a background for examination of interpersonal relationships” and “fanzine stories are an exclusively female domain” ²² (translation by the author of this thesis). The article as a whole is quite unique in this regard, as it’s very likely one of the very first theoretical reflections on fanfiction as a genre (genre written mostly by women, for women) within the Czech fan space (although it’s not actually using the term “fanfiction” yet). It presents fanfiction writing as an intimate experience and touches upon certain negative stereotypes surrounding it, especially when anticipating the potential reaction to this type of stories by the wider Czech fan audience. What makes the article even more interesting is the author’s perspective as a translator.

Ježková, introducing herself in the article as an avid reader and a collector of English fanzine stories, mentions having been in close contact with some of the fanzine authors and as a member of one of the British Star Trek clubs, she was able to accumulate a large collection of the original Star Trek fanzines. As such, she was probably one of the very few people within the Czech fandom with direct access to the English fanzine stories. With regard to sharing the stories with the Czech audience, she mentions she had translated a few of them “for her friends”, after having obtained permission of a particular author she knew well, but seems to be strictly against translating any story without its author’s permission, stating it was a “matter of honour”. According to her, fanzine authors were not keen on having their stories or poems translated and distributed in an environment they knew very little about. This accentuates not just the theme of ownership, but also the notion of fanfiction as an individual, intimate creative outlet, where the unauthorized translator or audience could potentially be seen as trespassers, not only and necessarily in the strict legal sense. Fanzines were not intended for mass distribution and it’s worth noting that many of the first Star Trek fanzine authors published the stories under their real names (Ježková mentions several of them in her article).

In a follow-up email correspondence²³, Věra Ježková confirmed she had never had any of her fanzine stories translations published in any Czech Star Trek club magazine. Around that time, she was going through a difficult time as a professional editor and translator, which had to do with what she calls “terminological wars” within the Star Trek fandom, and “simply did not dare [publish the fanzine translations].” She also explained she’d felt there was no real interest in the fanzine stories as it was a critical time for the Star Trek fandom in general and fans were looking for a different kind of entertainment. When asked to expand on her experience regarding the authors not willing to have their stories translated, she reiterated: “Those are really self-reflection stories. The authors, with whom I was in touch through the means of letters (yes, we wrote each other real letters!) became my friends, and still are. […] They indeed asked me to leave it be [and not translate the stories].” (Translation and parentheses by the author of the thesis)

Ježková’s account highlights everything that feels truly “personal” with regard to fanfiction, from the concept of fanfiction as a personal creative space, fanfiction being focused on exploration of personal topics, to the personal relationship between the author and the translator. The brief look at the Tolkien and Star Wars fandom in the next few paragraphs will provide slightly different angles.

The Tolkien fandom is unique in yet different ways. On one hand, it’s become one of the fandoms to reach mainstream audiences and recognition worldwide (together with for example, as Macek mentions, J. K. Rowling or Stephen King), on the other, its source material has been the subject of extensive in-depth scholarship for several decades, generating a massive body of secondary literature.

Even without inside knowledge, there are a few reasons to assume the Tolkien fandom was producing derivative works long before the movie trilogy generated a new wave of fans writing fanfiction. “Derivativeness”, linked to Tolkien’s idea of sub-creation²⁴, a philosophical concept referring to creating secondary worlds within the domain of the primary creation by God can be considered as central to his creative method and strategy and in turn can be used to support a discussion on whether or not fans are “justified” in their efforts to create further derivative works based on his material. A scholarly take on such discussion is offered for example in an article by Abrahamson (2013), who extends this argument to apply it to the phenomenon of fanfiction. Perhaps much more so than in other fandoms, fanfiction is thus not just a creative outlet, but at the same time a theoretical concept that can serve as a basis for meta-discussions on the very nature of the original, in this case Tolkien’s work. Kudláč confirms in his observations that a certain “scholarly” approach, on various levels of expertise, is typical for at least some parts of the fandom and their engagement with the source material.

Within the Czech fan space, the Tolkien fandom stood out as having one of the largest numbers of official members, i.e. members officially registered to one of the Czech Tolkien fan clubs (Kudláč, p. 157). For the larger part of the selected time period, two official Czech Tolkien clubs²⁵ coexisted, which differed in various characteristics such as the degree of formality or official contacts abroad and which were publishing several fanzines. Two of them are slightly more relevant than the others as they by design provided space for fan writing, whether more “literary” or “scholarly”: Imladris, first published in 1998 (the last issue came out in 2010), and Thorin, first published in 1992.

