War with the Newts 1936

War with the Newts (Válka s Mloky in the original Czech), also translated as Salamander Wars, is a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek. It concerns the discovery in the Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, an intelligent breed of newts, who are initially enslaved and exploited. They acquire human knowledge and rebel, leading to a global war for supremacy. There are obvious similarities to Čapek’s earlier R.U.R., but also some original themes.

War with the Newts was described as a “classic work” of science fiction by science fiction author and critic Damon Knight. For many years the English translation was hard to obtain, and earlier copies have been known to sell for a premium.

Translations

The novel was translated into several languages within a year of its first publication. During the Second World War, it was blacklisted by the Nazis in 1940 in Germany and in 1941 by Nazi-occupied Norway.

War with the Newts has been translated into English at least three times. Reviewers describe the 1936 Allen & Unwin translation by the husband-and-wife team of Marie and Robert Weatherall as competent but uninspired. The language of the era is preserved, but some of Čapek’s literary techniques are obscured. The 1985 translation, by the Czech Ewald Osers, is regarded by many reviewers as superior, capturing the crispness and strong metaphors of the original.[5] This translation was supported by the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Veteran Kafka translator David Wyllie completed another translation. New translations in Russian, Polish, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Hungarian have appeared since the 1960s.