My Golden Trades.

Schubert, Peter Z.

The latest addition to the extensive list of Ivan Klima's publications in English, the novel Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994; see WLT 69:2, p. 395) has just been favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Even before this special attention, however, Klima undoubtedly was one of the most frequently translated and most popular Czech writers. Although his latest novel found its way to the American reader very fast, this was not the case with My Golden Trades. The 1993 Penguin Books edition referred to a concurrent publication on both sides of the Atlantic, but in actual fact the U.S. reader had to wait another year to obtain his copy. This being the case, it comes as a surprise that the long-awaited U.S. edition uses British spelling.

My Golden Trades is the third - both chronologically and thematically - in a series of short-prose collections correlated by the author's style and autobiographical inspiration. The other two parts of the "trilogy" are Moje pruni lasky (My First Loves; see WLT 60:1, p. 137) and My Merry Mornings (see WLT 54:4, p. 663). Although Moje pruni lasky came into samizdat circulation only in 1981, three years after My Merry Mornings, it is chronologically the first of the cycle as the thirteen- to twenty-five-year-old narrator experienced his "first loves" in the 1940s and 1950s, and My Merry Mornings follows, as the action of these narratives takes place in the 1970s. Moreover, two of the stories in the latter collection already deal with the "golden trades," which the writer had to practice in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was banned from publishing - the general theme of My Golden Trades. This, of course, is also the central theme of Klima's more recent Love and Garbage (see WLT 65:2, p. 325).

My Golden Trades consists of six "stories," each - except for the first one, "The Smuggler's Story" - named after one of the occupations the author performed between 1979 and 1987. In other words, he painted, worked on archaeological digs, drove a locomotive, worked as a courier and as a surveyor's helper. "The Archaeologist's Story" is the second oldest among the selections, and it was previously published in the emigre journal Listy (16:5) in 1986. The first complete edition of these stories did not come out, however, until 1990, after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic, and by virtue of the depicted yet no-longer-existing reality, the collection automatically took on a "historical" character.

Klima, the "I"-narrator, presents his experiences and the absurdity and tragedy of life in Czechoslovakia during "normalization." Although the author is very careful with his linguistic tools, the same is unfortunately not the case with the translator Paul Wilson, who frequently omits parts of sentences, as in the following examples: "he had [perhaps after his father or mother] a dark complexion" and "he was a [career soldier who attained the rank of] colonel in the army." Elsewhere he abbreviates sentences so that "inspired poets to verses and visions of the world in which they wished to live until they had to live there" becomes "poets, who did not live there," or "for whom the books were intended, so they could get him, too" becomes "who the books were for," which usually spoils the style. As a result, he ends sentences with prepositions, omits explanations, destroys images, and impedes the flow of the narration. Moreover, this makes one wonder whether the sections omitted in Wilson's rendition were deleted by the author or by the translator. Other examples of the inept translation are the rendition of "your imagination is running away with you" as the brief "Rubbish," "nonsense" as "bullshit," "two dormitories with 300 beds each and they are full of marauders already" as "two dormitories and they filled them." Moreover, Wilson translates idioms literally: "Let them eat [keep] the stupid keys, if they want." On rare occasions he adds to a sentence with rather peculiar results: "[I remembered how,] 247 years ago," or "I am taking this opportunity" becomes "Permit me to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity." Furthermore, he obviously looked up several words in the dictionary and in the process discovered mistranslations that are not his own. Thus, "bucket" (dzber), for instance, is translated as "tub" and "overnight detoxification center" (zachytna stanice) as "detention center." One can add to the mistranslations also the computer "key-punch cards" referred to as "perforated labels," "power plants" that become "nuclear generating plants," "dispose of them" which becomes "hide them safely away," "Sclerosis Multiplex" as "Parkinson's Disease," et cetera. In addition, Wilson disregards the declension in the Czech original (e.g., Komorany becomes Komoran and Julek becomes Julka) but keeps the Czech gender for "death" and refers to the grim reaper as "she."

One could go on, showing how, for instance, "by her appearance, Angela did justice to her name" becomes "she looked like the angel in her name," or "A lousy brass-hat irritatingly talked at us" is transformed into "An officer with a lot of brass on his shoulders came and gave us a pep-talk," a simple "bus depot" becomes an "open-air-bus station," and flags, right next to the washbasin, glowing with colors become flags leaning against a brightly colored washbasin, or how Wilson translates some abbreviations and leaves others in the original. It comes rather as a surprise both that the author, who speaks English, accepted this translation and that My Golden Trades remains interesting and well worth reading.

Peter Z. Schubert University of Alberta