Gerald Turner started translating works by banned Czech authors in the 1980s, a period evoked in vivid detail by one of the leading dissidents and publisher of samizdat in A Czech Dreambook. An inverted roman à clef, this work by Ludvík Vaculík is “a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction—in which the author, his family, his mistresses, the secret police, and leading figures of the Czech underground play major roles.” While in London in February 2020 to launch A Czech Dreambook at the Free Word Centre, Gerald Turner, who is now based in the Czech Republic, talked to Julia Sherwood, Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, about grappling with Vaculík’s unique, earthy style and his formidable new project, Jaroslav Hašek’s comic masterpiece The Good Soldier Švejk.
Julia Sherwood (JS): You have been described as Václav Havel’s “court translator”: that is quite an accolade.
Gerald Turner (GS): I haven’t translated any of Havel’s plays but it’s a fair description as I worked closely with him during the last term of his presidency. I translated his articles for the international press and I was translating his correspondence, as well as video messages to various conferences and meetings around the world. In a sense, I was his private translator in this period.
JS: Your most recent translation, of Ludvík Vaculík’s A Czech Dreambook, appeared in 2019, although you completed it much earlier. When did you start working on the translation?
GT: I translated the first excerpt around 1987. Over the years, I spent a lot of time working on it—whenever I had a spare moment, I would take the manuscript out and by the time it was published, I had reworked it many, many times, honing and tweaking it.
JS: Why do you think that, despite the great delay in publication, it is still relevant and has something to say to Anglophone readers?
GT: As for the book’s relevance, Václav Havel certainly believed that it spoke to people around the world. In the conclusion to his essay on the Dreambook, “Responsibility and Fate,” he says:
“With this book Prague sends an important message to the world, one that concerns not just itself and the Czech lands but whose meaning also transcends the present. Will people abroad understand the message and its meaning? Will they understand it straight away? Will they understand it in time? Or will they understand it when it is too late?”
To me, A Czech Dreambook is a great piece of authentic writing and the passage of time should have no effect on it whatsoever.
Jonathan Bolton, the academic who wrote the afterword, sees it more in historical terms, as a portrayal of the politics of the time. Havel, by contrast, regarded it as “a great novel about modern life in general and the crisis of contemporary humanity, as well as about the heroism and tragedy of a man trying to challenge this general crisis.” I believe that the political aspect was secondary, and this is borne out by the fact that after 1989, when Vaculík had a chance to get involved in politics, he turned it down. And the greatest moments in the novel are, as Havel rightly says, his observations on what is happening to the planet, to the environment.
JS: At the launch of The Czech Dreambook, you mentioned that the first book you ever translated was The Restoration of Order by Milan Šimečka. For me this book is the most accurate account and incisive analysis of the normalisation era that followed the crushing of the Prague Spring. How did it come about and what was it like working on it?
GT: Sometime in 1983 I was doing some translations for the Czech exile community in England and Misha Glenny, who was then at Verso, asked me if I’d translate Milan Šimečka’s book. I had yet to meet him at that stage but while translating it I felt so close to him—there is so much warmth and humanity that comes through in the book. It posed enormous challenges, for example, at one stage Milan mentions that Alexander Dubček was referred to as Alexander Prostorovič, because he needed more space—in Czech, prostor means space. After thinking about it, I hit on Roomanoff. Milan loved the way I dealt with that, and he told me so in a letter that was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia.
I knew that he was a Czech philosopher living in Slovakia, and having grown up in Britain, my image was of a kind of dried-up, thin-faced philosopher, something of the Oxford or Cambridge variety. And when I first met him later on, suddenly, here was this burly man with a round head, totally different from what I expected. At the time he was driving a bulldozer and, in fact, he fitted the image of a bulldozer driver perfectly.
JS: This wasn’t the only work by a dissident writer you translated. What else did you work on in those days?
GT: I started working for Vilém Prečan and the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre (based in exile in Germany at the time), which became my daily bread from then onwards. It involved translating dissident writing that was smuggled out of the country, including some feuilletons by Ludvík Vaculík, which gave me a very good idea of what was happening in the writing world in Prague. The first full-length novel I did was Ivan Klíma’s Judge on Trial. I was grateful, as I already knew that his friends in Prague had persuaded him to pare it down quite considerably from the original, much longer version. I later translated two further novels by Klíma, and a book of his short stories.
