skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
[personal profile] skygiants
This summer I virtuously read The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the Great War, the Classic Czech Satire about how World War I was stupid and pretty much everyone in it was also stupid.

The introduction of my battered old library edition was a thing of fascination and beauty. Here, translator Cecil Parrot (a name perfectly suited to him, he writes exactly like a Cecil Parrot) complains about how English is a deeply inadequate language to translate this novel into:

"A further complication is the richness of Czech 'bad language' as compared with our own. In common with other Slavic languages and with German, Czech can boast a wide range of words of abuse in all shades of intensity. We cannot match those in Britain, where -- no doubt under the influence of puritanism -- the bulk of our terms of abuse are too mild and our strong expressions are limited to one or two hackneyed obscenities. Czech words of abuse generally involve domestic animals, excrement or the parts of the body connected with it. The English relate mainly to sexual functions or perversions, although there is in this respect a narrow area of common ground between the two languages. If the reader finds a certain monotony in the words chosen by the translator I hope he will realize that the bandsman has to operate within the limits of his instrument."

YOU ARE FORGIVEN simply for giving me that paragraph, Cecil Parrot!

I also deeply enjoyed the biographical details about the author Jaroslav Hasek, a wacky anarchist-slash-practical joker who forged dog pedigrees, wrote a bunch of articles for a scientific journal excitedly describing the discovery of made-up new species, and once got himself arrested as a Russian spy for the lulz.

The book itself is 800 pages of Svejk bouncing through the army serenely and viciously trolling everybody he comes across, which is fun for the first two hundred pages but then starts to pall a little if you have no particular vested interest in seeing Czech army officers consistently and viciously trolled. But it was worth lugging the whole thing around for the introduction alone.

Date: 2012-11-16 10:10 pm (UTC)
holyschist: Image of a medieval crocodile from Herodotus, eating a person, with the caption "om nom nom" (Default)
From: [personal profile] holyschist
Hmm, if I am not specifically interested in Czech officers being trolled, but just in how serene military trolling works in general, do you think this would be relevant to my interests?

Date: 2012-11-17 12:03 am (UTC)
minkhollow: (here at the end of all things)
From: [personal profile] minkhollow
I looked at the title and then went 'SVEJK!' I read a little bit of it in college, actually. Don't remember much, but it doesn't sound like I missed much.

Date: 2012-11-18 02:05 am (UTC)
minkhollow: (two generations of win)
From: [personal profile] minkhollow
I took a class about Bohemia/Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic that covered from... 1860sish through WWII. There was also Modern Europe, but that was a much broader class, so I feel like Svejk had to be in the Bohemia one.
(Same prof taught both classes. He was pretty awesome, which is why I went back for more after Modern Europe.)

Date: 2012-11-17 02:53 am (UTC)
gramarye1971: Colonel Une aiming a handgun at the viewer (EP 7) (Gundam Wing: Diplomat)
From: [personal profile] gramarye1971
I have The Good Soldier Ċ vejk on my reading list as well, along with the 1979 samizdat Russian novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (which has a similar character type and plot structure). The Central and Eastern European folktale tradition of the wise fool really does seem to lend itself well to military satire....

Date: 2012-11-17 07:27 pm (UTC)
hebethen: (Default)
From: [personal profile] hebethen
I do declare, it gave me a positive thrill to suddenly see "samizdat". My Wernicke's area could've sworn I'd never come across that word again.

Date: 2012-11-18 03:52 am (UTC)
gramarye1971: title card from Spitting Image's Soviet Election Special '87 (Election Specialski)
From: [personal profile] gramarye1971
Hee! I do a fair amount of research on Soviet history, so samizdat works crop up with regularity. Although one of the more interesting books that I read recently about Soviet literature was an assessment of works that actually made it past the Party censors, pointing out that the 'legal' Soviet fiction is just as worthy of study in the West as the 'illegal' stuff. Good stuff.

Date: 2012-11-18 03:45 am (UTC)
gramarye1971: stack of old leatherbound books with the text 'Bibliophile' (Books)
From: [personal profile] gramarye1971
I was planning to place a hold and pick it up early this coming week to have it to hand for the holiday weekend, but my library system's catalogue has crashed! I will have to go find it myself, it seems, without having it waiting for me to collect.

Date: 2012-11-17 08:56 pm (UTC)
happydork: A graph-theoretic tree in the shape of a dog, with the caption "Tree (with bark)" (Default)
From: [personal profile] happydork
Czech words of abuse generally involve domestic animals, excrement or the parts of the body connected with it. The English relate mainly to sexual functions or perversions, although there is in this respect a narrow area of common ground between the two languages.

<3<3<3

I cannot pass up an opportunity to relate one of my great-uncle's favourite stories about my grandmother from when they were growing up (in then-Czechoslovakia). Once she was clowning around in a horse-riding lesson. The instructor took off his helmet and shouted at the sky, "Lord, shit in this hat that I might throw it at her."

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