Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

Translating Hrabal, one is frequently constrained by two things in particular. One is his habit of using words unknown to anyone (including lexicographers) but himself. Here one can but make one’s ‘best guess’, but without resorting to invented words in the translation. This problem is, then, unlikely to be detectable. The other is Hrabal’s creative method, relying heavily on ‘cutting and pasting’, which he himself mentions time and again in Kličky na kapesníku (translated as Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp, Prague: Karolinum, 2008) as one of his key creative devices. Believing oneself bound to adhere to sameness or slight difference between cut-and-pasted chunks of text is what makes the task maddening — one is forever chasing back and forth between the different points in the text of both the original and one’s translation just to check. Thank goodness for the various ‘search’ functions one can resort to these days on a laptop or PC.

One often has the feeling that many things did not matter much to Hrabal. Although an obvious polymath with considerable knowledge of cats, dogs, football, optics, butchery, cinema, philosophy, motor-cycle racing…, and very widely read, he does sometimes get or appear to get things wrong. By design, to tease, or just because he has forgotten, cannot be bothered to check, or because it doesn’t matter anyway? Take Emerson Fittipaldi: one can understand why, in the ramblings of the particular oddball being reported (Leli, in the eponymous story), we find ourselves reading about Messrs Fittipaldi and Emerson, that is, two riders. That Hrabal himself knew that Emerson Fittipaldi is one person only transpires from another story not included in the present collection. But he also ‘forgot’ that Fittipaldi had two t’s in his name and Emerson one m, which would scarcely have shown in the diction of the character being reported; Hrabal is generally abysmal at foreign names, personal or geographical, though I have rectified them all in the translation. In another story omitted from this collection, Leni in the film Three Faces West is described, again by others, not by the narrating Hrabal himself, as played by Helen MacKellar, whereas in fact she was played by Sigrid Gurie, though Helen MacKellar is also in the film. Does it matter? Perhaps not, but it does irk this particular translator. And when Hrabal decides to cite something in English, he, like possibly every Czech writer at least since Karel Matěj Čapek-Chod (1860–1927), and doubtless before him, gets it wrong: the famous tune played by Helmuth Zacharias was called Fascination, not ‘The Fascination’, as reiterated umpteen times in the original of one of the stories herein. Where Hrabal got the definite article from is a mystery, not least because the first reference to the song is of its title’s actually being read from a gramophone label; I have elected, I believe fairly, to drop the article. In Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp, conceived as a fully edited translation, it was appropriate to use footnotes; in the present collection I believe it would not be. I offer the following sparing remarks as a partial substitute.

The more enquiring reader can easily, if lacking the immediate knowledge, discover what the wartime (Nazi German) Protectorate (of Bohemia and Moravia) was, and he does not need fully to understand the details of the civil administration of post-war Czechoslovakia with its hierarchy of ‘national committees’, but he may be largely in the dark about the earliest history of the area in Central Bohemia where Kersko lies (see map). In somewhat hyperbolic terms, the up-and-down hostility between neighbouring villages is portrayed with all the whimsy of an arch ‘rambler’ who knows his history as reaching back to the tenth century and the power struggle arising out of the dynastic rivalries between the Slavníks and Přemyslids, two powerful houses in this very area. Members of the powerful Vršovec family, on the Přemyslid side, did, as described herein, slaughter most of the Slavníks in the church at nearby Libice.

The reader can probably infer easily that a Czech hunt is carried on rather differently from how it would be run in Britain, whether before or after the ban on hunting with hounds introduced in 2005, and is in fact more like stalking (though that is not the word used by Hrabal). I believe it is also easily read between the lines that there is a ritual element to the domestic slaughter of a pig and that the whole proceeding is an entirely ‘normal’ custom among quite ordinary Czech folk. It can equally be so read that other customs, whether to do with food (fining salamis like fining wines, to give them that extra edge; beer ordered from and served at the table in a pub, not stood for at the bar) or with the Christian calendar (carolling and some pagan frolicking between the sexes at Easter; the mass domestic production and consumption of a range of sweetmeats at Christmas) are precisely that: customs that the reader may not instantly recognise, but should be able to take on board and accept as genuine local colour. More subtly, the reader accustomed to death personified as the ‘grim reaper’, portrayed as male, may initially be puzzled by references to Death as female. Among various metaphorical expressions for death, in Czech she likewise carries a scythe (and is skeletal), but her gender is simply motivated by the word for death, smrt, which is grammatically feminine (Czech and the other Slavonic languages have, like German or Latin, three genders).