Kudláč has already provided a rather thorough summary of the fanzines’ typical or most frequent content, pointing out instances of particular interest, but not paying special attention to texts in the category of translations. Below, a short outline of this category will follow.

Even though both fanzines contain a large number of texts that could be considered fan faction, i.e. prose and poems explicitly or implicitly inspired by the world of Tolkien’s books²⁶, translations from this category seem very scarce. Basically none appeared in Imladris, (with one exception that will be mentioned later) and only very few in Thorin: a story “Fourth Age”, translated from an English translation of a Finnish original appeared in Thorin 2/95, a story “Denethor” appeared in Thorin 3/95. In both cases, both the original authors and translators were credited using their full names. The latter story is also interesting as it was referenced by its original author in an English email discussion group²⁷ in 1994 as part of a debate on the appropriateness of fanfiction, here mostly interpreted as fictive speculations on events in Tolkien’s books. Rather than examination of interpersonal relationships, which is a characteristic that perhaps Věra Ježková accentuated in her presentation, this debate’s participants would probably lean more towards fanfiction being a speculation on various characters’ motivations as a breakdown on why exactly certain events happened the way they did, even though these two approaches overlap. It’s also interesting that the word “fanfiction” was used back then already.

One of the reasons why story translations weren’t more frequent in the Czech Tolkien fanzines might be the difficult access to the original stories, which were still very likely more often than online published in English speaking fanzines. That doesn’t however mean the Tolkien fandom didn’t engage in translation activities. Various members of both clubs regularly took on rather non-trivial translation tasks. There were translations of Tolkien’s poems²⁸, frequent translations of fan articles on various topics connecting facts from the books, fan speculations and analogies from the real world²⁹ or excerpts from official secondary literature³⁰ and, most notably, translations of excerpts from the History of Middle Earth series, where Christopher Tolkien collected and analysed a vast body of material related to his father’s books. This last category especially required an experienced or skilled translator as the HoME series is a complex scholarly type of work, with elaborate notes and commentaries (that were also part of the translated excerpts). In an absolute majority of these cases, the translators were again credited with their full names. It’s worth noting there were only a few of these individual “fan scholarship” or “scholarship” translators in the fanzines; they seemed to specialize on particular books, from which they would translate excerpts and pieces, and they seem to not have translated any actual literary text, i.e. any “story” for the fanzines (with possible rare exceptions that might have been missed). It can also be deduced from the context and other articles that they were either professional translators or individuals with experience with translations, translation or linguistics graduates or language enthusiasts.

Even though the subject here is strictly speaking not fanfiction translation, but would be closer to something akin to either simply fan translation or fan-speculation translation, it serves to show the Tolkien fandom did publish translations, with one of the possible goals being to provide a certain amount of “scholarly” enjoyment for readers of similar orientation. It also appears at least some of the translations of theoretical or scholarly texts were “commissioned” or conducted as part of a plan to have them available in Czech at least in an unofficial form – in a message in Imladris 4–6/2002, the editor is looking for new translators to help with translations of excerpts from secondary literature, while at the same time warning the potential candidates he might interfere to oversee the quality³¹, in an editorial in Thorin 1/98, a plan to systematically translate and publish excerpts from various J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters is mentioned³² and in an editorial in Thorin 2/00, the editor explains the lack of translated materials from Tolkien’s writings in this volume, saying she was not able to find anything “thematically suitable”³³. Going back to the fanfiction definitions in Chapter 1, the majority of the translated “fan speculation” materials here fall into the category of asking about the nature of the world, not about the experience of a character. The mere existence of the translated articles proves the Czech Tolkien club members did have access to various foreign magazines related to Tolkien, but fan prose (or poetry), beyond what individual Czech fan authors wrote, was possibly of less interest as a material for translation.

