A Menu

Traditionally Czech restaurant food has been heavy on meats, and it still is, although there is now more choice for vegetarians. Czech restaurants often offer a selection of grilled meats cooked over a logfire on a griddle (as here), these are eaten with a choice of side vegetables. Others offer casserole-based dishes such as goulash or meat smes (a mixture of meats in a spicy saunce). Then there is the offering of various roasted meat in sauce such as the Czech classic svíčková (when cooked well one of my all time favourite meals anywhere in the world) which is roasted marinated beef in a spiced vegetable sauce with cream.

Sometimes the translated menu can bring some interesting images to the mind of the bewildered foreigner,  as here in this menu from a restaurant in Slavonice. But then one has to wonder how on earth one could translate English popular foods such as spotted dick or roly poly pudding. I shall say no more than that I had a chop of Mrs Katerina and it was excellent and my husband enjoyed Zacharias' chop.

Translating Czech

For the historical trip to South Bohemia, that I am organising, I need to produce a handbook for the attendees. What a nightmare! You might have thought it simple - just download stuff off the web, after all Cesky Krumlov's official website is packed full of pages in English about the town and its surroundings. You might have thought that, but you would be wrong. When you come to read what is on the web, it just doesn't always make sense in English or sort of makes sense but I wouldn't swear by it.

"Late gothic reconstruction and monasteries area enlargements in the last quarter of 15th century and development of settlement of Nové Město (New Town - including area of todays brewery compeled up improved protection of this part of growing Český Krumlov. Forwarded city walls, built along Vltava river as far as Lažebnický bridge, fortificated entire New Town with gardens and convents. The city walls were probably built in 90's of 15th century and was borne up reconstruction of monasterial area, nowadays extended with regular house of beguines. Consecrating of chapter house of minorite monastery in 1491 was an important milestone in history of fortification."

Now, don't get me wrong, I think the amount of information on the Cesky Krumlov website is wonderful. And some Czech has toiled long and hard to translate it into English, for which I am grateful. But there's the rub - a Czech has translated this, there are too few native English speakers who can translate from Czech. Even when you do have that rare person who is bi-lingual it is not easy. A bi-lingual friend of mine is sometimes asked to translate pieces for the website and when she does is to be found in front of her laptop chainsmoking and pulling her hair out in clumps.

It is not simply a matter of translating the words correctly, having done that there still can be a problem. The difference between the languages is, I now realise, cultural. It became clear to me when I was working with some local people about a planning issue. In a meeting I tried and failed to explain that letters to an English official should be clearly argued point by point and ideally short. But no. For my Czech listener the longer and fuller the letter the better and repetition is good. And he probably is right, if the letter's recipient is a Czech official.

Nowhere is this cultural difference more apparent than in the Czech love of the poetic. Where the English would be writing solid information, the Czechs are wont to disappear into metaphor. Hence the programme of the Five Petalled Rose started a piece on the history of Cesky Krumlov with a paragraph on primeval mud! What can the poor translator do in such a situation but translate what is there?

Edith Pargeter - Czechophile

Many people will know the English writer Edith Pargeter by her pseudonym Ellis Peters, under which she wrote the very successful Brother Cadfael books. What then is she doing in a blog about the Czechs? Well, she was a great Czechophile, who almost single-handedly was responsible for bringing Czech literature to the attention of people in the UK.

Pargeter had first got to meet and enjoy the company of Czechs during the Second World War, afterwards she took advantage of an International Summer School in Czechoslovakia to visit the country she had come to love through meeting its people. The visit took place in that brief time before the Communist takeover of the country and inspired Edith into increased admiration for Czech culture. She taught herself Czech and began to translate Czech literature into English. This activity allowed her the opportunity to continue visiting Czechoslovakia on an almost annual basis, she worked with the state-owned publishing house Artia and even kept her earnings in the Communist country to fund her trips. It is apparent from her writings that she had to walk a very fine line – she was very much against the oppression that she saw, but needed for her Czech friends' sake and for the sake of her work not to upset the communist authorities - “I was continually walking a tightrope in order to avoid harming people I wanted only to serve.”

A bibliography of her Czech translations shows huge breadth, including modern classics (as yet unheard of in the “West”), more established writers and even Czech legends. Indeed it reads like a who's who of Czech literature – Neruda, Toman, Styblova, Nemcova, Bor, Seifert, Klima, In total she translated sixteen books. It is a tribute to her skill, that some of her translations are still in print. In 1968 Edith Pargeter was awarded the Czechoslovak Society for International Relations Gold Medal for her services to Czech Literature.

The more I have read of Edith Pargeter's relationship with this lovely country and its people, the more I find myself at one with her. Much of what she loves and recognises here, I love and recognise too. I will therefore leave the last word to her, here is her description of Neruda's Tales of the Little Quarter, she could have been talking about the wider nation: “He made a book the image of himself, high-spirited, amusing, compassionate, occasionally startling us by a flavour of astonishing bitterness, but having at its heart and ground an uncompromising affirmation that life, bitter and sweet together, is to be accepted with ardour, and humanity, in all its folly and imperfection, to be loved without reserve.”