This week’s Translation Tuesday honours one of Slovakia’s greatest writers on the eve of what would have been his seventy-ninth birthday (June 27). Translator Charles Sabatos writes:
The title story of Pavel Vilikovský‘s debut collection, A Sentimental Education in March (Citová výchova v marci, 1965), translated here for the first time, features the introspective meditation on everyday events that can be found in his later work, but in a more fragmentary style. A group of young people take a trip to Popradské pleso, a lake resort in the Tatra mountains, where two of them have a brief sexual encounter that leaves the young man disillusioned with intimacy and alienated from reality.
Pavel Vilikovský (1941-2020) had a distinctively ironic style that was rooted in Central European culture yet parodied the national myths of the region. He spent most of his life in Bratislava, although he briefly studied film in Prague before returning to Slovakia, where he became an editor and translator from English. During the “normalization” period of the 1970s and 1980s, Vilikovský preferred self-imposed silence to self-censorship, although he was never officially banned. He made up for this period of near invisibility with the appearance of three volumes during the last months of the Communist regime in 1989, including Ever Green is . . . (Večne je zelený) and A Horse Upstairs, a Blind Man in Vráble (Kôň na poschodí, slepec vo Vrábľoch), his first works translated into English (by Charles Sabatos for Northwestern University Press in 2002). His collection An Escalation of Feeling (Eskalácia citu), also published that year, was a mix of new and previously published stories, including a slightly revised version of “A Sentimental Education in March.” This reappearance was followed by three decades of prolific output, during which he won the prestigious Anasoft Litera award twice. Perhaps the most acclaimed of his later works was Fleeting Snow (Letmý sneh, 2014, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood for Istros Books in 2018) which depicts a narrator dealing with his wife’s gradual loss of memory. After writing five novels between 2013 and 2018, the last of which was The Thrill is Gone (RAJc je preč, 2018), Vilikovský (who always resisted technology and never used the internet) lost a completed text due to a computer error, leaving him so demoralized that he stopped writing entirely. Upon his death a few months later, friends and colleagues remembered his lifelong modesty and generosity along with his artistic brilliance. According to the critic Peter Darovec, Vilikovský “never stopped viewing sentiment as the most important part of how a person functions, whether in communicating with others or with the world. He was able to rationalize it, to think about it analytically . . . Before him no one else had managed that in Slovak literature, no one had even come close.”
At the station, they were waiting. Waiting and waiting.
“One, two, three,” cried the black locomotives. “Ohh. Ohh.”
“Then I cried,” he said. “I cried up there in that cottage, at the lake in the mountains, and it flowed down the Váh River. She told me no, I can’t, no. Then: those three years. That was in the hallway. She went up the steps. Yes? I asked. Yes. Then I cried. Those three years. Those three years. It all froze down my cheeks.”
They stopped to get some water. “Whoo-hoo,” cried the locomotive.
“When I cried,” he said, “everyone saw it. All night. Yes? Yes. And up the steps. And down my cheeks.”
They lifted the demijohns, the water sloshing inside. A train appeared opposite; it knocked at the rail switch. Come in.
“Here they are. Here they are.”
They set off on the road, splitting the girls up between them. Their high heels rang out on the hard gravel.
“Look, someone threw the moon into the water. Hooligan. Good-for-nothing. Atheist.”
Between the rails, apart through the grass, a part of the house. “It’s here.”
They unlocked it. “Careful, there are steps.”
In the candlelight: “Let’s introduce ourselves.” Peter. Eva. Paľo. Jana. Whatever. Whoever.
Nice to meet you.
A green light flickered on the table. Twing twang twung. Against the light, against the fur. Down the cheeks. Down the throat.
After the second, after the sixth glass, after two decilitres, after a litre, a person becomes a person. “Yes. Yes.” “Girl, I’ve seen you somewhere before,” with a hand on her shoulder. With a hand on her shoulder, “With my hand on my heart, wasn’t that you?” “Yes. Yes.”
Don’t be afraid, the hungry wolves are howling in the mountains. No, not me. It’s the fish that were afraid of their mute solitude.
They sat down, the glasses sprouting out of their warm palms. They breathed on each other like cattle in a Nativity scene. Their moist mouths came into contact.
Everything laid down in the night. Wandering bats and strange thoughts flew through the darkness. They nested in hair.
We’ve all dreamed about it before. At least it seems like it. Falling from a tower. Down the stairs. From the bottom.
In the trench, with a face in the dirt, my greatest love appeared in my dream. It will never happen again.
In the corner smiled the wide non-conjugal bed. They laid down there. They stretched out.
