City, Sister, Silver

Translator’s Preface

Set in the first years after “time exploded,” City Sister Silver is the story of a young man trying to find his way in the messy landscape of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Beyond that, though, it is the author’s exploration of the way language changed in response to the new reality. In an effort to capture the dislocation of this period, Jáchym Topol flaunts the conventions of his native tongue at nearly every step. Indeed his Czech publisher felt it necessary to include a special editor’s note alerting readers to “the author’s intent to capture language in its unsystematicness and out-of-jointness,” pointing out his radical fluctuations in grammar, spelling, syntax, and style between the two poles of written (or literary) and spoken Czech not only from scene to scene, but within a single paragraph or sentence, sometimes even from one word to the next.

Given the history of our own language, in particular the erosion of the border between spoken and literary usage by twentieth-century writers, this may strike English speakers as commonplace. But compared to English, the distinction between written and spoken language in Czech remains far more rigid, and the gap between them far greater. Bridging this gap, moreover, is a vast spectrum of “intermediate” levels for which English has no equivalent. In this novel, Topol works with all of them.

Some features of spoken Czech translate into English more easily than others. Dropped letters, for instance, are common to both languages (e.g., du = “I’m goin”). But Czech expresses “spokenness” in a host of other ways — shortening long vowels, for one, or adding a v before words that begin in 0 — that cannot be directly reproduced in translation. What makes Topol’s writing such a challenge to bring into English, though, is the way he combines and alternates forms, and the extremes he goes to in doing so.

Where Topol mixes spoken and written style, I usually dealt with it by dropping letters or using contractions, but inconsistently, to mimic the jumbled effect. In Chapter 8, for instance, Potok asks a downtrodden priest: “Do you know Padre Konrád, father, my good pastor … kina short and cross-eyed …” In the original text the sentence reads: “Znáte pátera Konráda od nás, otče, mýho dobrého pastýře … je takovej malý a šilhá …” Whereas the rules of written Czech would call for the last eight words to read, “mého dobrého pastýře … je takový malý a šilhá …” a fully spoken rendering would be “mýho dobrýho pastýře … je takovej malej a šilhá …” Here my translation approximates the clash of written and spoken forms by contracting kind of to kina, a common feature of spoken English, while retaining the d on and, which I would otherwise drop in the case of “pure” spoken Czech.

Despite the Czech edition’s assertion that “valid rules are present in the background of the text,” often it was hard to discern a pattern to the constant shifting and mixing, and in my exchanges with the author he repeatedly described his choices as a pocitová věc — “a matter of feeling.” Inevitably then, my translation too is less about mechanically reproducing the thousands of individual twists on and departures from conventional Czech than about capturing the feeling, the jarring, the dislocation they were meant to convey.

Grammatical and stylistic quirks apart, City Sister Silver contains a daunting variety of Czech idioms, dialects, and slang, plus assorted words and phrases from several other languages, and a multilingual tongue spoken by non-Germans in Berlin. Even more challenging — and more fun — for the translator, though, are the words, turns of phrase, and metaphors that Topol invented himself, a private language of sorts.

To choose just one example, from Chapter 17: As Potok and Černá hike through the woods, they nibble on something called “lanceroot.” Here I devised a neologism to match the author’s own. The Czech word, kopišník, to me suggested kopí meaning spear or lance. Then it was just a question of deciding what sort of nibblable plant it might be, fruit, root, or vegetable; root, I thought, sounded more likely than berry.

Probably the single most personal invention that I caught in the novel, though, was a metaphor in Chapter 16. (I deliberately say “that I caught,” since no doubt there are other references of an equally private nature that I failed to pick up on.) While neither the Czech original nor my translation give any hint as to where it comes from, the story behind this metaphor intrigues me too much not to share it.

In Czech the expression was mně se to v hlavě mihalo jak v koňský jámě — literally “it flashed through my head like in a horse pit.” In the author’s own words: “I still remember this as a little Central European boy: By the river (in Pořící nad Sázavou) there were these pits, just a deep hole basically, where the horses would go swimming to wash off after work. I remember how suddenly all this sludge and mud and horse shit and rotten branches and grass would start rising up to the surface … when that huge horse body sank in there, into the pit, the depths. Since we didn’t know how to swim yet, we were scared to death of the horse pits — that we’d fall in there and drown. So if something flashes through my head like in a horse pit, it means chaos and danger.”

Because of the way it falls in the text — “but the old woman intervened again, shooing them off … my head churned like a horse pit, Černá … out there in the woods, she’d better have strong protection …” — it would have been impossible to keep the original construction without sounding awkward (insert it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean). Respecting the fact that it wasn’t meant to be clear even in the original, my solution preserves the personal content while tailoring it to the context and maintaining the uneasiness the author meant to evoke.

Lastly I’d like to explain how the text was edited and notated. While the first two drafts of my translation followed the first edition, on the final go-round my editor and I decided to incorporate some of the cuts Topol himself made for the novel’s second edition, which weighed in at 455 pages versus the original 481. Given that the Czech text was edited with a light hand, we also took the bolder but, I believe, beneficial step of trimming it at points, especially in the case of obvious oversights (e.g., Potok being handed the same piece of paper twice in a single paragraph), phrases or sentences that made no sense (even to the author, in retrospect), and material that would have meant nothing to English speakers without a labored explanation, thereby ruining the effect. I should add that Topol never hesitated to suggest I use my delete button. (Interested readers can find most of the longer cuts on the Catbird Press website, at www.catbirdpress.com/bookpages/sister.htm.)

Naturally the translation still includes a number of words and references that few non-Czechs would recognize. To provide an experience as close as possible to that of a Czech reading the original, these items are marked with an asterisk and briefly identified in a Notes section at the back of this book.

Catching and tracking down these references, along with the various foreign words and phrases found throughout, was a major part of my work on this translation. When possible, I did my research on the Web or in the library, but often I was forced to turn to the source to explain or elaborate. And it is to Jáchym himself that I owe the most thanks, as author and collaborator, but above all as my friend. I know it wasn’t always pleasant for him to revisit a work that he considered over and done with, and to respond to the barrage of nit-picking questions I rained down on him.

Beyond my consultations with the author, many others aided me along the way. I cannot name them all here, but there are several individuals I turned to repeatedly, and they deserve to be acknowledged. In Prague, Lucie Váchová and Vladimír Michálek both helped me out by receiving my e-mailed missives to Jáchym, passing them on to him, and sending his replies back to me. Here in New York, Irena Kovářová and Jiří Zavadil fielded questions from me, at all hours, on everything from language to history to geography to pop culture. Karin Beck, who wrote her master’s thesis on the novel, aided me in translating the German and Russian portions; apart from that, it was always a treat to discuss the book with someone else who knew it in such detail. Special thanks to Czesław Miłosz for granting permission to use a previously untranslated poem of his, and to Magda Samborska for checking my translation against the Polish original. Czech history wizard Brad Abrams of Columbia University offered valuable input on some of the trickier historical notes. To Peter Kussi, who taught me Czech for two years in graduate school before I lived in Prague, belong my heartfelt thanks for steering me through a tough metaphor or two, but mainly for inspiring me to translate in the first place. I’d also like to thank Robert Wechsler of Catbird Press for taking on the exhausting task of wading through the manuscript, and for bearing with my constant revisions right up to the end. And last but not least Clare Manias, who not only designed the eyecatching cover but supported me throughout with grace, love, and patience.

Alex Zucker

Brooklyn

December 1999