MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Department of English Language and Literature

THE BIOGRAPHY OF

Diploma thesis Brno 2019

Supervisor Author Mgr. Martin Němec, Ph.D. Bc. Tereza Heřmanová

Declaration

I hereby declare that I wrote the thesis by myself and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography. I agree with the deposition of the thesis in the library of the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University in Brno to make it accessible for further study purposes.

Prohlášení

Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci vypracovala samostatně, s použitím pouze citovaných literárních pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy Univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších přepisů. Souhlasím, aby práce byla uložena na Masarykově Univerzitě v Brně v knihovně Pedagogické fakulty a zpřístupněna ke studijním účelům.

Brno, 2019 ……………………………... Tereza Heřmanová

Abstract

This diploma thesis deals with the description of biographical data and analysis of work of Paul Wilson, Canadian translator from Czech to English language. For the clarity of this paper, the thesis is divided into two main parts and that is Life of Paul Wilson and Works of Paul Wilson. The first part is dedicated to a detailed description of the translator’s life, starting with his youth, focusing on his ten year stay in , terminating with the contemporary life of the author, adding the information about his plans for the future. The second part consists of many subchapters, chronologically mapping Paul Wilson’s translations, articles, essays and other publications of his. The thesis is closed with the evaluation of the research of this dissertation.

Anotace

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá popisem biografie a analýzou díla Paula Wilsona, kanadského překladatele z českého jazyka do angličtiny. Za účelem přehlednosti je práce rozdělena na dvě hlavní části, a to život Paul Wilsona a dílo Paula Wilsona. První část se věnuje podrobnému popisu života překladatele, počínaje jeho mládím, soustředící se hlavně na jeho desetiletý pobyt v Československu, konče současností a jeho pracovními plány do budoucna. Druhá část je tvořena mnoha podkapitolami, které chronologicky mapují překlady, články, eseje a další publikace autora. Závěrečná část se zaměřuje především na zhodnocení přínosu této diplomové práce.

Key words

Paul Wilson, biography, translation, normalization, underground, The Plastic People, Czechoslovakia, , Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma,

Klíčová slova

Paul Wilson, biografie, překladatelství, normalizace, underground, The Plastic People, Československo, Kanada, Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, Bohumil Hrabal

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Mgr. Martin Němec, Ph.D. for inspiring me to start writing this thesis. I express my gratitude for his helpful assistance, valuable advice, guidance and patience that he provided during my work on this diploma thesis.

Also, my big thanks go to Mr. Paul Wilson, who was kind enough to cooperate with me and answer all of my questions regarding both himself and his translation work.

Table of contents

1 Introduction ...... 7 2 Life of Paul Wilson ...... 9 2.1 Youth ...... 9 2.2 University of Toronto ...... 10 2.3 London and George Orwell ...... 12 2.4 Moving to Czechoslovakia ...... 16 2.5 Living in Czechoslovakia ...... 18 2.6 1968 ...... 21 2.7 Normalization ...... 23 2.8 The Plastic People of the Universe ...... 25 2.9 1970s ...... 31 2.10 Expulsion...... 34 2.11 Back in London ...... 38 2.12 Back in Canada as a Translator, Journalist and Essayist ...... 40 3 Works of Paul Wilson ...... 48 3.1 Translations of Václav Havel ...... 52 3.1.1 The Power of the Powerless ...... 55 3.1.2 Letters to Olga ...... 59 3.1.3 Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala ...... 62 3.1.4 Open Letters: Selected Writing 1963 - 1989 ...... 64 3.1.5 Summer Meditations ...... 66 3.1.6 Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings ...... 68 3.1.7 The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice ...... 69 3.1.8 The Beggar’s Opera ...... 71 3.1.9 To the Castle and Back...... 73 3.1.10 Leaving ...... 74 3.1.11 The Memo ...... 76 3.2 Translations of Josef Škvorecký ...... 78 3.2.1 The Swell Season ...... 80 3.2.2 The Engineer of Human Souls ...... 81 3.2.3 Dvorak in Love...... 83

3.2.4 The End of Lieutenant Boruvka &The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka...... 86 3.2.5 The Miracle Game ...... 87 3.2.6 The Republic of Whores ...... 88 3.2.7 Ordinary Lives...... 89 3.3 Translations of Ivan Klíma ...... 90 3.3.1 My Golden Trades ...... 91 3.3.2 Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light ...... 92 3.3.3 The Spirit of ...... 93 3.4 Other translations ...... 94 3.4.1 Zdeněk Mlynář: Nightfrost in Prague ...... 94 3.4.2 Pavel Taussig: Blbé, ale naše / One (party) liners...... 95 3.4.3 Arnošt Lusting: Indecent Dreams ...... 97 3.4.4 Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England ...... 99 3.4.5 Civic Freedom in Central Europe...... 102 3.4.6 Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion ...... 103 3.4.7 Screenplay Translation: Dark Blue World ...... 105 3.4.8 Bohumil Hrabal: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult...... 106 3.5 Essays and articles ...... 109 3.6 Other publications...... 119 3.6.1 We Are Children Just The Same ...... 120 3.6.2 57 Hours: A Survivor's Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama ...... 122 3.6.3 Bohemian Rhapsodies ...... 124 4 Conclusion ...... 128 5 Bibliography ...... 130 5.1 Print Sources ...... 130 5.2 Online Sources ...... 133

1 Introduction

Paul Robert Wilson (*3. 7. 1941) is a publicist, essayist and most importantly a great figure among many brilliant translators from Czech to English language and his life experience is above extraordinary. However, not to anticipate, it is important to be said that concerning Paul Wilson, being such an influential figure, no complete work introducing both him and the collection of his work and translation exists. Thus, this is the aim of this thesis – to collect all the biographical data about the translator and deliver the information in a uniform text, tracking the translator’s personal life story and also describing his lifelong work in a full complexity. The method is to explore as many sources as possible regarding the translator, both print and online, and based on that research to coherently, comprehensibly and chronologically present all the information collected.

Of course, it is possible to learn much about Paul Wilson by reading his articles, essays or many interviews done with the author, however, many of these focus solely on a specific sphere of the author’s agenda and are not presented chronologically. The only publication that allows us to dive deeper into Paul Wilson’s way of thinking and finding valuable information concerning his life and work is a book called Bohemian Rhapsodies, released in 2011. Nevertheless, even though it is a very interesting read without a doubt, Bohemian Rhapsodies is rather a collection of the translator’s essays and articles, accompanied by an intriguing and extensive interview and thus shall not be considered a full biography, but rather a publication with biographical and autobiographical features to it. By writing this thesis, I would like to honor Paul Wilson’s work, translation and his contribution to promoting our country and its wonderful writers worldwide.

