If it weren’t for Norma Comrada, most people in this country probably never would know about Karel Capek (pronounced Carl CHAH peck), and that would be a shame. That’s because Capek lived in Czechoslovakia — now the Czech Republic — from his birth on Jan. 9, 1890, to his death from pneumonia on Dec. 25, 1938.

Capek was a journalist, playwright, sketch artist, philosopher with a doctorate, art critic, publisher, literary reviewer and science fiction writer.

In fact, it was Capek, in collaboration with his older brother, artist Josef Capek, who introduced the word “robot” not only to the English language but apparently the world.

“Karel was busy in 1920 writing a play about a factory that built artificial creatures to work for people, and he needed something to call them, so he asked his brother what he thought,” Comrada said.

“Josef was busy painting, so he just said, ‘Oh, just call them robota,’ from an old Czech word for work that implied toil, drudgery, slaving. And that’s where the term robots came from.”

The play, incidentally, called “R.U.R.” or “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” was a huge hit, not just at home in Czechoslovakia.

Within two years, it had been translated and performed in 30 languages.

U.S. author Kurt Vonnegut called it one of the great plays of the 20th century, “by a great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honorable, blackly funny and prophetic.”

Comrada, who has lived in Eugene since the late 1950s, knows all this because she has spent most of her career translating the Czech writer’s literary works into English. More.

See: The Register Guard

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