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.
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