[In the following essay, Hrabik-Samal examines the difficulties of sensitively translating works such as Hrabal's from Czech into English.]

“Translating is a form of masochism,” growled my usually mild and understanding spouse as an answer to my question, how to say kulový filek in English. This was the fourth or fifth time that I interrupted his watching of an exciting hockey game to consult him on some finer point of vocabulary or euphony. I was in the throes of translating an excerpt from Bohumil Hrabal's Kdo jsem into the King's English. “It is not,” I sputtered, “It is …”

As I tried to finish sentence, I was transported backwards in time to the third row, second seat of Sister Mary's English class at Notre Dame Academy. So inseparately wedded are good English and Sister Mary in my linguistic consciousness that I cannot put pen to paper without this nun peering over my shoulder. “Thou shall not commit bad grammar, style and diction” was the Eleventh Commandment in her classroom. Hell's fire held no greater terror for me and my classmates than Sister Mary's merciless command, “Rewrite!” We worked assiduously to avoid both.

So, my first duty as a translator is to produce an English text that does not incur Sister Mary's dreaded wrath. Translation is more than a mechanical task of transposing one language into another as if they were merely different musical keys. Every language has its own vocabulary, grammar, syntax and style. Each of these represents only an iceberg's tip of much larger unshared social, historical and cultural experiences.

It would be easier, I sometimes think, to catch fish with one's bare hands than to translate. The right word is more elusive and slippery than the craftiest fish. Not every English word has its exact Czech counterpart. A translator must be careful to choose a word not only with the same denotation, but also connotation. For example, the Hrabal text refers to affixing (přilepit) a one hundred koruna note to the forehead of a tavern violinist. My dictionary gives two words, to glue or to paste, for přilepit. In the English mind, unfamiliar with this Central European custom, both words conjure the image of someone coming with a pot of glue and smearing it on either the violinist's forehead or the bank note. Occasionally, words identical in both languages are false friends. If I were to use the dictionary translation of správce and daně, director and taxes, I would mislead the readers. The gentlemen described by the English word, director, is far removed from the nitty gritty of day-to-day administration. He would not be making the rounds of the taverns where the brewery sold its beer as Mr. Hrabal's father, správce pivovaru, did, and he would not be collecting “taxes,” a word in English reserved exclusively for payments levied by and paid to the government. Even when words are identical in both languages, context at times mandates other usage. In one place, Hrabal speaks of being his own prokurátor a obhájce. English does use “procurator” as a technical term for the prosecuting attorney in a trial in communist countries. Mr. Hrabal, however, wanted the more generic and broader term, prosecutor. Idiomatic phrases and proverbs literally translated rarely make any sense in another language. If I had translated co mě osolí word for word, the English reader would imagine that for some incomprehensible reason salt was poured on Mr. Hrabal. For the sake of intelligibility, the translator must substitute appropriate phrases or proverbs.

Occasionally, an author makes life difficult for the translators by using an idiom as the starting point for a metaphor as Mr. Hrabal does with pupek světa ‘navel of the universe’ in the following passage:

Pánové, tak ryzec je mystická houba, je krásně ryšavá, soustředně zelenkavé kruhy obsahují mystické poslání té houby, protože ty zelenkavé, stále se zužující kruhy se vysoustruhují u každého ryzce v zelený pupík, tečku středu těch zmenšujících se soustředných zelených kruhdu, a ta tečka uprostřed klobouku ryzce je střed myšlení, je to, nač se dívají buddhističtí kněží, na svduj pupek, kterým se navlíkají pupečními šndurami nazpátek až k prvnímu hříchu naší pramáti, první ženy, která měla hladké břicho, počátek lidského rodu, to všechno, pánové, povídám, lze vyčíst jako poselství ze souřadných zelených kruhdu ryšavého ryzce, obsahujícího to nejryzejší základní symbolično lidského začátku a přítomnosti …

Mlčel jsem, ten ryzec a soustředěné zelené kruhy, ta zelená tečka uprostřed ryšavého klobouku ryzce, ten omfalos, pupek světa, kterým lze jít nazpátek až k hladkému břichu pramáti Evy …

In this instance, the translator can only translate pupek světa literally. Consequently, in the English text, it becomes an original and interesting metaphor.

Literary allusions present a similar problem. When Hrabal speaks of his writing being his search for lost time, he is clearly referring to Marcel Proust's masterpiece. This stumps the translator because the English title of À la recherche du temps perdu is “Remembrance of Things Past”.

