Václav Havel Today: with Marci Shore and Paul Wilson

Join us for a moderated conversation between Professor Marci Shore of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Paul Wilson, Václav Havel's translator for the "The Power of the Powerless." They will discuss the historical context and contemporary relevance of this landmark essay, much in the public eye at present given Prime Minister Mark Carney's discussion of Havel's parable of the greengrocer in his January speech at Davos.

  

Marci Shore began a position as Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School at the University of Toronto in 2025. She was previously professor of history at Yale University; she is also a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. In spring 2025 she guest curated, together with Oksana Forostyna, the Kyiv Book Arsenal with the theme “Everything is Translation.” She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in 2024. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her forthcoming book about phenomenology in East-Central Europe In Pursuit of a Certain Truth: The Lives and Loves of a Central European Idea.

 

Paul Wilson is a freelance writer, editor, and translator. From 1967 to 1977, he taught English in Czechoslovakia, where he became involved with the underground music scene as a member of the legendary rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe. He was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1977 and on his return to Canada, he began translating the work of major Czech writers, including Josef Skvorecky, Ivan Klima, and Bohumil Hrabal. He has worked as producer on three national CBC Radio programs (The Arts Tonight, Morningside, and This Morning) and as an editor at The Idler, Saturday Night, the National Post, and The Walrus, which he helped found in 2003. His articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, and the Literary Review of Canada. An anthology of his work was published in Czech translation, under the title Bohemia Rhapsodies, in 2012.

Wilson’s longest association with any Czech writer has been with Václav Havel, beginning with his translation of Havel’s best-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” in 1979, followed by Letters to Olga, a book-length autobiographical interview, Disturbing the Peace (1990), Summer Meditations (1993), and his presidential memoirs, To the Castle and Back (2007). He has edited two collections of Havel’s essays and presidential speeches, Open Letters (1991) and The Art of the Impossible (1997), and translated four of Havel’s plays.

He is currently completing a translation of a recently discovered manuscript by Havel, with the working title I Hid it Somewhere, an account of Havel’s first incarceration and interrogation by the secret police following the launch of Charter 77 in January, 1977.