The thesis is divided into two main parts, having many subchapters. The first part named Life of Paul Wilson is dedicated, as the title itself suggests, to a description of Wilson’s life and is divided into several subchapters for better orientation in the text. The narration starts with author’s childhood and continues portraying Wilson’s university studies both in Toronto and later in London – one could say that certain moments in his childhood (finding out about George Orwell) influenced his future choices of coming to England and later to Czechoslovakia, seeing Prague for the first time at a perfect time during and later being able to witness moments that made history. Hence, Paul Wilson came to Prague in 1968, in the end staying ten years in the country. During those ten years, he was able to learn to speak Czech perfectly and what is more, he made

7 friends among many influential people in Prague and Brno. Consequently, Wilson became a part of Křížovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu and also a band member of the legendary underground rock’n’roll band The Plastic People of the Universe. In Brno and in Prague, Paul made living as a teacher of English, but after marrying Helena Pospíšilová, a photographer, there was no need to justify his stay in the country by working there. While still in Czechoslovakia, Wilson started translating texts by several underground authors who published their works in samizdat. In 1977, after the release of , the police took interest in Wilson and later that year, he was expelled from the country and returned back to London and then Canada, starting his career as a publicist and professional translator of famous Czech writers and novelists. The end of this chapter also outlines Paul Wilson’s plans for the future in the field of translation.

Thus, the second part of this thesis named Works of Paul Wilson is focusing on thorough and full description of Paul Wilson’s translations and other works he has contributed to or edited and prepared for publication. The translations are divided into subchapters according to the author of the original Czech novel and later sorted by the year of publication, starting with the oldest one. The complete list of Wilson’s translations not taking the authors into consideration is at the beginning of the chapter called Works of Paul Wilson. This chapter also describes Paul Wilson’s list of chosen articles and essays, commenting on each briefly and mentioning the publisher, aligned in chronological order with the last article being the most recently published one.

The thesis is closed with a conclusion summarizing the writing process of the biography, together with the findings and its contribution and value.

8

2 Life of Paul Wilson

2.1 Youth

Paul Robert Wilson was born in Ontario, Canada, in the city of Hamilton on July 3, 1941. He studied at a secondary school in the south of Ontario province, in a town called Exeter, where he, apart from studying, enjoyed playing ukulele with his student folk band called The Four Mad Lads.1

During his childhood years there had never been any connection to Czechoslovakia nor a situation that would have launched Paul’s future stay in Europe, he was just aware of the existence of this country but it was still very distant for him. It was only his studies in London when he learned more and what later led him to move to the heart of Europe. Concerning the future Paul’s career as a translator, he would have never imagined such job could be a possibility for him, as he says that “no child wishes to be a translator when they grow up.”2

1 „Galérka Chátry – Paul Wilson.“ Fenomén Underground, 2012, https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10419676635-fenomen-underground/412235100221010-galerka-chatry/8104- paul-wilson/. Accessed 29 October 2019. 2 „Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel (15. 5. 2014).“ Youtube, uploaded by knihovnavaclavahavla, 22 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osoiLsPLFPc&t=2552s. Accessed 29 October 2019. 9

2.2 University of Toronto

Reading and interest in literature led Paul Wilson to study at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where he chose the department of English language and literature, starting his studies in 1959. Paul was especially intrigued by George Orwell’s works as he first read the novel 1984 when he was only fourteen years old. At that time, however, he though the book was mainly about sex due to its cover, and he admits he was not really able to understand the meaning of the book back then:3

One night, while babysitting at a neighbour’s, I was poking around the bookshelves looking for something to kill time and one book caught my eye. It was a cheap paperback with a shiny, laminated cover showing a buxom woman with sullen but enticing eyes and full red lips. She was wearing coverall tied tightly around her waist with a scarlet sash and her enormous bosom seemed ready to burst out of its unnatural confinement. Behind her, as I remember it, was a bleak city street with a crowd of demonstrators carrying banners with slogans on them.4

He was not able to find the erotica in the book he was looking for, however after reading the novel, he felt differently about the world: “My horizon had shifted and I felt the strangeness of this new perspective for a long time afterwards.”5 No wonder after that Orwell has accompanied Wilson throughout his whole life and probably influenced some future choices of his.

To Paul’s disappointment, George Orwell was not a part of the curriculum at the university. The reason was mainly that the English literature course was taught chronologically, not covering the authors and their works according to the topic. Moreover, students were expected to study everything written after the World War I on their own. And additionally, according to Paul Wilson, Orwell was probably too contemporary and even too political at that time for the teachers to find his place relevant in the syllabus.6

3 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 4 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. The Idler Magazine – July/August, 1989. 5 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 6 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. Praha: Torst, 2011, page 18.

10

During his studies, to acquire some experience and to get to know another part of the world, Paul Wilson travelled to Senegal, Africa, where he spent three months. This was in 1960, when the country gained their independence.7

Paul Wilson finished his studies at the university in 1963 with a thesis focusing on an Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. By these means he tried to point out to the apolitical attitude of the literature lecturers.8 After finishing the university, Paul Wilson worked at a children’s home for a while, yet for some time visiting and living in London was on his mind and few months later he decided that this dream of his shall become true.9

7 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 19. 8 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 19. 9 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 416. 11

2.3 London and George Orwell

A year and a half later after graduating from the University of Toronto, Paul Wilson sailed across the ocean to come to the British Isles to get his postgraduate degree at King’s College, University of London. He arrived at London in 1964. “The 60’s and swinging London were very interesting times,” says Paul Wilson in an interview called Talks in English, “The Beatles were putting up records, The Who just started to play and girls wore plastic.”10

Paul Wilson started working on his dissertation, and the topic he chose was literature of the thirties. He quickly became a frequent visitor at the British Museum Library, where he focused principally on studying the books connected to his main interests – writing and politics. Most of these texts that he was reading in detail were connected to the British left-wing way of thinking, which was very popular at that time. Wilson spent most of his time in the library, which was also a great meeting point for other students, professors, writers, editors, but also for revolutionists and lunatics, as Paul Wilson describes in his essay called Growing up with Orwell.11

In the British Museum, he was able to find countless texts on various topics – everything written in English language since the half of the 19th century was there available for him to study. Paul Wilson, on his dissertation investigation, went through many leftist authors, poets, critics or philosophers, which eventually led him back to George Orwell (and also Henry Miller), a writer he knew from his childhood. This time, he was determined to pay more attention to the analysis of the themes in his books; eventually he read all of his works and articles he was able to find in the library archive and started working on his postgraduate thesis.12 Due to those readings, Wilson’s way of thinking was changing gradually with the inclination towards the left ideology:13 “This made me, even as I studied Orwell, into the kind of thinker he (Orwell) was the most critical off.”14 Moreover, Paul lived in a poor part of London near Kentish Town, being able to live off of about five pounds a week, which made him more aware and able to see more clearly what Orwell was writing about in his novels: “This vision he had of England under totalitarian socialism was just

10 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 11 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 20. 12 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 21. 13 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 25. 14 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell.