JS: You did all these translations jointly with your then wife, Alice, under the pseudonym A. G. Brain. Why was that?
GT: My wife Alice was Czech and we were travelling to and from Prague at the time, so we needed a pseudonym. I picked my mother’s maiden name, Brain, and A. and G. stood for Alice and Gerald. This led people to believe that we were joint translators and we were indeed a tandem, but in the end, what appeared on the page was my work, I was the final arbiter. Alice was invaluable to me, and I consulted her on everything I translated. She was a Czech scholar and an English graduate, so she was perfect for the role. She had the sense of nuance in Czech—she was my internal editor. The pseudonym became a kind of a brand and I continued using it until 1994, even after Alice and I broke up. The first to reveal that A. G. Brain was Alice and Gerald Turner was Paul Wilson, in his preface to “Open Letters,” a selection of Václav Havel’s writings published in 1991, for which I translated a number of Havel’s articles.
JS: Let’s go back to Vaculík. I really liked what you said at the launch: that translating Havel was wonderful but Vaculík’s writing was so musical it sang to you from the page. Would you say that this is characteristic of all his writing?
GT: Yes, I don’t think there is a single sentence in Vaculík that is standard in any way. Almost everything he wrote was unique. I struggled with the first sentence in the book, turned it around dozens of times until I finally left it alone. He is toying with the reader all the time. He nudges the reader. Several times in the book he says: “you will remember that on such and such a page I said this or that . . .” But, in fact, it’s something he invented afterwards. He is in constant dialogue with his reader. I think he wants the reader to have fun.
JS: You can almost taste his words, and that quality must be really difficult to get right.
GT: Very difficult. Sometimes I would sit over a sentence for hours. I was living in Ireland at the time, looking out of the window, at the Irish local landscape, gesturing to myself: What’s he doing in this sentence? How do I do this? Because his language is so pithy, so condensed, and I was desperate not to yield to the temptation of paraphrase. At one point he says, he’s complaining about his lodgers in Dobřichovice, and he says: “Kleju, kleju, bude ze mne starý klíč.” What do you do with that? So I came up with: “I cuss, I cuss, I’ll be an old custodian.” To come up with that I needed days—I went for long walks in the country and struggled with it. I didn’t want to leave anything out. They left things out of the German translation, which annoyed him. I think the French translation is abridged too—forgive me if I’m wrong— but if you look at the book, it is much thinner, and French would have about the same wordage as Czech.
JS: So what did you find were the main challenges in translating Vaculík?
GT: Trying to achieve in English the same concision that he has in Czech. It starts with the very first sentence which goes as follows: “V noci jsem, nevím proč, nemohl spát, asi šestkrát byl jsem upíjet pivo nebo mléko, myslel jsem, že moje podráždění pochází z nějaké chemie.” In my translation: “Last night, I don’t know why, I couldn’t sleep. I got up about six times for a drink of beer or milk, thinking my restlessness to be of chemical origin.” What we’re hearing is spoken Czech, yet highly refined at the same time. And further on: “Vrtěl jsem v noci hlavou a říkal jsem si, jak se proti člověku, což jsem já, bouří i jeho biologie a neurologie.” (“The thought tossed around in my head the whole night and it struck me that one’s biology and neurology really do start to rebel against one—against me.”) I had a long discussion with Jonathan over this. This was a struggle, these little injected clauses, what to do with them in English, where to put them so that they surprise you as much they surprise you in Czech. I wanted that surprise to be there, so that it wasn’t just a bland sentence. I don’t think there’s anything bland in the entire novel. Every sentence was a challenge for me.
JS: Well, you have risen to the challenge of nearly five hundred and forty pages of Vaculík’s with great aplomb. Now you are facing an even more formidable one, Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk—especially if you’re going to translate the full set of four books.
GT: I first read Švejk in Paul Selver’s translation, then I read Cecil Parrott’s version. I believe Parrott did translate everything that was there. I shall certainly not be looking at his translation at all, although I will be researching what he discovered. I understand that Parrott devoted a lot of time to studying the book, and I will study everything that’s available.
