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  Originally published in Czech as Prst, ktery se nikdy nedotkne

  Czech original edition © 1995 Daniela Fischerová

  English translation and translator’s preface © 2000 Neil Bermel

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  except in the context of reviews.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  Fischerová, Daniela.

  [Prst, ktery se nikdy nedotkne. English]

  Fingers pointing somewhere else / by Daniela Fischerová ;

  translated from the Czech by Neil Bermel. -- 1st English-language ed.

  “Garrigue book.”

  ISBN 0-945774-44-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Fischerová, Daniela. Translations into English. I. Bermel, Neil. II. Title.

  PG5039.16.I82P7713 2000

  891.8’636--dc21 99-16409 CIP

  Contents

  Czech Pronunciation Guide

  Translator’s Preface

  My Conversations with Aunt Marie

  A Letter for President Eisenhower

  Boarskin Dances Down the Tables

  Far and Near

  Two Revolts in One Family

  Dhum

  The Thirty-Sixth Chicken of Master Wu

  Translator’s Preface

  In the final story of this collection, Fischerová puts her finger on a problem all translators face. At one point, an old man stares critically at his young but decrepit nephew and thinks: “How old he looks! At thirty-one I looked my thirty-one years, but I aged differently. There was a powerful current of youth, and a powerful current of old age surging against it, and their waters mixed with a roar, like a dam bursting. But him — he’s a ditch full of dried-up mud.”

  The narrator follows this interior monologue with the comment: “He saw this image with absolute clarity, but he did not think it, and if he had had to describe his nephew’s aging, he would not have found the word water, nor the word ditch, nor the word current.”

  All translators struggle with this need to look behind the words, to return to the essential images that underlie them. And yet, a piece of literature doesn’t reduce to a collection of pictures, sounds, smells, flavors. A literary translation’s success hangs on the goals and compromises the translator adopts when working with the author’s prose, trying to balance these two ways of perceiving the text.

  Authors like Daniela Fischerová, who chooses her words with extraordinary care, tempt the translator to bend all his effort to literal meaning. Fischerová’s prose constantly surprises in the way it combines unusual images and situates words in unexpected proximity to each other, keeping the reader slightly off balance, attentive to the linguistic medium as well as the literary message. This sense of unsteadiness and heightened awareness is central to the experience of reading Fischerová in Czech — but it is not all there is to it.

  In the end, translating the literal meaning of a sentence is straightforward. The agonizing, frustrating, hair-pulling bit is reducing the first draft to something readable that mirrors not only the author’s meaning but also her style and impact. Fischerová’s language is deceptively simple and compact. She has told me that she is as proud of what is not in these stories as of what is. Every word is there on purpose; all superfluities have been stripped away. Can a translator ignore this sort of mandate? A translation that fails to account for the economy and sound of the original will give the reader a radically different — and probably markedly inferior — experience.

  At each juncture, then, I have tried to recreate in English this balance between sense and style. This is where, I suspect, I am a bit obsessive. Right now, as I finish up the translation, I frequently count words and syllables on my fingers, asking myself if, for instance, I can really justify having twelve words where Fischerová gets away with only eight. I also scan the meter, read aloud, and measure the text visually, flipping back and forth between the original and the translation, trying to see whether the aural and visual impact of the two texts is roughly parallel. These are all primitive tools, but the translator needs some defenses against verbosity.

  As you may have gathered, what I hope you won’t find here is one of those zealously “faithful” translations that give you the feeling you’re reading something in an unfamiliar language, but with English words. I have no interest in such translations, either as a reader or as a translator. They serve no one outside the academy, and as I am also a teacher of Czech, I propose that those occasional academicians who want to study Czech literature in gory detail make the effort to learn the language. We could use the business, anyway.

  Here are a few of the balancing acts I’ve done in this translation.

  Fischerová constantly twists clichés and proverbs to fit her themes, a tactic that inevitably puts the translator on the rack. In “Letter for President Eisenhower,” the narrator, a young girl, writes about her first essay, “A Merry Christmas Party,” which she says was vycucaná z prstu, ‘made up.’ She then goes on to say that vycucanym detem se v ní dejí vycucané veci, literally ‘in it, made-up things happen to made-up children.’ The problem is that the expression vycucany z prstu literally means ‘sucked from one’s finger,’ echoing the ‘finger pointing somewhere else,’ Fischerová’s image for fiction and storytelling. The children and events are literally ‘sucked out,’ not ‘made up.’ This image will not survive in English, but I resisted using the pedestrian made-up. Instead, I substituted another metaphor: My “Merry Christmas Party” was made up out of thin air. About thin-air kids doing thin-air things. In this resolution, the unusualness of the combinations (thin-air kids, thin-air things) mirrors the effect in the Czech. Although the original allusion is lost, thin air becomes a forward reference to later in the story, when the narrator writes a scenario about mountain climbing. So the reference to creativity survives, if in an attenuated form.