12 everything he could see around him - dirty, poor neighbourhoods, the threat of atomic bombs. He was just looking around, observing and he could see all of that in London.” According to Paul Wilson, Orwell was not a prophet as many people in the Czechoslovakia would later call him. He was solely using his own experience as an inspiration.15

Of course, Paul Wilson was not only spending his time studying in the library. London was very lively in the sixties: “Movies were plentiful, the theatre was good and cheap, and in the warm pubs the British would shed their reserve and become garrulous and friendly.”16 Paul also fancied public lectures, meeting new people, reading newspaper and going to the cinema and theatre, e.g. he witnessed the first very famous play by Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and he owned a cinema club card, hence he was well oriented in all the films that were coming out.17 Moreover, London was attracting the attention of foreigners and refugees and the culture connected to those:

In the midst of all this, a festival of Czech films came to London. I was enchanted and mystified. I loved the sophisticated artlessness of the films, the sly humour, the way they could make ordinary situations seem chilling and sinister. At the same time, I felt excluded; there was a mystery here that I wasn’t a party to. It wasn’t just the strange musical language they spoke, or the leaden subtitles, that excluded me.18

Those films Paul Wilson saw were the ones by Miloš Forman - Lásky jedné plavovlásky and Černý Petr, translated as Peter and Paula, and also a film by duo of directors Jan Schmidt a Pavel Juráček called Postava k podpírání. Next movie that was projected was called O slavnosti a hostech – The Party and the Guests, based on a short story Démanty noci written by Arnošt Lustig, a Czech novelist. Another thing Paul could not quite grasp while watching the movies was how could such beautiful films be made in a country which was supposed to be having one of the toughest communist regimes in Europe. Consequently, he even went to see some of the films more than once as he was deeply fascinated and mystified by them.19

15 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 16 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 17 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 418. 18 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 19 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 416.

13

Shortly after the movie festival, one of Paul’s friends went to visit Czechoslovakia, where he met with the boys whom he then invited to London. Paul Wilson then met the two Czech engineers, Petr and Miloš, who were visiting the city.20 Over a beer, they started a lively and exiting conversation about communism and socialism, where Paul could not quite keep up with his own arguments about positives of communism and Marxism against the two men, who had much experience living in such regime and he did not:

I said that theoretically, there was no reason why socialism shouldn’t work; they replied that practically, there was no reason that it should… I began instead to listen to what they had to say about life in Prague. There was plenty of it, and not much was flattering. Yet beneath their litany of complaints I could sense that they were excited by something, that they were not as pessimistic as the sounded.21

Based on the conversation, Paul sensed that things in Czechoslovakia were probably improving and he became curious:

“So what is it?” Paul asked them, “first you tell me communism won’t work, that it’s never going to change. But you’re telling me this here in London. A few years ago you couldn’t have come. So things are changing, aren’t they? And you’re going back home. So who’s right?” “If you want to know the answer, why don’t you come to Czechoslovakia and see for yourself?” replied Miloš. “But I would have to live and work there, and if things are as bad as you say, they’d never let me.” “Maybe,” said Miloš slowly, “things are getting a little bit better. Maybe you could get a job teaching English.”22

Paul Wilson accepted his new friends’ offer to move to Czechoslovakia as the discussion sparked up his curiosity. At the time, he was reading a lot of Marx, but also he had very sceptic teachers at high school who told the pupils that it is better not to believe anything they read in books or newspaper, thus Paul Wilson felt the need to verify whether everything he had read about

20 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 417. 21 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 22 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 14 communism could work in real life, not just on the paper and in theory. Moreover, after doing all the research for his dissertation, he knew he did not want to become an academic, he thought such career would not suit him the best as he thoroughly enjoyed reading texts by Orwell and Miller, however was not interested in an academic analysis of those authors23. Even though he had an opportunity to go to Africa, he preferred to explore life in Czechoslovakia at that moment. Paul wanted to go to Africa later, but that never happened.24

Paul Wilson had a chance to visit Czechoslovakia and to stay only two or three weeks, however, he felt that this would not be enough for him to get to know the culture of the country, nor the political system he was mainly interested in. He knew he would have to find a job. The two engineers provided him with addresses of several schools where he could apply for a job as an English teacher. He sent out about ten curriculums to both Prague and Brno. A language school in Prague responded with a job offer, however they were not able to provide Paul with any accommodation. Later on, a school in Brno offered Wilson a job, so he decided to go to Moravia.25 Above that, just before leaving for Czechoslovakia, Paul met his future wife Helena Pospíšilová on a private party in London, she was a photographer who went to the UK for a visit.26

Thus eventually, Paul Wilson left the swinging London behind, his thesis on Orwell unfinished and set off to live in a completely foreign country, where he knew just the two engineers and Helena, no one else.

23 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 416. 24 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 25 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 26 Galérka Chátry – Paul Wilson. 15

2.4 Moving to Czechoslovakia

Paul Wilson sent his luggage via post to Czechoslovakia and on his own, hitch-hiking, he set off first to Split in Yugoslavia, then through Vienna and finally arrived in Znojmo.27

I arrived in Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1967 on a dirty white bus with blue trim belonging to the Czechoslovak state bus lines, in the company of some dumpy, sour-faced old women carrying large sacks of Austrian food and clothing. We were let out onto a vast cobble-stoned square in front of the main railway station in Znojmo, the women disappeared into the night, the bus drove off, and the square was empty again under street lights so dim that they seemed to intensity the darkness around me. It felt like the end of the world.28

This is how Paul Wilson depicts his first minutes in Czechoslovakia in detail in his essay called Growing up with Orwell.29 He then spent the night in the dormitory near the station, which was filled with old bunkbeds and the moving trains outside the room, dispatchers whistling to coordinate the trains and more people coming to the dormitory to their beds would not let him rest. He had to wake up very early in the morning to catch the only train going to Prague to meet the two Czech friends he knew from London.30

Paul Wilson remembers the people on the streets, wearing mostly grey and black colours, being very silent, minding their own business. Arriving to the capital, the first impression of the cloudy city was not greatly positive – everything seemed dirty and dusty, not well maintained and all the seemingly neglected sights were covered by the scaffolding.31

Paul took a tram and headed towards the address Miloš gave him. Even though Miloš was at work, his parents invited Paul heart-warmingly inside:

And while Mrs. S. fussed in the kitchen over her buchty (a kind of sweet bun) and made coffee, Mr. S. pulled out the morning paper and, in broken German and English, tried to

27 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 418. 28 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 29 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 30 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 27. 31 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 28.

