Place: Czechoslovakia

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Lucky Beny by Simona Bohatá

May 10, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Alžběta Belánová

“You’re gonna be a famous photographer . . . you’ve got an eye for it, you see 'it,’ dude, they can’t teach you that at no school.”

This Translation Tuesday, we feature an excerpt from Simona Bohatá’s novel that offers the reader a kaleidoscopic perspective on a slice of the working class in 1980s Czechoslovakia. With prose reminiscent of Bohumil Hrabal, the novel was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Prize in the Czech Republic where the jury praised Bohatá’s characters as “so full-blooded that we can almost feel their pulse.” As you glimpse into this fascinating novel of the everyday, hear from translator Alžběta Belánová on the intricacies of representing the Prague slang. 

“The novel offers an up-close-and-personal look at the grimy, crumbling world of workers’ settlements, pubs and salvage yards in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the lively assortment of bizarre characters who inhabit it. Young Beny leaves home to escape a violent and abusive father to find refuge at a scrapyard run by someone they call the Fabrikant. Together with Hany who is handicapped, a drifter called Julča and Beny’s brother Vítek, they form a quirky new family. While the author certainly shows the dark and disturbing reality of this era—Beny and the others were certainly dealt a hard hand in life—the book doesn’t just serve up misery as the real time storyline moves in an almost optimistic direction. Beny is truly lucky, as he manages to find a better job and ends up having more time for his one passion, which is photography. As with other Simona Bohatá’s works, the biggest challenge for the translator is capturing the atmosphere of the novel, which the author achieves through the use of heavy working-class Prague slang, what is more, spoken by teenagers. Linguistically, I found a parallel with The Basketball Diaries memoir (and similar such works), which achieves the same effect through the use of heavy New York slang and a disarmingly familial tone of the various journal entries. I found this quite inspiring for my translation and was able to draw on that to find the right voice for Beny and the others.”

—Alžběta Belánová 

Beny 

He was mad as hell as he walked up the street, angry with himself for letting it get to him even after all these years. He ran into them stupidly on the corner right by the ice cream parlour. They were laughing but stopped when they caught sight of him. Two, maybe three of them said “hey,” while the others bent their heads down in embarrassment. Beny was ten times more embarrassed though because they split the embarrassment up among themselves but he had to go at it alone. 

Classmates, he thought and smirked to himself. They were thick as thieves all of year eight including Jana and Bingo whose grades were just as shitty as Beny’s. But Bingo’s mom came down hard on him, forced him to start cramming and managed to get him through to ninth grade. No one came down hard on Beny though, so he had to go off to trade school right out of eighth grade while Bingo went on to ninth grade with all the others and then on to grammar school. 

He was a leper to them ever since. It only took one time when he met up with them after summer vacation to figure that out. He was sitting with them outside the Bookworm restaurant and it was as though he was invisible to them. They wouldn’t look him in the eye. Jana was latched on to Bingo who was telling idiotic stories. The very same Jana who was telling him how much she loved him only half a year ago. They didn’t even notice when he left. He didn’t see them for more than four years after that and now he had to go and run into them all together like that.

He wanted to go home but felt all out of sorts so he headed to the scrapyard.

“Fuck them, dude . . . they’re just spoiled brats.” Fabri handed him an opened bottle and Beny took a big gulp to wash the anger down. Fabri went on with his philosophizing.

“Where the hell would they be without their filthy rich fathers? Bullshit, rich brats . . . with parents in high places . . .” He shot a side glance at Beny and was glad to see him smile.  READ MORE…

A Tribute to Antonín J. Liehm

February 4, 2021  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Aleksander Kaczorowski and Julia Sherwood

I couldn’t have wished for a more ideal guide to Czech history and culture than A.J. Liehm.

Czech journalist Antonín J. Liehm was a leading public intellectual who passed away on December 4, 2020, aged ninety-six. One of the movers and shakers of the cultural and political ferment of the Prague Spring, he left the country after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and it was largely thanks to Liehm’s tireless work in exile that essays by Václav Havel and many other Czech authors reached readers in Western Europe and the United States before 1989. To help bridge the gap between the East and the West, he founded the ground-breaking journal Lettre International, which in its heyday appeared in thirteen different countries and languages. In this essay, Polish writer and journalist Aleksander Kaczorowski pays tribute to his mentor.

In the spring of 1992 my wife and I went to Sofia for our honeymoon. Don’t ask why, of all places, we picked Sofia: it was a random choice, yet one resulting in one of the major discoveries of my younger years. It was there, in the Bulgarian capital, at the Czech Centre, that I stumbled across a book that I bought and virtually devoured before our holiday was over.

The book, Generace (A Generation), was a collection of interviews with Czech and Slovak writers that was finally able to appear in Czechoslovakia, after a twenty-year delay. It featured many authors whom I had already come to love and whose books had enticed me to study Czech language and literature at Warsaw University: Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, and Václav Havel, as well as many others whose work I would get to know only later, like Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík, or the great Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka. Many of them had joined the communist party in their youth, and in these interviews conducted by Liehm between 1963 and 1968, they take a critical look at their own involvement, as well as the contemporary social and political situation in Czechoslovakia. They called for political changes (many of them did indeed play a key role in the Prague Spring of 1968) but what interested me most was what they had to say at the time about literature, the sources of their literary inspiration, and their own plans. In particular, the interview with Kundera—whom Liehm had met when they were both young, their friendship lasting nearly seventy years, until his death—was full of extraordinarily interesting biographical details that are hard to find in later interviews with the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book became unacceptable to the censors. Instead of Prague, it first appeared in Paris in 1970, together with a lengthy preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. German, English, Spanish, and Japanese editions soon followed. Over the next twenty years, several of the writers featured in the book achieved world-wide fame. However, until I encountered in Sofia the reissued Czech edition of A Generation published in 1990, I knew next to nothing about the man who had conducted the interviews: the Czech exile journalist Antonín J. Liehm. READ MORE…