In translation as in life, experience, everybody's experience—the two cultures', the author's, and the translator's—is the great divide. What really keeps me up at night is finding equivalents for objects and activities which do not exist in the English speaking world. How does one say reálka or talk about mariáš and mushroom picking? This brings us to that question of kulový filek. English speakers play with different cards. Kulový filek is the third highest card, my husband explained after the hockey game, equivalent to the queen in American deck. To translate it as queen makes no sense in this context; moreover, it leads the reader far astray because “queen” is also slang for a homosexual in drag. This most certainly is not what Mr. Hrabal meant. Even gestures have their cultural content. Had I slavishly translated that the tavern mistress innkeeper waved her hands over the accounts, the English reader would have considered this a description of an idiosyncratic gesture. To express indifference, English speakers shrug their shoulders.

American and English readers, not subjected to required courses in Marx-Leninism, will not catch the mocking reference when Hrabal writes: “Moje vzdělanost nikdy nebyla přetavěna, nikdy nemohla být kvalitativně proměněna, nikdy nemohla dosáhnout skoku …” Nor are they likely to note the allusion to the poètes maudits when Mr. Hrabal confesses that he had become what he always wanted to be an accursed poet.

The translator's own experience, or lack of it, complicate her task. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to ascertain whether chcát proti větru is ‘pissing in the wind’ or ‘pissing into the wind’. No one dared utter this expression in Sister Mary's classroom. I had to call a friend, the mother of three strapping boys, to ascertain the correct preposition. Pakunk as in limonáda s pakunkem was a mystery to me. I am not old enough to have drunk lemonade with or without pakunk in the pre-World War II inns.

If the words, plain and simple, have not stumped the translator, the different grammatical structure of the two languages certainly will. She makes easy work of Czech's dearth of articles, the unlike uses of the verb tenses or the disparate rules for capitalization and punctuation, but the consequences of Czech's highly inflected nature continually bedevil her. By pressing prepositions, auxiliary verbs and, especially word order, into action, I can usually put the invariable English noun and adjective into a mode representing the Czech nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, locative, instrumental or vocative cases. When modifiers (be they adjectives, adverbs or clauses) are present, the task becomes onerous. In the uninflected English language, proximity is the surest way to indicate connection. To avoid confusion, ambiguity and absurdity, the writer places the qualifiers immediately after or before the word they modify. Not only does the highly inflected Czech allow a much looser word order than English, it also permits the heaping of modifying clauses upon modifying clauses—at times to the third or fourth degree. Since the hapless translator cannot stack these clauses vertically next to the modified word like plates on a shelf, she must rephrase the sentence. Her choices are unpalatable: she can chop up the sentence into several, thus hamper the flow and rhythm intended by the author, drop some of the modifiers, thus lose the fullness of text's meaning, or repeat the modified word before each related clause, thus make the writing redundant, inelegant and often awkward.

Syntax is a far greater challenge to the translator than grammar. Each language has its own cannons and is not infinitely malleable. For example, in English, but not in Czech, there is a requirement of parallel construction and an onus on the use of the passive voice.

How well I remember Sister Mary reading the examples of passive voice from our compositions and making a list on board of its effects: the passive voice adds length, hides the actor, thus gives the writing an evasive weasel-like tone, makes it easy for the writer to succumb to the temptation of dangling participial phrases, fosters stuffiness and makes difficult ideas even harder to understand. Were Mr. Hrabal writing in English, he would, I am certain, recast his sentences to avoid de-humanization by the passive voice.

Proper English writing requires parallel construction, i.e. that logically equal elements in a sentence also be rhetorically equal. Unhampered by any such rule, Czech writers combine logically equal elements in whatever manner strikes their fancy without any thought to their rhetorical equality. Thus, Mr. Hrabal writes without offending anyone:

Ovšem největší frajer jsem na vylhávání situací, ve kterých jsem nikdy nebyl, předstírání, že jsem četl knihy, které jsem nikdy nečetl, svědectví o událostech, které se mi nestaly, přísahání, které je křivopřísežnictvím, vychvalováním se činy, které vykonal někdo jiný, falešné vidění očitého svědka, jsem nevěstka, která předstírá, že miluje z lásky, jsem podtrhávač a křivák a lhát je mi tak přirozené jako rybě voda, očistec pro moje hříchy musí být tak velký, že zasloužilé kriminálníky a vandaly nebesa propustí do nebes jenom proto, aby konečně došlo na mne, než budu sražen do pekel.