16

give me the gist of a front page article about Tomas Masaryk, who had led the and Slovaks to independence and become their first president in 1918. ‘Something is happening,’ Mr. S. said. ‘This is the first time I see his name in newspaper in good – no, not in good, in neutral way, since 1948.’32

Wilson remembers his first days in Prague very clearly and even later on many times George Orwell’s novels came to his mind, as many things in Czechoslovakia reminded him of Orwell depiction of the future. For instance, the very first day he went to a pub, very dirty one, full of cigarette smoke. After glancing at a wall in the bathroom there, he saw a drawing with swastika equals hammer and sickle (Hitler’s and ’s symbols). And according to Wilson, it was one of the Orwell’s most prominent signs, comparing communism and Nazism as being the same.33 In Paul’s opinion, Prague was in many ways similar to the novel 1984, whether it was the cigarettes, grey clothing, difficulty of finding toilet paper in shops, or the elevators not working However, Wilson understood quite soon that the country is not full of robots and that things seem to be getting better.34

Paul Wilson had the luck to come to Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, just about a year before the invasion of the Russian Armies and thus he was later able to witness the enormous difference between the rising liberation and the following normalization. In 1967 it was also just before Alexander Dubček became Communist Party Secretary and set the reforms of the Prague Spring into motion. Therefore, Paul could see the optimism and happiness of people, who hoped for a positive change in the society.35 He believed there was a possibility for the communist regime to be reformed at the time of his arrival and during his first few months: “But I did not really understand what was happening around me as I look back at it now.”36

32 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 33 Mottýl, Ivan. „Plastic People jsem učil zpívat anglicky, vyprávěl v Lese kanadský překladatel Paul Wilson.“ Ostravan, 1 June 2019, https://www.ostravan.cz/56198/plastic-people-jsem-ucil-zpivat-anglicky-vypravel-v-lese- kanadsky-prekladatel-paul-wilson/. Accessed 29 October 2019. 34 Konrád, Daniel. „Paul Wilson: Havel má pověst rytíře v nablýskané zbroji.“ Hospodářské noviny, 21 December 2011, https://domaci.ihned.cz/c1-54258200-nemel-tak-ostre-lokty-jako-jeho-oponenti. Accessed 29 October 2019. 35 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 419. 36 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 17

2.5 Living in Czechoslovakia

Paul Wilson’s first year in Czechoslovakia was quite intense. He was trying to learn one of the most difficult languages in the world, everything around was unknown and new to him, he was meeting a lot of new people, he explored the Czech cuisine and culture but mainly, he was travelling back and forth between Prague and Brno, teaching English.

Paul’s qualification for teaching was actually none, he had no teacher training and he had never wanted to be a teacher in the first place, nonetheless teaching English was his only possibility of finding a job in a totalitarian country while being able to stay there for as long as he possibly wanted. Despite of having no educational training, Wilson was quite confident as a teacher, as his both his parents were teachers – mother taught Latin and father French – and thus he was familiar with some basic information about education.37

Wilson was a teacher at a language school in Brno and later on, Helena’s friends helped him to get another job in the capital city, thus every Thursday he went to Prague as on Fridays he was teaching English at The University of the 17th November, which was a university originally established for foreign students mainly.38 He taught translation there and it was the first time he found out about Josef Škvorecký, more specifically about his work. It was because Paul gave his students articles and short essays by Czech authors to translate to English, which also later helped him to improve his Czech.39

Paul aspired to learn Czech language as fast as possible as not many people were able to speak English, and if so, their level and pronunciation were not sufficient for decent communication the reason being that those people were not in touch with foreigners, thus they could not perfect their English skills. Moreover, Wilson had a deal with his students – he would teach them the ‘real English’ (the colloquial one you cannot find in the dictionaries) and after the lesson, they went to

37 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 418. 38 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 418. 39 Štráfeldová, Milena. „Paul Wilson: ‚Strach je pryč, ale práce je ještě dost, ne?‘.“ Radio Prague International, 30 April 2018, https://www.radio.cz/cz/rubrika/udalosti/paul-wilson-strach-je-pryc-ale-prace-je-jeste-dost-ne. Accessed 29 October 2019.

18 a pub and spoke in Czech – they were telling stories, talked about politics, sang songs and most times they stayed until the closing time.

Paul Wilson worked really hard on improving his Czech, after about three months he was able to ask for help in a grocery store and he managed the basic communication, and a year later he was finally capable of having more complex conversations.40 His progress was quite quick as he spent the weekends in Prague around with friends, also, he tried to read a newspaper every day and listen to the radio frequently.41

Paul Wilson was also trying to get to know the Czech culture, he was interested in music and he was meeting many culturally active people, such as painters, graphics, etc. Helena was the person to introduce him to many artists, as she was a photographer herself. The one thing Paul Wilson enjoyed the most were Czech movies - he thought those were the most valuable creations in the official sphere (Spalovač mrtvol, Ostře sledované vlaky), as otherwise, in his opinion, the official art was not of a great quality – meaning galleries, literature or opera.42

Being in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring was an intriguing phenomenon and this revolt included also the cultural one. One of the changes to be floating in the air was a new genre of music so called rock’n’roll, alias big beat. Paul did not understand the meaning of the expression first, as he could see posters promoting big beat everywhere during the years 1967 and 1968. There were many beat festivals and beat clubs and countless of beat bands in Prague, such as Matadors, Rebels, Juventus, Olympic, Flamengo, Vulkán or Stop the Gods. Even though Paul Wilson did not think those concerts were anything extraordinary, he was able to appreciate the atmosphere and enthusiasm intensified by the freedom of Prague Spring.43

As Paul witnessed the ‘socialism with human face’, he thought the regime was much bearable than the western world had been presenting it. What is more, many people or leaders of the Prague Spring, such as the writer Ludvík Vaculík, were even the members of the Communist

40 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 420. 41 Macháček, Jan. „Paul Wilson: O zpívání s Plastiky, zmlklém národu a Havlově zemitosti.“ Respekt, 31 March 2006, https://archiv.ihned.cz/c1-18147590-paul-wilson-o-zpivani-s-plastiky-zmlklem-narodu-a-havlove-zemitosti. Accessed 29 October 2019. 42 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 420. 43 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 42.