  In other places, I simply let the author’s words stand, even though I knew their impact would be diluted by their cultural journe
y. For instance, in the story “Dhum,” a doctor describes his fascination with women who are “as bitterly beautiful and neglected as an October grave.” An October grave? In Czech culture, All Souls’ Eve falls in the first week of November; after nightfall, people visit the resting places of their deceased friends and family to light candles in their memory. On the days leading up to it, the cemeteries are crowded with people brushing the gravesites free of leaves, pulling weeds and cleaning the stones, preparing for the holiday. But by the following October many of the graves are overgrown and desolate once again. Without this cultural context, half the impact of the simile is lost. But the image of a grave in cold autumn is still striking enough, I felt, to survive the transition.

  Sometimes, however, respecting the original is of dubious value to the English-language reader. Czech, like many European languages, distinguishes between a formal and informal you (respectively vy and ty). The use of one or another conveys a wealth of information about a relationship. As might be expected from a writer so interested in language, Fischerová remarks on this distinction at points. When speaking of a friend in the story “Far and Near,” the narrator says, “we never stopped saying vy to each other.” And when two characters speak English in the story “Dhum,” the narrator notes that the Czech one “subconsciously translated the English you as vy.” Here, as a translator, I simply throw up my hands. Footnoting the sentence and explaining it exhaustively would solve one problem while instantly creating another. The Czech sentence explains matters economically in five words, not fifty. It does not distract the reader from the flow of the text nor introduce a new and unfamiliar concept. So I let such instances lie. In the first case, I translated it as we never dropped the formalities, while in the second I left it out altogether. And as for the rest of the ty-vy relationships in this book, interesting or no, they go unremarked and unmentioned in the translation.

  A translator, talented or otherwise, is only as good as those who back him up. So there are a few people waiting for their due.

  For a non-native speaker of Czech like myself, every text has dark corners that no dictionary or handbook can illuminate. A native-speaker consultant is an absolute must — but as every translator quickly learns, very few people have the breadth of knowledge and the grasp of translators’ issues to give reliable, solid advice. I am lucky to have a very kind, patient and extraordinarily knowledgeable consultant in Prague, Ilona Koránová. Herself an experienced translator from English who has worked with fiction, films, and television, she has over the past seven years fielded hundreds of questions from me about obscure words, quotations, idioms, names, customs and slang words. There is many a phrase in these stories that we have puzzled through over coffee or discussed at length by e-mail, and if this book reads by and large smoothly, I have Ilona to thank for the lack of “speed bumps” in it.

  I also owe a debt to Dr. Miriam Jelinek, School of East Asian Studies, and Dr. Petr Kopecky, Department of Politics, both of Sheffield University, and to Dr. Ivana Bozdechová of the Czech Language Department at Charles University, for their helpful and insightful commentary. Andrew Swartz was the first to wade into the English version with no recourse to the Czech, and offered many valuable comments. My father, Albert Bermel, himself a translator (of French and Italian drama), deserves thanks for his advice and support over the years. I would be remiss in not mentioning Catbird Press, in the person of Robert Wechsler, for taking my work from rough draft to final version with great care and insight, and for initiating numerous provocative and interesting discussions along the way.

  There are two ways to translate words from a language far removed in time, Fischerová says in this volume’s final story. “One is with the eternal present’s abbreviated arc, in the belief that the sense of words and things endures and, like Zeno’s arrow, hangs in flight. The other keeps to Babel’s model, clinging anxiously to the literal meaning of individual words confined to the solitary cell of their place and time. We choose the first method, but this does not mean it is the better one.”

  The dilemma, of course, applies to all languages, and every translator is intimately familiar with it. I’ve striven to do justice to Fischerová’s work in Zenoic fashion: if I’ve succeeded, the arrow will remain suspended, and the stories will seize you and engage you, as good works of fiction should, while the gears and machinery of my translation remain essentially invisible. Happy reading.

  Neil Bermel

  Sheffield, England

  August 1999

  My Conversations with Aunt Marie

  Is love finite or eternal? Aha!

  I am not quite five. A hazy memory: my parents have arrived on the evening train. Look: Mother had her braids cut off. Do I like it? I don’t. On the way back, Grandma cries over the braids. Then mother too bursts into tears. On a balcony in the twilight I study the curls almost oozing from her head — but I don’t remember that house having a balcony.

