Translator’s Note

The twin forces of global economy and world culture are having quite an impact on traditional national and ethnic cultures, making universal communication both necessary and possible.

The message of Svejk, one man surviving absurdity, is universal. As English is the lingua franca of the present times, a good English translation of Jaroslav Hasek’s modern classic could serve to provide a universal good.

However, the world into which Svejk was born was very particular and is now dated even in its own geographic extension of Central Europe. An increasing number of linguistic, cultural, and historical phenomena often escape the understanding even of Czechs. An eloquent piece of evidence of this is the existence of a two-volume Encyklopedie pro milovníky Svejka (An Encyclopedia For Those Who Love Svejk).

The first volume of our new translation of the Good Soldier Svejk, i.e. Book One, was translated and edited by the authors in three months. Many expressed their appreciation for the result of our effort to bring to the readers a translation that would allow them to have insights unobtainable by reading the previous English versions.

This volume, Book Two, and the remaining volume, Book(s) Three & Four, have been in the making over a much longer period of time. Not all the time that has passed since the publication of the Book One paperback was devoted to the mechanics of translating the remaining books. However, much of it was spent eating, breathing and living the material, even if not actually translating it at any given moment. On a few occasions the struggle to open a particularly hard-to-crack translating nut continued even during the translator’s sleep.

There are differences you might notice. Some represent a differing solution to a problem of translating a particular word or phrase. For example, "nadporuèík Lukás" in the Czech original, i.e. "Lieutenant Lukás" in Book One, is now "Senior Lieutenant Lukás". No, he hasn’t been promoted. His rank, ‘oberleutnant’ in German, remains the same. And yes, there isn’t a ‘Senior Lieutenant’ rank in the U.S. or UK armed forces. Why the change?

While Lukás is ‘oberleutnant’ to the Germans, ‘Lieutenant’ to the English, and ‘First Lieutenant’ to the Americans, (unless you happen to sail with the U.S. Navy, in which case he would be ‘Lieutenant J.G.’), his rank ought to be understood by any English language reader anywhere. That is not necessarily easy to achieve, especially in the U.S. as there is no universal draft and the basic knowledge of military nomenclature is becoming less common.

Apparently, there are two (and sometimes three) levels of the lieutenant rank in a number of countries across the globe. It seemed reasonable to convey Lukás’ ‘lieutenant’ kind of rank as ‘Senior Lieutenant’, aligning him with the uppermost of the customary lieutenant ranks anywhere, regardless of the military service branch, the historic period or language.

The second of the most apparent changes is the solution of the very complicated problem of rendering the many non-Czech words, phrases, proper names, titles and even a few blue-streaks into English. To give the reader the flavor of the real-world multi-culturalism of Austria-Hungary, in Book One and the first versions of the remaining volumes published as e-books the original German, Polish and Hungarian phrases were left in, italicized, and followed by a comma and the English translation.

During reader testing of Book Two this original solution hampered readability and diminished reading enjoyment. Svejk is now on his way to the front with the military in which German is the official language, he travels through Hungary and Poland, meeting local residents and soldiers from all corners of the Empire and eventually even soldiers fighting for the other side. The number of utterances in foreign languages increases accordingly. To overcome the reported readability problem, the most reasonable option appeared to be to omit the foreign language text wherever we can assume the average Czech likely to read the book in the 1920s would understand it. Instead, only the translations are included, printed in italics to indicate that the words were spoken in a foreign language. After applying this solution, however, the identity of the foreign language is not immediately apparent. Yet, which foreign language the words originated in can usually be discerned from the context or by direct reference.

By the time you get to page 22 in this volume you will most probably know and remember that an italicized ‘you’ should indicate that the original Czech text contains a word meaning ‘you’ in a foreign language other than Czech. The italicized ‘you’ is a singular and important exception to this rule. The ‘you’ stands for the Czech word ‘oni’, pronounced ‘'oh-nyi’. It means ‘they’ and is used here in place of ‘you’. Why? The word isn’t foreign, but its use is, in a very significant way.

During the 300 years of Austrian imperial regime, the German language virtually replaced Czech among the successful and ambitious Czechs. The process of Germanization didn’t stop with them. When in the 18^th century the Czech National Revival started, programmatically driven by the intellectuals, much of the writing, including treatises on the Czech language, was done in German.