19 party, which seemed curious to him. Moreover, after Alexander Dubček was elected the Communist Party Secretary, Paul was very pleased and things got moving faster. Quite peculiar was the fact that people in Brno were more sceptical than the ones in the capital, as Paul could observe.44 And to his surprise, teaching English was very easy at that time. After the censorship was not as limiting as before, many people had immediately a lot to say in Wilson’s lessons. The students wanted to share their opinions on the new political events in the country, magazines were full of interesting articles and interviews. There were plenty of public meetings, new political groups emerged and Paul even attended some of those.45 However, concerning the positive change and hope in the society, Paul Wilson, looking back at those times, describes himself as young, unexperienced and confused by other people’s very polite behaviours towards him. But no one really could have expected what was going to happen.46

44 Macháček. 45 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 31. 46 Toman, Marek. „Překladatel a bývalý člen Plastiků Paul Wilson: Močit proti zdi, dokud nespadne.“ Novinky.cz, 3 July 2013, https://www.novinky.cz/kultura/salon/306785-prekladatel-a-byvaly-clen-plastiku-paul-wilson-mocit- proti-zdi-dokud-nespadne.html. Accessed 29 October 2019. 20

2.6 1968

I remember when my friend from the University of Toronto, Don Sparling47, came here in the summer of 68, when we thought the world was changing. And I think it was on the August 15 when we and some other people decided we were going to go to Yugoslavia for the beach. And so, we got as far as Hungary and there was something wrong with my friends’ visas, so they held us up there for a couple of days before we got that sorted out and we arrived in Split on the August 21. There were little groups of people standing around the square. I knew enough Czech at that time to understand them, I recognized they were speaking Czech. There were groups around transistor radios and I walked up to them and said ‘What’s going on?’ and they said: ‘You haven’t heard? We’ve been invaded.’ And at that point my friends said: ‘It is ok, we can go somewhere else, you don’t have to go back,’ as we thought we would never get back in anyways. Then we spent a couple of days on a small island where there were bunch of Czechs and there were information meetings every day, then we discovered there was a train going back to Prague from Split.48

Paul and his friends decided to take the first train to Prague and this decision Paul Wilson made was life changing for him. Had he decided to leave, he would not have become the part of the Czech underground, nor the translator of famous writers or the process of normalization, which completely changed his view on the leftist political regimes.

At the Czechoslovakian border, everyone was very surprised at their arrival as they did not understand why anyone would be coming back at such circumstances. Paul Wilson arrived in Prague on August 26 during the night while the city was placed under a curfew. There were only officers of the night watch in the streets, no one else.49 After arriving, Paul could not find any of his friends, but then he had an idea to go to a flat where he sometimes would go and spend the night. Everyone was there, sleeping at night and distributing leaflets during the day.50

47 Don Sparling studied English and literature at the University of Toronto and Oxford University, he first came to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and a year later he started working as a teacher at language school in Brno. In years 1970- 1977 he taught English in Prague and in years 1977-2009 Sparling worked at the Masaryk University as a tutor at the Department of English language. Later, he worked as a translator. 48 „Canadians and Czechoslovaks in the Age of Normalization.“ Youtube, uploaded by Československé dokumentační středisko, 6 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JIZ0_7fmE. Accessed 29 October 2019. 49 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 32. 50 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 419. 21

That same day, the Czechoslovak leadership, which had been hijacked to Moscow and held hostage there, had finally signed the so-called Moscow Protocol, legitimating the invasion. The next day, August 27, the leaders were back in Prague. Dubček went on the air and, with great physical difficulty, read a prepared statement promising that the reforms would continue and appealing for support in ‘normalizing’ the situation. People who heard it said he wept.51

51 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 22

2.7 Normalization

The invasion did not stop all the spontaneous activities of people at once - it continued until the spring of 1969 when people still had their faith, tried to protest and gathered for demonstrations. Everything came to a climax when Jan Palach, a young university student, set himself on fire on the Wenceslas Square in Prague to show his disapproval with the invasion and occupation that took place in August the previous year: “His funeral, attended by thousands of people, was the last large peaceful public manifestation of any kind for many years to come. Unlike similar funerals in Iran, or South Africa of China, it marked the end, not the beginning, of public resistance.”52

Several following months were even more new and more intense for Paul Wilson in the sense of ‘normalizing’ the society. He witnessed the restoration of the strict censorship, newspapers were closely monitored, all the clubs and associations were forbidden and Paul was, in the end, able to understand what George Orwell tried to depict in the novel 1984.53 A year after the invasion, he decided to move from Brno to Prague to only teach English there – he taught at three grammar schools, at a university and additionally he taught teachers in the evening courses.54

Coming back to the writer that has been a huge influence to Paul Wilson, it was very typical for the period after the Russian Army invasion that people started returning to George Orwell and his novel 1984. As Paul Wilson says in his essay named Growing up with Orwell, Czech people thought it was very symbolic that Orwell wrote the novel in 1948, which was just the year when communism took over the country after the war. Of course, Orwell’s novels were forbidden in all the oppressed countries and consequently, the younger generation was probably only aware of the writer’s name - his books were nowhere to be found and all the copies that existed were secretly hidden from the eyes of the regime. Yet, in the seventies, the famous expressions from the novel 1984 such as ‘newspeak’, ‘thought police’ or ‘doublethink’ were part of everyone’s vocabulary.55

However, Paul Wilson did not feel that the communist regime in Czechoslovakia as he knew it would be creating a new language, such as the ‘newspeak’ in Orwell’s novel. Wilson rather talks about the government taking the meanings of certain expressions and giving them meanings

52 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 53 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 33. 54 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 420. 55 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 34. 23 new, more suitable for the regime, and at the same time more dangerous for the people. Thus, words such as democracy, freedom, peace, justice, truth, lie, right, wrong, etc. stayed in the vocabulary but gained the new meaning, very often in contrast with the previous connotation and only insiders are able to distinguish or understand the context. In the essay Growing up with Orwell, Paul Wilson gives specific examples he was able to observe in the seventies in Czechoslovakia:

Frequently, this new meaning is made more rigid by the addition of another word, creating oxymorons, pleonasms and the like. ‘Revolutionary truth’, ‘democratic centralism’, ‘socialist justice’, ‘real socialism’ or the ‘right to work’ – these are familiar examples of totalitarian rhetoric. There rhetorical units are the D.N.A. of ‘doublethink.’ It is impossible for an uninitiated person to understand what an ideologue is talking about, precisely because the ideologue uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways.56

It is clear that Wilson was interested in the rhetoric of the ideology regimes and so he tried to look into the problematics deeper. In the fifties, there was an exile magazine Skutečnost that issued an article called Slovník komunistického novináře (Vocabulary of the communist journalist) in 1953. Wilson describes the article: there were two columns, one with nouns and the other with adjectives and those were supposed to be connected so that a collocation would be created. E.g. the adjective American was added to the noun fascism, thus American fascism. Wilson explains that for an ideologue it is impossible to speak for instance of the German fascism as at least half of the Germans are good people. Moreover, he adds that even though Ministry of Love or Ministry of truth57 did not exist in Czechoslovakia, as Orwell depicted in his novel, there was Public safety (Veřejná bezpečnost), which in fact was very unsafe and dangerous.58

Additionally, according to Wilson, this practice of altering the meanings in vocabulary is not Czech feature solely, it is typical for any totalitarian or communist regime and culture in the world.59

56 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 57 Concepts from the novel 1984 by George Orwell. 58 Toman. 59 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 24

2.8 The Plastic People of the Universe

Paul Wilson did not have many friends during his first year in Czechoslovakia, but soon he became a member of a group of people who called themselves Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu (Crusader school of pure humour without jokes). It was a community full of artists, poets and musicians, for example Karel Nešpar or the extroverted Jan Steklík, whom Wilson met in Brno, describing him as “the kind of person who introduces you to everyone else.”60 This way Paul got to meet all sorts of interesting people and it resulted in him becoming the part of the Czech underground culture.

