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

The Czechs are sometimes portrayed as rather materialistic in their outlook (if not noticeably more than many other nations), so, amongst other things, money matters. That does not transpire particularly in this book, though a crude form of materialism is perhaps what channels into monomania, whether this is to do with apple-growing, rabbit-breeding or the hoarding of utterly useless bargains. Money does figure in a reference to a ‘hard-currency shop’, which may be lost on some readers: the Czechoslovakia of the day had, in essence, two currencies: the Czechoslovak crown (koruna československá) as standard, but non-convertible, and the Tuzex crown, which was obtained by exchanging any (strictly legally, but frequently illicitly acquired) foreign, convertible currencies and then used in the special Tuzex shops filled with sundry ‘Western’, thus highly desirable goods (there are a few other scattered hints in the book that ‘West is best’, common throughout Communist central and eastern Europe). Hence the dream of one character’s purchasing through Tuzex a Simca, that late lamented (?) French car. The observant reader will no doubt notice that not once does the everyday Czechoslovak car, the Škoda, get a mention, though we find plenty of East German Trabants, relatively easily obtainable at the time, but often rudely dismissed as a two-stroke wheelbarrow with a cardboard body and the butt of countless jokes; and the local policeman (incidentally, a splendid caricature) drives around, as they did, in a Volga, a fairly lumbering saloon from the unloved Soviet Union. Both cars mentioned (ignoring the Opel owned by a resident of West Germany) have, then, inherently negative connotations.

For the rest, I believe that these stories have a deep core of general humanity and as such they call for no further comment and can be read for the sheer pleasure of it.

The Czech, or uniquely Hrabalesque, version of what I have finally called rambling (the underlying verb pábit is not actually Hrabal’s invention, though most Czechs associate it uniquely with him) varies in fact from almost hectoring at one end of the scale to burbling at the other. I quite liked the notion of ‘burbling’ for at least one of its dictionary definitions as ‘talking excitedly and rather incoherently’ (Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, rev. edn., 1966), and because, in its Czech manifestation, it is apt to exploit asyndeton to a degree far in excess of the neutral norm, and Czech already uses it rather more than English, inside and outside literature; this rate of asyndeton is just one of the features that add to the sense of ‘incoherence’. Yet it remains — in Hrabal’s Czech — sustainable, ‘natural’, while in English it would definitely be ‘too much of a good thing’. Consequently, I have not reproduced it here at every occurrence; the two grammars are sufficiently different overall for the slightly incoherent in one language to verge on the incomprehensible in the other. I finally selected ‘rambling’ as the core notion, since to describe some of the narrations, whether in the Ich or er mode, as ‘burbling’ would seem a little harsh. What I was not predisposed to do was to sustain the link with previous translations of pábení as ‘palavering’ and of pábitelé as ‘palaverers’. However, readers familiar with other translations from Hrabal containing these expressions should know that this is what my ‘rambling on’ is.