It’s still a work in progress, as they say. At this point, I’ve just cleared other long-term projects from my desk—you have come to me just as I’m about to leave space to start the work. In the case of Švejk the starting point will be re-reading the book a few more times. I re-read it last year. At this stage I’m concentrating on the actual mechanics. Realistically I think I will need to spend about nine months on research. I did start last year in a minor way, but I had too much other work on my plate at the time. Sadly, many of the old experts are now dead but there is a great Hašek scholar in Germany, a friend, who I’d like to visit and consult. And there is also this fan of Švejk in Norway, who has created an entire website, which is brilliant. I do hope he lives a long and healthy life and keeps his website going. It includes a glossary of Hašek’s language, with explanations in Czech. I would like to meet the man—it should be fun to go and see him. But once the research is done, the moment will come and I will just sit down and translate from beginning to end.
JS: Do you think a new translation is necessary? Abigail Weil, an American Slavic scholar working on a book about Hašek recently said on Czech radio that she is really excited about your forthcoming translation:
“So while I still think that Parrott did a really admirable job, when you read it today it comes off a little more stuffy and a little more formal than low-class soldiers in World War I, who were from Prague and were big drinkers . . . they wouldn’t have sounded like that. It should be a little dirtier, a little bawdier. So I have high hopes for this new translation, that it’ll capture the liveliness of the way soldiers really speak.”
GT: Well, I thank her for that, that’s very encouraging. I couldn’t put it better—this is exactly how I feel about the Parrott translation. I certainly thought so in 1974 when it first came out. I was in Prague at that point, Paul Wilson and I had talked about it then and said that we would do a new translation together. When I recently reminded him of this, he said—did we really agree to do that? He was chickening out. I think we felt at the time that this translation didn’t do it full justice. Don’t get me wrong: it was a very good translation—no translation will do it full justice, I have to admit—but I think that the low-life passages in Sir Cecil Parrott’s version were fanciful. I said to myself at the time: the man was a diplomat, a professional diplomat, he lived in a completely different world from Hašek’s. I learned my Czech in Prague in pubs in the 1970s, I’ve seen pint pots come down on people’s heads in brawls, and when I re-read the novel now, I’m amazed how little Prague Czech has changed, in fact, in the hundred years since it was written.
JS: Do you think English has changed more?
GT: I’m not sure. Not necessarily. But I will aim for the English of that period. I recently auditioned for a production of the musical “Oh! What a Lovely War,” although in the end it didn’t happen. But that sort of black humour is a very good parallel, and I will be immersing myself in that sort of English, the English of the trenches, the newspapers that the troops brought out to console themselves, to confront the sheer misery and absurdity of their situation. I think this resonates entirely with what we read in Švejk. That’s where I think I will find inspiration, just like I found it in Irish English for the Dreambook. My dad was from Battersea, south London, where we’re sitting right now. He was born in 1914 and knew the language of that era as he was growing up. I grew up with his language, and I knew his workmates—I so it will probably be London English. It has to be some sort of urban language, and that is an awful trap for a translator. I think the dialogue will be inspired by the English of London at the time of the First World War. It has to be.
JS: I was going to ask if you are thinking of tackling any contemporary writers, but I guess Švejk will keep you busy for a while.
GT: Of the post-dissident generation, I’ve translated Michal Viewegh’s Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia, Miloš Urban’s Lord Mord, a retro mystery thriller, Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana and Michal Ajvaz—I translated his novel The Other City, which was an immense challenge. I do want to read more contemporary authors while working on Švejk. I would also like to translate more women writers. I’ve done some short pieces by Jana Červenková, and a book by Jiřina Šiklová on dying, which is yet to be published, but no women’s fiction yet, except for a passage from Lenka Procházková’s Beránek (The Lamb)—she’s middle-aged now, but as for the younger writers, I really must read more. I have also translated a book by another Procházková, the journalist, Petra, The Aluminium Queen, interviews with Chechen women. It was harrowing but very interesting.
JS: Well, you certainly have plenty on your plate for now. Good luck with Švejk!
Gerald Turner is a widely published translator from Czech and French. During the 1980s he translated banned Czech authors, including Václav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Šimečka and Ivan Klíma under the pen-name A. G. Brain. His published translations include novels, short stories, and plays. His translation of Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana received the US PEN Translation Award in 2004 and Tomáš Halík’s Patience with God, also in his translation, was awarded the best theological book prize for 2009-2010. Born on the outskirts of London, Gerald Turner has lived in Czechoslovakia, Ireland, France, and England, and is currently based in Zbraslav near Prague.
Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Since 2008 she has been working as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, and Russian. She is based in London and is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia.
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