This group of friends used to meet very often in a pub called U Svitáků (however, official name was U Městské knihovny) in Prague, near the Faculty of Arts. And in Autumn 1969, Jan Steklík and Paul were walking around the streets of the capital, when they saw a man with a very long hair. It was Ivan Jirous, the manager of the band called The Plastic People of the Universe, and Jan Steklík introduced him to Paul. They went to their favourite pub U Svitáků for a beer and later, Jirous invited them over to his place to a party.61

Jirous lived in small flat on the side street in the eastern part of Prague with his wife Věra. When they arrived, there were already two other members of the group, and Josef Janíček, and so they sat eating, talking about music, playing and listening to the Fugs and , two American rock bands.62 Paul had no chance of knowing the VU, however he had heard of the Fugs before as they were known for their protests in front of Pentagon in 1967. He soon became very fond of the music.63

The band The Plastic People of the Universe alias The Psychedelic Band of Prague met with Ivan Jirous (also called Magor, meaning freaky, crazy person in Czech) in the early 1969, when the group was just a few months old. The founder was a bass player Milan Hlavsa who created the group together with his friends he knew from school: Jiří Števich, Michal Jernek and Pavel Zeman. Their music was not perfect, however, they were able to make it up to the audience

60 Macháček. 61 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 422. 62 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 46. 63 Macháček.

25 with their energetic performances, crazy costumes and makeup. They sang songs both taken from another artists, e. g. Venus in Furs, Velvet Underground or Doors, and they also played their own music, though with unintelligible lyrics.64

Ivan Jirous was an energetic, witty young man who loved literature and came to Prague to study the history of arts. He started meeting all sorts of people who were involved with the rock and before joining The Plastic People, he worked with the Primitive Group, the only psychedelic band in Prague until the PPU were created. He helped them organize crazy extravagant and original shows. However, in spring of 1969, Jirous felt the band was not evolving the way he would be excited about anymore and the moment he saw The Plastic People of the Universe performing, he knew there was a potential. He soon became the art director of the band, taking care of everything apart from the financial matter and music, that was solely in the hands of the musicians.65 Paul Wilson talks about the band in an interview with David Vaugham:

It was about being yourself, doing what you liked. One of the great things about The Plastic People was that they started up in the fall of 1968 when things were really bad – the country had just been invaded – and they were starting up a rock band. There was an almost childlike optimism that was really attractive and they didn’t care about the politics. They wanted to make music.66

Even though it seems very unlikely that such band would not be in an opposition to the regime, not trying to provoke it, it was true – at least at the beginning. The members of the group were neither interested in politics, nor the Prague Spring, which was surprising to Paul. Ivan Jirous even told him that the Prague Spring was just the game that the political leaders played with people about to see who was liberal and who was not. And other boys in the group cared even less. The band became the symbol of the underground culture only after the police took interest in it and that is the reason, according to Wilson, for the voice of the band being so powerful later.67

64 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 44. 65 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 45. 66 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 67 Toman.

26

Paul Wilson first saw the band performing in December 1969 in Horoměřice, where they would play in the local pub every weekend, they even included fire shows to spark up the performances.68 They played on Sunday nights, wearing white satin dresses with dark and angry looking makeup on their faces. PPU sang all their songs in English, however Paul Wilson was not able to understand the lyrics.69

Paul became a close friend with the musicians and they would meet in the flat of Ivan Jirous from time to time – they cooked food, went to pubs, drank beer and listened to music.70 Later on next year, the business manager of the PPU wanted them to go abroad and make a lot of money to be able to buy a proper equipment, but some members of the band, Števich and Jernek, did not agree which resulted in splitting the band.71 Moreover, the PPU decided to sing only in English from now on and they needed someone to transcribe and translate the texts of Velvet Underground and the Fugs for them:

And, a little while later Jirous got this crazy idea of inviting me to the band as a singer! Not that I have a great voice and I'm certainly not a great guitarist, but I could strum the and I was also useful for transcribing the lyrics of Velvet Underground songs from this scratchy old tape that they had. I joined the band in 1970.72

And same as the other members‘ of the group, Paul’s intentions to join were not political at all.73 Paul was also teaching the singers to pronounce the English lyrics properly. To match the look of the other boys, he let his hair and beard grow out.74

Together with Paul Wilson, another member joined the group. It was Jiří Kabeš, a viol player, who used to play with the big beat band Teenagers in the sixties.75 At this time, The Plastic People experienced a rather artistic and political development, not only in the style and member

68 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 422. 69 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 47. 70 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 422. 71 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 72 Velinger, Jan. „Paul Wilson – The impact of The Plastic People on a communist universe.“ Radio Prague International, 31 May 2005, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/one-on-one/paul-wilson-the-impact-of-the-plastic- people-on-a-communist-universe. Accessed 18 November 2019. 73 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 74 Mottýl. 75 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 47.

27 exchange. The normalization finally reached the cultural sphere and many musical bands and groups were banned, and one of them was, of course, The Plastic People, which resulted in the band losing their professional status.76

The Plastic People wanted to become a professional band, however their chances to reach that goal were minimal as they had nowhere to rehearse in order to prepare for the performance. That required and official permit. Temporarily, they decided to play using acoustic and sing in the flats of their friends or family relatives, but that was very risky and what is more, they had no chance of knowing what the performance would look and sound like on stage.77 Their first concert in this member arrangement was held in a small beat club in Suchá, about 30 kilometres far from Karlovy Vary. The only sound rehearsal they had was an hour before the concert itself. Paul Wilson remembers the quality of the music not being really good as during the concert, they were not able to hear themselves sing or play.78

During the two years Paul Wilson spent in the band they were able to make about fifteen performances, which was a huge success while not having the official license to play. Very often, Jirous was able to arrange the concert because of him still having a valid status as an art critic, but later on it was not possible anymore. The Plastic People concerted in Prague at the Music F Club together with the band called Aktual, who were also very eccentric – they did not use regular musical instruments but rather bizarre ones, e.g. electric drills or Jawa motorbikes.79

As mentioned before, the look of the PPU band on the stage was always very distinctive – long robes and makeup. But their style also went through a development. Jirous and Wilson did not agree on wearing the strange clothes and they argued from time to time – Paul thought it was unnecessary, uncomfortable and difficult to move in, on the other hand Ivan believed that the music was not enough and that there had to be certain atmosphere accompanying the performance. According to him, the show was as important as the music. However, as the sound of the band improved gradually, they agreed there was no need for extraordinary show on stage anymore.80

76 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 48. 77 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 48. 78 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 49. 79 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 425. 80 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 426. 28

But the band’s appearance on the stage was not the only thing Wilson and Jirous were not in accordance with each other about:

I remember having arguments with Jirous about whether or not we should be translating these songs and at least singing them in Czech so that the audience would know what the words were, but for Jirous and for the band too it was important that we sing in English and give the audience something like the experience the audience would have listening to the Velvet Underground.81

Jirous thought that only English is a rock music language and that Czech is not suitable for that style of singing.

