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

One often has the feeling that many things did not matter much to Hrabal. Although an obvious polymath with considerable knowledge of cats, dogs, football, optics, butchery, cinema, philosophy, motor-cycle racing…, and very widely read, he does sometimes get or appear to get things wrong. By design, to tease, or just because he has forgotten, cannot be bothered to check, or because it doesn’t matter anyway? Take Emerson Fittipaldi: one can understand why, in the ramblings of the particular oddball being reported (Leli, in the eponymous story), we find ourselves reading about Messrs Fittipaldi and Emerson, that is, two riders. That Hrabal himself knew that Emerson Fittipaldi is one person only transpires from another story not included in the present collection. But he also ‘forgot’ that Fittipaldi had two t’s in his name and Emerson one m, which would scarcely have shown in the diction of the character being reported; Hrabal is generally abysmal at foreign names, personal or geographical, though I have rectified them all in the translation. In another story omitted from this collection, Leni in the film Three Faces West is described, again by others, not by the narrating Hrabal himself, as played by Helen MacKellar, whereas in fact she was played by Sigrid Gurie, though Helen MacKellar is also in the film. Does it matter? Perhaps not, but it does irk this particular translator. And when Hrabal decides to cite something in English, he, like possibly every Czech writer at least since Karel Matěj Čapek-Chod (1860–1927), and doubtless before him, gets it wrong: the famous tune played by Helmuth Zacharias was called Fascination, not ‘The Fascination’, as reiterated umpteen times in the original of one of the stories herein. Where Hrabal got the definite article from is a mystery, not least because the first reference to the song is of its title’s actually being read from a gramophone label; I have elected, I believe fairly, to drop the article. In Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp, conceived as a fully edited translation, it was appropriate to use footnotes; in the present collection I believe it would not be. I offer the following sparing remarks as a partial substitute.

The more enquiring reader can easily, if lacking the immediate knowledge, discover what the wartime (Nazi German) Protectorate (of Bohemia and Moravia) was, and he does not need fully to understand the details of the civil administration of post-war Czechoslovakia with its hierarchy of ‘national committees’, but he may be largely in the dark about the earliest history of the area in Central Bohemia where Kersko lies (see map). In somewhat hyperbolic terms, the up-and-down hostility between neighbouring villages is portrayed with all the whimsy of an arch ‘rambler’ who knows his history as reaching back to the tenth century and the power struggle arising out of the dynastic rivalries between the Slavníks and Přemyslids, two powerful houses in this very area. Members of the powerful Vršovec family, on the Přemyslid side, did, as described herein, slaughter most of the Slavníks in the church at nearby Libice.

The reader can probably infer easily that a Czech hunt is carried on rather differently from how it would be run in Britain, whether before or after the ban on hunting with hounds introduced in 2005, and is in fact more like stalking (though that is not the word used by Hrabal). I believe it is also easily read between the lines that there is a ritual element to the domestic slaughter of a pig and that the whole proceeding is an entirely ‘normal’ custom among quite ordinary Czech folk. It can equally be so read that other customs, whether to do with food (fining salamis like fining wines, to give them that extra edge; beer ordered from and served at the table in a pub, not stood for at the bar) or with the Christian calendar (carolling and some pagan frolicking between the sexes at Easter; the mass domestic production and consumption of a range of sweetmeats at Christmas) are precisely that: customs that the reader may not instantly recognise, but should be able to take on board and accept as genuine local colour. More subtly, the reader accustomed to death personified as the ‘grim reaper’, portrayed as male, may initially be puzzled by references to Death as female. Among various metaphorical expressions for death, in Czech she likewise carries a scythe (and is skeletal), but her gender is simply motivated by the word for death, smrt, which is grammatically feminine (Czech and the other Slavonic languages have, like German or Latin, three genders).