  Another memory: at a bend in the fence, tiny lavender flowers called slipperwort. I stick my fingers into them. I am sent to the garden for parsley, but return with empty hands (what is “parsley”?). My father the musician, who my grandma respectfully asks to write down the music for the song I “composed” yesterday. We are all standing downstairs in the hallway (Father has just arrived), each of them is singing over the next, but no one can recall exactly how the melody went. My own wavering, insistent voice. What I sing makes the least sense of all. Everyone snaps at me that that isn’t how it went. An overwhelming sense of alienation from my yesterday: surely my song is whatever I’m singing right now. The confused smile of my father, who is still holding his suitcase and feels out of place among all these women.

  Comings, goings, comings, goings. I am constantly threatened that my parents will be told how badly I behave, and then they are told what a good girl I am. I believe both. And most of all summer, summer, the massive surge of a child’s summer between four and five. Time without beginning or end. A boundless present: a raincoat I never take off. Where is it?

  And mainly, above all: my Aunt Marie. We live to be together, day after day, always within eyeshot of each other. Grandma goes out to the fields, Aunt Marie looks after me. We never go anywhere. We never open the garden gate.

  Of course, I understand this, because my aunt is a “voluntary prisoner” and I even know why. Because they stoned her in the village, on the green, with stones “big as a man’s hand.” It seems completely natural to me not to go into a village where you have been stoned; still, the idea of a stoning does not disturb me.

  Our days are endless and our mutual bond is rich. We weed the vegetable garden, feed the hens, and draw with pastels. Aunt Marie teaches me German. On Saturdays my parents are always surprised how much I have learned and how many pictures I have drawn. I learn not words, but whole sentences, because Aunt Marie realized immediately that I have a God-given talent. Sentences like: “I’m fine, thank you,” “I love you, Mommy and Daddy,” or “Grandma and Aunt Marie are nice to me.” I know lots of sentences already.

  What we draw are more properly called “studies.” Aunt Marie, you see, is a painter. She could not study painting; it is somehow connected with my mother. She threw her off her bike (my mother threw my aunt off, that is) and Aunt Marie got pneumonia. I do not understand this; it is a vortex of secretive pauses. I do not ask.

  The studies are girls’ profiles. I learn to draw heavy eyelids, drooping eyebrows, lips slightly parted. I learn the magic of complementary colors: blondes have blue eyes, brunettes have dark ones, and a redhead’s are green, like a cat’s. When the face is done, then comes the most important part: I am allowed to break off the tip of the pastel and crumble it. Then, with exceedingly gentle, intimate touches, we spread the dust out around the girl’s head. The girls give off a fragile glow. We deposit them in a prewar candy box. What does “prewar” mean? I am learning to water the garden.

  Am I happy? I don’t know. I simply am. The eternal present’s protective cocoon carries
me through the days, whose succession I barely notice. The current of infinity surrounds me — the current of the commonplace.

  I barely notice my grandmother, because it is harvest time and Grandma is constantly in the fields. She is a quiet, pious woman, who is a bit afraid (I don’t know why) of my aunt. A fragment of one hot afternoon, what I can retain of my childhood memories at this remove.

  Aunt Marie is having a “fit.” She is running around the sitting room, shrieking. I do not understand her, because she is shrieking in German. I have not learned the sentences she shrieks. Grandma is crying quietly into her clasped hands. I crumble a salted crescent-roll into my milk. The crumbs float silently on the surface. Suddenly Grandma jumps out of her corner and, with a wildness I have never seen in her, shrieks and latches onto my aunt’s hand.

  “Marie! Don’t raise your fist to the cross!” she implores. “Don’t raise your fist against it!”

  I watch her with interest as, with the full weight of her tiny, withered body, she hangs on to my aunt’s arm, the one threatening the black crucifix. And then that scene too slides into oblivion.

  But these animated outbursts are not very common. It is my conversations with Aunt Marie, as I remember it, that cover the greatest expanses of time. For we talk incessantly. The discussions are about our future, even though I don’t have a future yet (what is a “future”?), so what we’re talking about has to occur as soon as possible, preferably right away. Because Aunt Marie is strong, because an arc of solidarity shines bright between us, we have only to speak and it all becomes real.

  “A painter?” Aunt Marie thoughtfully shakes her head. Absent-mindedly she shreds a pod into tiny bits. “A painter?”

  We are talking about whether I will be a painter or a writer. We endlessly analyze which of the two possibilities is better. It is entirely possible that I will be both. No: my future is in me. I am already both.