There was, however, one notable exception. Translation of what can most certainly be called a fanfiction story was published in Imladris 1/2006 (that means several years after the movie trilogy, when massive popularity of online fanfiction was already under way). The story “Russandol” (name of a morally ambiguous character in Tolkien’s legendarium) was originally published on fanfiction.net in August 2004. The author of the story is, with some degree of likelihood, female – she created a rich profile section as part of her fanfiction.net account with a lot of personal information. The story is even mentioned on the international fan Wikia project Fanlore³⁴ and the author’s fanfiction.net page also states it was nominated for a Mithril Award, a purely fandom award for online fan works inspired by the world

of J. R. R. Tolkien. Even though it’s difficult to assess the story’s actual fandom status, it seems to have received some wider recognition. The translation was published in Imladris under the translator’s nickname but didn’t include any additional information as to why or how this exact story was chosen and remains one of the very few examples of translated fanfiction published in the Czech Tolkien fanzines.

To paint a somewhat more nuanced, albeit still only schematic picture, it’s possible to look at the Czech webpage Jedi Land³⁵ as another example of fanfiction translation activities centred around a specific fandom, in this case the Star Wars franchise. The website was founded in 2000³⁶, towards the close of the older era that is the subject of this chapter’s interest but as the Star Wars media fandom is one of the veteran ones, with a following in the Czech Republic throughout the larger part of the 90’s³⁷, it will be used here to complement the previous two mentioned illustrative cases.

Jedi Land was from the beginning designed as a page to publish translated fanfiction stories from the Star Wars universe: “We want to cater to everyone, whose limited knowledge of foreign languages prevents them from being able to read some of the gems created by the foreign Star Wars fanfiction authors. We will be translating for you as if our lives depended on it.“³⁸ While the initial idea was to translate stories to share with others, the team also offered to publish original Czech Star Wars fanfiction and was frequently posting calls for new fanfiction stories or translations and to this effect also organized several fanfiction contests³⁹ throughout many years, some of them being held in “real life” at various fan conventions. Based on the information in the Team section, the original crew was female only (which changed a bit over time) but they remarked early on they did not want this web to be considered a project “by women, for women”⁴⁰. One of the team members states that before coming up with the idea to share the translations with other readers, she used to translate for her friends, something that Věra Ježková mentioned as well.

In at least one case, the team was in close contact with an author of one of the original fanfiction stories that was in translation at that time and possibly due to the story’s popularity organized even a little Q&A session via email, which the readers were invited to take part in by sending their questions for the author⁴¹.

Jedi Land seems to have been active for about 10 years and is in a hiatus mode today. It’s now difficult to assess to what extent its concept as an organized fanfiction archive with accompanying activities or “services” (in the form of basic writing tips and some basic beta-reading) was innovative at that time within he Czech fan space, with many other old websites lost or transformed, but it’s legitimate to assume that as a fanfiction archive dedicated, at least originally, to translation, it may have been one of the first ones. Many fanfiction sites and archives that appeared later as part of the large wave inspired by Harry Potter shared some similar characteristics.

The three examples presented in this chapter can hardly justify generalizations but they can illustrate different aspects of fanfiction and fanfiction translation – from the emphasis on what some may see as a private nature of fanfiction writing, here associated with the world of the old Star Trek fanzines, through fanfiction in a broader sense as “fan speculation” or curiosity about the nature of the original works’ world, where the translation efforts are focused on the more scholarly type of materials, and lastly to fanfiction in the most “modern” sense, as stories published online, with various surrounding activities aiming to engage with the community not just within the online environment, but in the offline fannish space as well.

As fanfiction was to be transformed after 2000 into what it is today – an immensely popular fan activity with countless archives, communities and individual websites, there’s no reason to necessarily expect any of these aspects – the need to engage with the original characters on a more intimate level, interest in broader speculation and theorizing about the original world, and enthusiastic joy of creating and sharing – to be lost, perhaps just transformed.

One common denominator to the three above examples has however not been mentioned. All three fandoms (strictly as presented here) had some ties to the professional or semi-professional translation scene⁴². Věra Ježková is a professional editor and translator, the Tolkien fandom was home to skilled or educated translators and language enthusiasts⁴³, who could tackle demanding texts, and both the Star Trek and Star Wars fandoms had experience with translations of official licenced novels from their respective universes and with cooperation with the publishing houses (Šimečková, 2017). The case of Věra Ježková illustrates how the professional translating career could affect the fandom activity in various ways, especially as it was common to publish even fan texts under one’s own name.

It can be assumed that in contrast with this picture, the new fanfiction translation generation, mirroring the new social reality of the internet, without necessarily having to depend on the previous fan translation traditions, was to bring more spontaneity.