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

Besides the striking rate of asyndeton, the language of these stories is rich in almost every other structural or artistic device — synonym pairs, oxymoron (heightening the depth of a thing; black teeth compared to white jasmine petals), anacoluthon, rhyme, alliteration and a general, but not universal rhythmicality. I would not wish to catalogue all the cases and how they were resolved in translation. Suffice it to say that where a feature was not soluble in situ, so to speak, I freely resorted to the hallowed (by such as Jiří Levý, a leading Czech theorist of translation) device of ‘compensation’, that is, allowing, for instance, alliteration or a casual rhyme at a point where there was none in the original in order to compensate for my failure to alliterate or rhyme in English where the Czech text is alliterative or rhyming. Possibly the trickiest to translate or compensate for are many of the anacolutha, since strict adherence to and/or compensation for them could easily create an unnatural, even unreadable text in English, and Hrabal’s texts are nothing if not readable, even where you have to wait several pages for the next full stop. The random, quasi-accidental nature of anacoluthon makes it difficult to ‘fake’, hence its incidence in the translation is markedly lower than in the original, as that of the semi-colon or full stop is somewhat higher. In other respects, I can only hope that I have been faithful to this increasingly appreciated writer, who, maddening though he can be, is always a pleasure to work on.

David Short February 2014