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

Between childhood and retirement age Bohumil Hrabal lived in quite an odd mix of homes: his grandparents’ house in Brno-Židenice, the service flat at the local brewery in Polná, the brewery at Nymburk, where his parents eventually acquired a house of their own and thereafter led the typical lifestyle of the financially secure middle class, then he left (some might say fled from) his parents and went to Prague and a number of often bizarre sub-lets, leading finally to working-class Libeň and bare, non-residential premises that he furnished himself and where he finally felt happy. Life goes on, however, and the 43-year-old bachelor got married in December 1956. And although his accommodation on Na hrázi Street saw some gradual improvements, his wife never stopped dreaming of a proper flat with central heating and a flush toilet. The couple joined a housing cooperative and in June 1973 moved into a tower block in Kobylisy. It has to be said that Hrabal never felt happy in the tower block, and whenever he could, he would escape to his chalet at Kersko, where, among others, his brother Slávek lived quite close. The famous writer soon became a kind of icon for the chalet colony and he himself drew widely on the lives of his neighbours for many of his stories.

Cottages or chalets as second homes were quite a phenomenon of Czechoslovakia under normalisation. Anyone who could would escape for the weekend from the towns and cities to the countryside, where they would work hard on doing up their second dwelling. This was almost a reflex reaction to multi-occupancy living, where people were crammed in cheek by jowl with no escape distance, which we are genetically encoded to need and without which we are apt to suffer stress and other psychological problems. The perpetuity of normalisation added another argument: in a situation with endless prohibitions of anything under the sun one looked for a space for self-realisation. And that is what gradually turned the tiny community of Kersko, not far from Nymburk, into the ‘sylvan township’ so brilliantly portrayed by Jiří Menzel in the opening sequence of his film version of The Snowdrop Festival. Bohumil Hrabal’s stories have ensured Kersko’s immortality.

In the present edition we have sought to preserve the author’s original intention. As against the original Snowdrop Festival collection, we have omitted ‘The Most Beautiful Eyes’ and ‘Children’s Day’, which in both form and content seem rather out of line with the rest. The text of ‘Variations on a Beautiful Girl’ appears in its later version as ‘Adagio lamentoso’, and we have added the 1972 story ‘The Maid of Honour’, which is entirely in harmony with the other texts in the collection. The texts are based on Vol. 8 of Sebrané spisy Bohumila Hrabala (The Collected Works of B. H.; Prague: Pražská imaginace, 1993), where further details can be found on the collection’s evolution. Let it be noted in conclusion that the collection, as Slavnosti sněženek, has re-appeared in the Czech Republic several times already and continues to do so with various editorial changes.

Václav Kadlec February 2014

Pražská imaginace

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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.