Those who keep up on world news will know that Belarus is commonly described nowadays as Europe’s last dictatorship, another reality reflected in The Devil’s Workshop. One example of this is the scene in Minsk where the Belarusian President appears on TV and declares martial law. This does not depict an actual event, but the words Topol puts in the mouth of the President are based on the text of a controversial and disputed interview with Alexander Lukashenko from 1995.
This mixing, and blurring, of fact and fiction is one of Topol’s favoured techniques, though, as I learned when I was translating City Sister Silver, the more blood-chilling the anecdote, the more likely it is to be true. As I wrote in my preface to that book, unearthing the sources Topol drew on was a major part of my work on his first novel. With The Devil’s Workshop he took a different approach, including acknowledgements that cite, among other things, the source of the stories told by the macabre talking corpses in Alex’s museum: they are taken directly from the testimony of Belarusians who survived atrocities similar to the ones in Khatyn.
A more personal note on the interplay between fact and fiction: one of the events that happened in my own backyard while I was translating this novel was the birth of the Occupy movement. Hearing the participants and sympathetic observers comparing it to the Arab Spring, which in turn had been compared to the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, I couldn’t help seeing some kinship between the people occupying Zuccotti Park and, in Topol’s novel, the bunk seekers who ‘occupied’ Terezín, and the protesters with their tents on the square in Minsk. Before I ever met Topol, as a graduate student in 1990, I had read about him — not only because of his poetry but also because of his work as a human-rights activist. As a reporter for a samizdat newspaper, Topol was intimately involved in the downfall of communism in Czechoslovakia. This was on my mind in mid November 2011, when the New York Police Department violently dismantled the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park. There is always a continuity, of varying visibility, that sneaks from the past into literature, into the present, and back again, and I was acutely conscious of it while working on this translation.
Finally, a few words about the title: Topol’s original name for the book was Ďáblova dílna (‘The Devil’s Workshop’). Shortly before its publication in Czech, however, a German film was released called Die Fälscher (‘The Counterfeiters’), which in the Czech Republic was retitled Ďáblova dílna, so in order to avoid confusion Topol and his publisher decided to call this novel Chladnou zemí (‘Through a Cold Land’ — another phrase that appears in the book). A Czech friend of mine, pointing out the cold/hot dichotomy between the two titles, told me she preferred the newer one, since it better corresponded to the novel’s chilly mood and atmosphere. I agreed with her but still felt that ‘Through a Cold Land’ (or simply ‘A Cold Land’), if less of a cliché, was also less evocative, and seeing that most translators of the novel into other languages had opted for Topol’s original title, I decided to do the same.
Alex Zucker
Brooklyn, November 2012