European languages, with the exception of English, retain the device of showing respect by addressing another person using a form of the personal pronoun other than the second person singular. Most, with the exception of at least German and Finnish, do it by using the second person plural of the personal pronoun and the corresponding form of the verb.

To complicate things further, in modern English there is no way to indicate whether the speaker is addressing one person or many people when saying ‘you’. Unless, of course, he’s from the American South and makes himself clear by saying ‘y’all’. The means of the familiar address, the second person singular pronoun in English used to be ‘thou’. ‘You’ was reserved for the second person plural. ‘You’ eventually replaced ‘thou’. Therefore, using the pronoun ‘you’ among the masses of secular mortals nowadays when addressing a single person is actually showing mutual respect and maintaining distance. At the same time, in a linguistically and socially bizarre twist we refer to even casual acquaintances and strangers we merely conduct business with by their first name. (The capitalized ‘Thou’ is retained only among some Christians to address God with whom we’re supposed to be on first name basis and on really good terms and show respect to at the same time.)

Now, consider this: the Germans use the pronoun ‘Sie’, the capitalized form of ‘sie’, i.e. ‘they’, when addressing a stranger or showing respect to age, position, or maintaining distance. Remember the Czech ‘petty bourgeoisie’ under the German speaking Austrian rule? It must have been they who introduced, spread and maintained the habit of using this German rule of grammar when speaking Czech: using the third person plural pronoun ‘oni’ in place of the second person plural ‘Vy’, i.e. ‘You’ (capitalized in writing in conformance with the German grammar and to distinguish it from the proper form of the second person plural,‘vy’). ‘Germanisms’, most often simply German words with Czech endings, persist in the Czech language and are still used today. Fortunately, using ‘they’ instead of ‘you’, a particularly onerous ‘Germanism’, has disappeared at last. However, among the snobbish ‘petty bourgeoisie’, a cultural equivalent of the latter day U.S. "upper middle class", it was in use even after the demise of the Habsburg rule of 1918.

Can you image living in a society where foreigners and their language rule? Can you imagine the successful and the turncoats among your own people twisting your own language to conform to the unique rule of the oppressors’ language? Perhaps you can now begin to ponder how many levels of communication there are when, as you’ll read later on, a police station chief addresses an old hag gofer of his in the manner signifying respect or distance that he borrowed from the language of the foreign oppressors. Is the hag being given respect, is it just a habit to address her in such a way because she is older, or is she being mocked? Some would argue that the police station chief is mocking her, that his mocking is habitual and the manner of speech is mocking-habit-forming. Imagine hearing this speech phenomenon for another twenty years after your country had been liberated and become free and independent. And that is just a single point of language.

It’s been said by literary critics that Book One is the best of the four. For example, Hasek’s writing is said to had been more disciplined. It was perhaps easier to write about the familiar world he lived in and wrote about his whole life before the onset of the "War to End All Wars". Book One introduces that world to those who are not familiar with it. For those "in the know" it is a hilarious stroll down the familiar paths: the pubs, cops, politics, houses of ill repute, eking out a living. Even after Svejk already joined the military, life goes on as usual. He and his cohorts might be in uniform, but frequent the same pubs, interact with the same people under similar circumstances. The military is not much different than the police. It’s just another uniformed service diminishing one’s options and pleasure, only to be outwitted and largely ignored.

Book One sets the stage for what follows once Svejk moves out with his outfit to go to the front. If the writing seems to be more disorderly and fragmented in the rest of the volumes, whether by design or default, it matches more closely the reality of heading for war than the easy going, relatively well constructed and better polished narrative of the first volume.

As the text progresses, it becomes clear this is not a book meant for the light entertainment of the leisure class. There have been quite a few "livingers", people making a living from interpreting what Hasek meant by what he wrote and arguing among themselves. If the common working people find the text funny or even hilarious, it is because, as Chicago writer Don DeGrazia put it, it is "a bellowing barroom brawl of a book that will forever have everyday people doubled-up with the painful laughter of recognition". Such laughing people know Svejk without having to analyze him or the text he lives in.

They know what it takes to survive. When "svejking", most don’t know, as Peter Steiner put it in his Tropos Kynikos: Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk , that the "Modern society has refined the tools for coercing its citizens to be cooperative, and the latter-day kynik must negotiate his or her unimpeded passage through a hostile world with rhetorical strategies that his Greek ancestors could comfortably forgo." But they deploy those strategies honed for generations with zest and keep on surviving. Under any circumstances. Any regime. Anywhere.