The conversation:
“Well, hey. Hey. Behave.”
“Behave, I told you.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t.”
“No, not now. Not now, maybe later. Wait.”
“Ow, no. No. Not that.”
No, that’s not me, the hungry trains race across the plain with a protruding red tongue.
Give me your hand. Right at the end of the journey. Don’t be afraid. It won’t hurt.
It never hurts.
Don’t cry; don’t cry at the very end of the journey, give me your hand, I’ll lead you. Into those sublime lands. I’ll show you. In that land so childlike, in that land so sweet. Give me your hand.
There are beds where there is no lying. There are fields where there is no sowing. There are wells where there is no drinking.
Sometimes he tried to understand everything. There was a word for this: simultaneously. He got up and passed between the bodies. On the terrace the wind touched him, the water offered him a cold embrace. He shivered. But not for that reason; the night cried out in him. Everything that happened was simultaneous. That word. And he heard a body, a pronounced breath, palpable in the darkness, blindly; simultaneously there were mountain forests which he remembered as alive, the mountain lake, the steps, the Váh River, down which water flowed. Simultaneously there was her face asleep, like a bitter negative, salty tears. Simultaneously there were other things, there was life; simultaneously he was young, the roosters crowed, simultaneously trains departed, in which he wanted to experience unhappiness, the accessory, the accomplice of life, his own condemned, his own executioner
he tried to understand, but what did he understand: he trembled. So it happens again, he’ll never be immune (the verdict is pronounced) his own self rises up into his throat, stretches its wings and it’s a wonder that it doesn’t fly away, but it doesn’t fly away, with its eyes focused ahead of it, a stranger in its own nest, almost an enemy
these evenings will return, simultaneously he’ll be older (nothing else), simultaneously younger, eternal (in memory, forcibly), as God treads on the throat of time, he’ll repress his hissing,
he’ll blaspheme and change into a thing, motionless to the eye; he’ll be warm from that usefulness, simultaneously he’ll be everything, abandon his single limited form
simultaneously he was standing here alone, alone with the water, transparent to the bone, alone with the rough wood of the terrace, with the strikes on the rails, with the cries of the fish (so he unwaveringly believed), with the sound of music, with the sound of a voice
simultaneously, as he entered through the glass door (the moon slid down its smooth plane, fell on its surface, sharp shards), he didn’t forget, he didn’t let go of it, still ever-present in the darkness, he touched the body, although he didn’t understand the context
no, she didn’t know his name, she called him by his occupation: my little student
as if she wanted to make it easier, to help; even to convince herself (for this evening, of course)
my little student. The conversation continued like this. At one point they were speaking heatedly. How much time had passed? Two bottles?
“You’re biting my ear.”
Simultaneously wild dogs strained at their chains; the shortest connection between two points is a line.
“That hurts, little student.”
He wasn’t afraid of presence; he wasn’t afraid of the body next to him, its strangeness, quiet screams, salutations, but simultaneously, simultaneously. That word.
How a day begins, that he knew (certainly not with storks), but he loved to watch it cracking open like a shell. To be here completely meant to be simultaneously everywhere else; this comparison gives the feeling of real tension; in the growing daybreak of the room he searched for the forms of objects, the forms of countries, of conversations, events, the little student.
He turned back to the body next to him. Why not. He wasn’t afraid. He heard the voices of awakening sleepers (under one roof of life.) They didn’t die. Let’s rise, brothers. We’re the ones who’ve caught life in flagrante.
And look, something speaks in us. We push off naked into the water down to the bottom. We follow our trembling images. Fish swim across our chests, like silver arrows. Slowly we sink, the water swallows us.
Only later in the morning we return to this world with difficulty. We disentangle our limbs in that disorderly cemetery. Finally we have them all, we walk around the lake, through the grass, between the rails. The morning cold jolts us.
On the train: “You look like a blind cat.” We laugh, we lean our foreheads on the window. Beside the railway line red roosters are crowing. And in a quiet voice: “So up at the mountain lake she said yes, no, she went upstairs, and I cried. Yes? Yes. I couldn’t stop it. Really.”
Look, across the street the trams are already clanging. We sit at the table.
But what about the cold white snow that fell so suddenly in March? What about the footprints of hunting dogs, sniffing into the void?
Translated from the Slovak by Charles Sabatos
Charles Sabatos (PhD., University of Michigan) is associate professor of comparative literature at Yeditepe University (Istanbul). He has published numerous articles on Slovak, Czech, and American writers, and his book Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature (Lexington Books, 2020) is the expanded English edition of a monograph first published in Turkish.
*****
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