Posts filed under 'czech literature'

A Czech Dreambook: Gerald Turner on Translating Ludvík Vaculík

I wanted that surprise to be there . . . I don’t think there’s anything bland in the entire novel. Every sentence was a challenge for me.

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 isa unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fictionin 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. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Xi Xi, Bianca Bellová, and Osamu Dazai. Have we got your attention? Read on.

The days are opening wide this season, like the pages of a new book: for most of us growing longer and fuller. It’s a good thing, because we’ve got a lot to catch you up on. This week, we’re bringing a full dosage of global literature news with achievements from Hong Kong, rolling publications by Czech talent, and literary commemorations gliding through the literal end of an era in Japan.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

This spring has been a series of firsts for Hong Kong literature. Continuing from my previous dispatch in March on Xi Xi winning the Newman Prize for Chinese literature, historically awarded to writers from mainland China and Taiwan, World Literature Today is dedicating its first annual city issue to writing from Hong Kong. Sourcing contributions from writers, translators, and academics at the forefront of Hong Kong literature, the issue includes poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction with a focus on food and languages as well as a selection of recommended reading about the city. Xi Xi and Bei Dao are among the list of writers featured in the magazine, as is Wawa—recently showcased in Asymptote’s Winter 2019 issue in an interview with Poupeh Missaghi, our editor-at-large in Iran—and Chris Song, one of the winners of the Fifth Hai Zi Poetry Prize which announced its results a few weeks prior.

To celebrate the launch of the issue, Cha, Hong Kong’s resident online literary journal, is organizing an event on April 27 at Bleak House Books, where eight contributors will be reciting and discussing their works. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, founding co-editor of Cha and the guest editor of World Literature Today’s Hong Kong feature, will also speak about the conception of the special edition.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: ‘Labyrinth’ by Kamil Bouška

A thin room showed me the map of the world and loneliness

This week, we travel to the Czech Republic, where the poet Kamil Bouška brings us ‘Labyrinth’, translated by Ondřej Pazdírek, winner of the 2017 Beacon Street Prize in poetry. Moving from a room to vast nature, to suburbia, and more, this poem rapidly moves between small and large worlds, negotiating a maze of all that ‘a strip of light’ touches.

Labyrinth

A strip of light
in a threadbare carpet
lights up cities,

lifts valleys
adorned in silver sequins of dust,
raises aerials in hot asbestos
on flat roofs,
hurls the earth toward the sun,
and the earth crackles like a song in old vinyl.

Bird calls seep through a woodpulp sky,
down from the golden cotton of clouds
suckled on sweet water,
and descend to the carotid arteries of flowers
in beds behind the fences of family homes.
Behind them, shrubs in low light ignite
a specter of the forest into existence— READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Lost” by Jan Čep

“Quite a detour,” said the old man shaking his head. “You must have gotten lost.”

Today we’re thrilled to present a story by Jan Čep, a Catholic Modernist whose stories depict characters lost both spiritually and geographically. Weaving together deep mysticism and delicate realism, his style of writing has earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth century Czech prose.

That afternoon the house emptied out, the voices in the neighboring rooms fell silent, the wagon of a child stood overturned in the yard, and inside the half-open gate peeked someone’s goat. Clouds covered the sky and hills encircled the ravaged and vindictive countryside; the trails led nowhere and the steel surface of the pond shimmered with hostility.

Petr Kleofáš left the house and set out on the first trail he found without meeting a single soul. On a marshy meadow with dry grass, stumps of old willows stood over black pools. Grey groves, blasted by the breath of age and death, bit maliciously into the barren hillsides. Past the pond on the other side, crooked roofs from the village hunched beneath the dismal sky.

Petr Kleofáš found himself in a grassy ditch below an empty stubble field with two stunted pine trees. A bit further stood a forest, full of dry needles and fallen cones. The only sounds were the rustle of dry grass and the bloodless whisper, like fire consuming paper, inside Petr Kleofáš. He half-knelt, half-lay on the cold earth; eyes closed, he silently counted the beat of his slowing heart. The sense of sheer nothingness and the proximity of death caused a poisonous and grotesque sweetness to spring inside him. Damp and cooling colors flowed before his eyes…

READ MORE…