Apart from transcribing the songs by the American rock bands, Paul was alto translating Czech texts by Věra Jirousová into English for the PPU to sing and in addition, he himself wrote a text for them called Rosie Rottencrotch. The story is about a girl prostitute who has a horrible life and a bad reputation. It is a song about child sexuality and the text includes also a nursery rhyme. Nevertheless, in the band’s published collection of their work, this text is missing as it was impossible to reconstruct it from the recording, thus the story is only left in Paul Wilson’s memory.82

In 1971, the band found a real place for their rehearsal. It was an old cellar in an abandoned apartment house in Holešovice. In winter, they played in coats and drank rum to feel warmer. This allowed the band to improve the sound which led to the creation of their own music as well. In the same year, the police took interest in the band members for the first time. Everyone, except for Paul, was taken in for interrogation but no charges were filed.83

The very next year, on July 29, 1972, The Plastic People had their biggest but at the same time last concert in Prague. Among the audience there was present an underground poet and he was exited about the performance. He wanted the band to turn his poems into music, which in the end they agreed on and those songs appeared on their first album called Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned. Nevertheless, coming back to the concert, something else happened

81 Velinger. 82 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 426. 83 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 51. 29 that night that resulted in the band not being able to perform in Prague anymore – a drunk policeman started a fight in the building and two other police officers arrived and took Jirous to the station. He was able to explain himself, however no more concerts were made in the capital city ever since.84

Paul Wilson decided to leave the band sometime in the late year of 1972. But it was not an instant goodbye, the process was rather gradual as he and the band were growing apart slowly. It was connected with the direction the band decided to take:

I did not contribute very much musically. I did not think singing in English was a good idea as people could not understand the lyrics, so there was a lot of pressure for the band to sing in Czech. Therefore, the band went in a different direction, I tried to sing in Czech but it did not work for me, I do not know why.85

So finally, The Plastic People wanted to sing more Czech songs in order to connect better with the local audience and Wilson felt that he had nothing more to offer as long as their music was not based on western rock with English lyrics anymore. Moreover, the band started to work with the poet Egon Bondy while Milan Hlavsa began to compose music to which his poems could be set.86 This change in the band’s direction was also caused by the refusal of their new member at the time, saxophonist , to sing anything taken over. And so, Paul and PPU parted their professional ways, however he still supported the band and attended their concerts.87

84 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 52. 85 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 86 Vaughan, David. „Paul Wilson – Pure humour without jokes in 1970s Prague.“ Radio Prague International, 24 May 2014, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/books/paul-wilson-pure-humour-without-jokes-in-1970s-prague. Accessed 18 November 2019. 87 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 52. 30

2.9 1970s

Paul Wilson taught English in Prague and Brno only until 1973, as in 1972 he and Helena Pospíšilová got married and thus he would not have to justify his stay in Czechoslovakia by working there anymore.88 Helena was a photographer and Paul introduced her to the community of his friends from Křižovnická škola. In the sixties and seventies, though her camera, she was documenting the encounters and events of her friends and she was able to capture many unique moments of the underground life. As mentioned very early on in this text, Paul and Helena first met in London, just before he decided to go to live in Czechoslovakia.89

For about a year, Paul Wilson worked for a company that organized courses for managers working in foreign trade, however he had to leave the job as a new regulation was made – foreigners could not meet with such managers.90 Moreover, full time teaching was not an attractive job for him anymore. The main reason was simply that people stopped talking. With an ongoing normalization, Paul’s students were afraid to freely express themselves and teaching conversation was no longer enjoyable for him. One could see the people’s enthusiasm and positivity of the year 68 to disappear gradually and the whole nation became silent. Moreover, Paul’s Czech has improved immensely so he was able to start a job as a freelance translator.91

Paul Wilson was mostly translating books for the publishing house Artia, which exported non-fiction and children’s books for the British market. Sometimes, though, he translated more curious titles, for instance a technical book about small arms and light weapons. Most importantly, he was translating shorter essays and works by the Czech authors who could not publish officially after the invasion in 1968 – Jindřich Chalupecký, Ladislav Klíma, Ivan Jirous, Milan Knížák, Egon Bondy etc. The translations had to be smuggled from the Czechoslovakia via underground post, but some were not published and Paul still keeps them in his paper box to this day.92

88 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 429. 89 Chuchma, Josef. „V Galerii Josefa Sudka je vystaven jedinečný obraz života v ‚paralelní kultuře‘.“ iDNES.cz, 9 November 2009, https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/archiv/v-galerii-josefa-sudka-je-vystaven-jedinecny-obraz-zivota-v- paralelni-kulture.A091109_143840_kavarna_bos. Accessed 18 November 2019. 90 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 429. 91 Chuchma. 92 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 450. 31

All these years Paul was in a close contact with The Plastic People and many events connected to this band influenced Paul directly, even though he was not the member anymore. On March 30, 1974, The Plastic People, together with several other bands, organized a small music festival, however, they only got to tuning their musical instruments when the police came and arrested about 150 people. This event was later called the Massacre of Budějovice (Budějovický masakr) and ever since then, the police watched the underground and especially PPU very closely. So, it was very surprising that the police did not show up at the Second Festival of Underground Music in February 1976. This was an underground event that hosted 12 bands and took place in the middle of nowhere in a little village in southern Bohemia.

But two months later Paul Wilson got an urgent phone call from his friend.93 At this time, Paul lived in Prague in a little flat. It was one snowy day in March, when his phone rang. His old friend was calling to inform him about closing down the PPU and the whole Czech underground. And so, because Paul was a former member of the band and he was still attending some of their performances, he had the right to worry that he could be imprisoned as well. So, he took his coat and run down the street, crossed the Charles bridge and went north. There on the bridge, just two months ago, PPU were posing for a photo which was taken to serve as an invitation to the already mentioned Second festival of underground music. The police took the advantage and used the two months as a preparation for a bigger move.94 Thus, Paul met his friend who told him about what had happened: 27 people imprisoned, including all the members of PPU and other underground bands. All their equipment was confiscated. There were searches in several of the flats where police took many photos, samizdat texts and books. More than 100 people were interrogated. It was the biggest police intervention in Czechoslovakia since the beginning of the 70’s.95

All the events that followed influenced Paul Wilson directly, even though he was not among the people who were imprisoned that day. Immediately after the police’s intervention with the underground, the message about what had happened was sent into the world behind the iron curtain where anyone was not able to understand, why would any regime put people into the prison for

93 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 55. 94 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 42. 95 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 55.