He delights constructing lists such as the following: “jak Mistr Jan Hus, tak Jiřík z Poděbrad nakonec i profesor Masaryk” or “… jsem vyloupil hrobku pana Louise Ferdinanda Celina, Ungarettiho, Camuse, pana Erasma Rotterdamského, pana autora textu Idioti mají přednost, Ferlinghettiho a Kerouaca.” In another place, Mr. Hrabal writes:

Vrstva klobásy, pak vrstva ryzcdu, pak krájená paprika, pak vrstva špeku, pak krájená rajčata a pak vrstva klobásy a ryzcdu, tak vrstva za vrstvou, až nakonec ta klobása, všechno se zapeče na ohni a nakonec, když je to hotovo, mduže se to posypat strouhaným sýrem.

Sister Mary would have considered such constructions an abomination, and Mr. Hrabal would have had to stay after school with the rest of us to rewrite them. Sister's reaction is not unmitigated pedantry. What offends the English ear is well tolerated by the Czech one. Because he is writing for English readers, the translator must recast the offending sentences into parallel constructions. Otherwise, the author will sound shabby and seedy.

Beyond vocabulary, grammar and syntax, Czech and English have developed different styles of expression. Czech, it seems to me, still bears the effects of what Václav Černý has called the Czech spirit's Babylonian captivity by Walhalla of the Herders, later of the Hegels and perhaps even of Husserls (Paměti, p. 87). Czech expansiveness and its convoluted, vague sentences when literally translated become verbose and ponderous in English. Commonly used phrases such as nelze pochybovat o tom, že, bylo by dobře si připomenout, že, or na druhé straně však nelze neuznat, že, when faithfully reproduced in English appear as mindless padding. In becoming the lingua franca of science and commerce, modern English has acquired a standard of conciseness and precision. If a translator ignores these implicit requirements, he makes the author a muddle-headed pumpkin too lazy to write clearly.

Too fine a writer to compose in an overblown style, Mr. Hrabal does not escape the tyranny of the long baroque Czech sentence. He obviously has never heard Sister Mary's rule that a sentence must be read in one breath. I tried to read a page of his text in this manner and turned blue. Although Mr. Hrabal writes in compounded rather than complex sentences, nowhere does he approach that standard terseness of modern English prose. Mr. Hrabal does not write like Ernest Hemmingway. Yet, somewhere in the pantheon of English literature, the nearly desperate translator recalls, someone wrote in a style similar to Mr. Hrabal's. That discursiveness, and that pulling at the heartstrings … Yes, Dickens, Thackeray and other nineteenth century greats … That Hrabalian opening of Charles Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities comes to mind:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …

Momentarily, the translator rejoices; she has found the proper cadence. However, Mr. Hrabal is a thoroughly modern author, even avant-guard one, who dips generously into surrealism and stream-of-consciousness. Although appearing as an artless collage, his prose is as carefully constructed and orchestrated as a symphony. How can I make this nineteenth century style leap into modernity, the translator wonders.

In fact, this is the translator's perpetual task: to leap from one way of thinking to another while ostensibly remaining in the same place. If the jump is successful, no one notices that the translator has assumed another's persona in the process nor the strain of the undertaking. Yet, for all her efforts, the translator is much maligned. The public at large consider her profession a second rate occupation and a dishonest one to boot. Even the French, usually so tolerant of human idiosyncrasies, take a dim view: Une traduction est comme une femme quand elle est belle, elle n'est pas fidèle. [‘A translation is like a woman when she is beautiful, she is not faithful.’] The Italians are even more to the point: Traduttore traditore [Translator, traitor]. People whisper, and not only behind the hapless translator's back: “Those who can write do, those who cannot translate.”

Taking my courage in hand, I asked Mr. Hrabal what he considered a translator's role. He knew all to well, I suspect, that my heart was in my throat. “It is to write the text as the author would have written it were he writing in that language,” he said. My heart descended to its usual place. Hope and daring pumped through my veins.

Emboldened, I now dare to whisper what possessed me to undertake so foolish a venture. In translating this text, for one shining moment, I become Bohumil Hrabal going from tavern to tavern and Sister Mary teaching her charges. At the same time, I remain, what I have always been, the little girl, who while sitting demurely in the third row, second seat, is carried through the world far and wide on the kite of her imagination.

Yes, dear husband and gentle readers, there is a psychoanalytical term for translating. It is … sublimation.