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What was CEEPP? Initiated by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations to support publishing and journals behind the Iron Curtain, CEEPP's office was established above a junk shop in East Oxford in 1986. The consortium of foundations asked Ralf Dahrendorf to chair the "international committee of leading authorities on European culture and public affairs," which would pursue the goal of promoting "a free flow of culture between East and West Europe." Before 1989, its major mission, which was concentrated initially in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, developed in two directions. The first, defined as "continued publication," supported exile and dissident production and distribution. It is important to emphasize the sensitive approach of the CEEPP to the varieties of conditions in different countries. For example, Czechoslovak literature needed specific attention compared to, say, Hungary, where the major, state-owned, publishing houses had practiced a much more open-minded editorial policy since the mid-1980s. The second direction - "improved translation" - started by assisting translations of "major works of modern humanities" from the "local" languages into Western languages and continued by supporting translations from one language to others within the region as well as establishing an extensive list of West-East translations. Moreover, this project's concern was not only with texts but also with the translators, who were provided with fellowships and a good working environment at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
The year of the changeover, 1989, raised new questions for both intellectuals and their sponsors as to CEEPP's mission, and thus the decision was made to concentrate on a limited number of concrete tasks, for example, providing the earlier underground or exile publishers "whose track record we knew" with grants for basic equipment, such as computers. The forms of work and fields of activity changed as well. Beside direct financial grants, the CEEPP co-organized "how-to" workshops, and its activities expanded to the Balkans and the Baltic states. Previously, the foundation had always tried to carry out its projects with a high degree of flexibility. Thus, in response to requests of local publishers, who were becoming overloaded by visiting experts and training seminars, the CEEPP developed a program of publishing "internships," in which editors and managers from the region could obtain experience in the daily operation of British publishing houses. The trustees also invited the Hungarian philosopher György Bence, the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki, and the Czech writer Eda Kriseová to join the board in 1991.
A major initiative of the translation project was the Central European Classics series. It went back to the initial of opening up the "buried treasures" of the regional literatures to an international readership. The idea was to translate and put these books on the lists of mainstream British publishers. This project only partly succeeded, but, nevertheless, did so significantly in connection with Chatto & Windus. At present, it is being continued by the Netherlands Fund for the Central and East European Book Project and the large-scale translation projects of the CEU Press.
As a jeu d'esprit, the CEEPP trustees compiled a list of "100 Books which have influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War," based in part on the local publishers' demands, including those texts which "almost nobody in Central of East Europe will have heard of" but which the board members found particularly influential for the evolution of what they call "Western public discourse," and consequently for an understanding of civil society. CEEPP has always supported pioneering or genuinely pan-European journals (including Budapesti Könyvszemle - BUKSZ, launched in 1989, and its English-language edition, Budapest Review of Books. Ed.'s note).
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