The Czechs are sometimes portrayed as rather materialistic in their outlook (if not noticeably more than many other nations), so, amongst other things, money matters. That does not transpire particularly in this book, though a crude form of materialism is perhaps what channels into monomania, whether this is to do with apple-growing, rabbit-breeding or the hoarding of utterly useless bargains. Money does figure in a reference to a ‘hard-currency shop’, which may be lost on some readers: the Czechoslovakia of the day had, in essence, two currencies: the Czechoslovak crown (koruna československá) as standard, but non-convertible, and the Tuzex crown, which was obtained by exchanging any (strictly legally, but frequently illicitly acquired) foreign, convertible currencies and then used in the special Tuzex shops filled with sundry ‘Western’, thus highly desirable goods (there are a few other scattered hints in the book that ‘West is best’, common throughout Communist central and eastern Europe). Hence the dream of one character’s purchasing through Tuzex a Simca, that late lamented (?) French car. The observant reader will no doubt notice that not once does the everyday Czechoslovak car, the Škoda, get a mention, though we find plenty of East German Trabants, relatively easily obtainable at the time, but often rudely dismissed as a two-stroke wheelbarrow with a cardboard body and the butt of countless jokes; and the local policeman (incidentally, a splendid caricature) drives around, as they did, in a Volga, a fairly lumbering saloon from the unloved Soviet Union. Both cars mentioned (ignoring the Opel owned by a resident of West Germany) have, then, inherently negative connotations.

For the rest, I believe that these stories have a deep core of general humanity and as such they call for no further comment and can be read for the sheer pleasure of it.

The Czech, or uniquely Hrabalesque, version of what I have finally called rambling (the underlying verb pábit is not actually Hrabal’s invention, though most Czechs associate it uniquely with him) varies in fact from almost hectoring at one end of the scale to burbling at the other. I quite liked the notion of ‘burbling’ for at least one of its dictionary definitions as ‘talking excitedly and rather incoherently’ (Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, rev. edn., 1966), and because, in its Czech manifestation, it is apt to exploit asyndeton to a degree far in excess of the neutral norm, and Czech already uses it rather more than English, inside and outside literature; this rate of asyndeton is just one of the features that add to the sense of ‘incoherence’. Yet it remains — in Hrabal’s Czech — sustainable, ‘natural’, while in English it would definitely be ‘too much of a good thing’. Consequently, I have not reproduced it here at every occurrence; the two grammars are sufficiently different overall for the slightly incoherent in one language to verge on the incomprehensible in the other. I finally selected ‘rambling’ as the core notion, since to describe some of the narrations, whether in the Ich or er mode, as ‘burbling’ would seem a little harsh. What I was not predisposed to do was to sustain the link with previous translations of pábení as ‘palavering’ and of pábitelé as ‘palaverers’. However, readers familiar with other translations from Hrabal containing these expressions should know that this is what my ‘rambling on’ is.

Besides the striking rate of asyndeton, the language of these stories is rich in almost every other structural or artistic device — synonym pairs, oxymoron (heightening the depth of a thing; black teeth compared to white jasmine petals), anacoluthon, rhyme, alliteration and a general, but not universal rhythmicality. I would not wish to catalogue all the cases and how they were resolved in translation. Suffice it to say that where a feature was not soluble in situ, so to speak, I freely resorted to the hallowed (by such as Jiří Levý, a leading Czech theorist of translation) device of ‘compensation’, that is, allowing, for instance, alliteration or a casual rhyme at a point where there was none in the original in order to compensate for my failure to alliterate or rhyme in English where the Czech text is alliterative or rhyming. Possibly the trickiest to translate or compensate for are many of the anacolutha, since strict adherence to and/or compensation for them could easily create an unnatural, even unreadable text in English, and Hrabal’s texts are nothing if not readable, even where you have to wait several pages for the next full stop. The random, quasi-accidental nature of anacoluthon makes it difficult to ‘fake’, hence its incidence in the translation is markedly lower than in the original, as that of the semi-colon or full stop is somewhat higher. In other respects, I can only hope that I have been faithful to this increasingly appreciated writer, who, maddening though he can be, is always a pleasure to work on.

David Short February 2014