32 playing rock music. In the following 24 hours, BBC was broadcasting the news all over the world, so the PPU became famous over one night.96

Paul Wilson talks about the events and his experience in the interview with David Vaughan, additionally he mentions how Havel and Jirous met which resulted in Havel taking interest in the both underground and the subsequent trials with it:

First of all, they arrested seventeen or eighteen people, not just in The Plastic People but also other musical groups in the underground. There were two trials. Havel and Jirous actually met, I think it was in March 1976, and they had an all-night session where they drank a lot of wine or beer and Havel suddenly understood that what was happening in the underground was a realization of one of his basic ideas, which was that you cannot actually stop society from functioning. You can put a lid on it but you can’t stop it from bubbling up. And Havel was scheduled to come to one of the underground concerts, and just before it happened – and I think there’s a connection here – the police rounded up all these people in the underground. Then Havel and his people came to their defence. A lot of people were arrested, but all but seven were released and the sentences that the seven got were not as heavy as they had thought they would get.97

Because of the imprisonments and trials, the philosophical part of the communities together with writers started caring about the regime oppressions and people who needed the protection. Hence, Charter 77 was created in January 1977 already having more than two hundred signatures and more were being added each year. Thus, the originally non-political intentions of the PPU resulted in creation of the very important movement, and suddenly the underground became the moving force that slowly launched the many years later: “I'm not saying that there wouldn't have been a human rights movement in Czechoslovakia without the Plastics, but they became the first sort of 'cause celebre'.”98

96 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 55. 97 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 98 Velinger. 33

2.10 Expulsion

After Charter 77, police undergone extensive arrests and kept following all the people who had signed the document. Information concerning Paul’s persona was passed to the secret police on March 15, 1977 by a secret agent discovering that Paul had been planning to do an interview with a rightist supporter Petr Pithart. In consequence, Paul’s StB file was created four days later on March 19 and it said: “Paul Wilson shall not be invited for questioning yet in order not to reveal the investigation, but his elaboration should be started in interest of looking at his overall activity closely.” The interview with Pithart was his first cooperation with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was supposed to be a part of the series of interviews with dissidents the CBC was preparing.99

The file that I have is very thin. It’s only about thirty pages. I thought they would be watching me like a hawk from the time I first arrived in 1967, but apparently, if they did and if there were files, they’ve destroyed them. But at a certain point in early 1977, the word came down from somewhere that they wanted to take a look at me and that means following me around, tapping the telephone, doing all this obvious surveillance. And then at a certain point the knock comes on the door at five o’clock in the morning and they take you down to the police station.100

Public safety (Veřejná bezpečnost) came for Paul Wilson on May 4 after he had been neglected by the police for a long time, actually this was surprisingly his first interrogation ever since coming to Czechoslovakia in 1967. They came to Paul Wilson’s flat early in the morning when he was, as a matter of fact, getting ready to go out and continue working on his secret interviews. Before that day, he had already conducted several of the interviews. His bag with the tape recorder had already been prepared so Paul was lucky the police did not go inside. They interrogated him for eight hours asking him about his closest friends but he refused to talk about anything but himself. They also asked him on his opinions about Charter 77 and underground. When the interrogation ended Paul was ordered not to leave Prague and shortly after he had to

99 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 432. 100 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel.

34 report himself at Department of Passports and Visas where he was told he would have to leave the country in two months, July 15 1977 at the latest.101

After the interrogation, the StB file on Paul Wilson said:

During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Paul Wilson was regularly meeting with the music band The Plastic People, with whom he also sang songs in English. This band illegally performed at many places around Czechoslovakia, which is considered a criminal activity. Five people from the band were convicted for such activities. Paul Wilson is suspected of helping the members of the band during their trial, moreover of mediating the case for publication in foreign media and radio. He is a close friend of Jiří Němec, Věra Jirousová, Ivan Jirous, Svatopluk Karásek and many other signatories of Charta 77, he is aware of Charta 77 and helped to obtain more signatures of the document together with Andrej Jankovič. Since Robert Wilson as a Canadian is taking the advantage of his stay in Czechoslovakia and is continuously helping to commit crimes I propose that he is 1. forbidden to prolong his stay in the country and 2. is listed as undesirable person.102

As Paul was due to leave Czechoslovakia, he and The Plastic People planned to play one last time together. However, the StB had a secret informant so they knew about the performance in advance. The informant – agent Fox – turned out to be Paul’s good friend Žluťák, they knew each other for the whole ten years he spent in the country. Unfortunately, he was not the only one Paul Wilson’s friend who succumbed the secret police influence. However, Žluťák provided the police with some untrue information about the place of the event, probably to confuse them. Nevertheless, the StB was still able to locate the concert.103 In Paul’s essay called What it’s Like Making Rock’n’Roll in a Police State?, he describes the details of the last night he spent with the PPU in the house of his friends – Princovi - including the police raid that followed, it was on the July 9, 1977:

A few days before my departure, the Plastics and I got together, polished up all the songs we used to do together, and held a small party for about fifty people in an old house in the hills near Děčín in Northern Bohemia. For a couple of hours we played the old repertoire,

101 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 57, 432 and 433. 102 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 433. 103 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 435. 35

reliving the days that now seemed as distant as an idyllic dream of youth, the days when it was still possible to pretend, for a while at least, that we were living in a normal country.

At midnight, there was a knock on the door. Suddenly, the house was crawling with police and within half an hour, about ten of us were on our way down the winding road in the back of squad cars. In Děčín the police station was bustling with red-eyed plainclothesmen carrying truncheons. I was separated off from the rest and when I refused to be interrogated, they put me in a car and drove me back toward Prague. As we got close to the city where I had spent almost ten years of my life, the cop beside me in the back seat – who I learned later may have been Koudelka, the mastermind of the whole police campaign against the underground – said to me:

„Look, you’ll be leaving the country in a few days. When you get to the west, we don’t want you doing anything – you know – to help the Plastics. Know what I mean?“ „When I get to the west, I’ll be outside your jurisdiction.“ „Is your wife going with you?“ „She hasn’t got her papers yet.“ „But I take it you want to see her again.“ I looked at him, but I couldn’t see his face in the dark. „Call it blackmail if you want,“ he said, „but you’d better believe me.“ The driver pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. We were still in the middle of empty, black countryside. „Our orders were to take you to Prague,“ Koudelka said. „Here you are.“

He pointed up ahead. A small dirty sign leaned crazily over the ditch PRAHA. The driver got out and opened my door, which had no handle on the inside. I was left standing there in the night with the lights of Prague flickering faintly in the distance like a constellation of fallen stars.104

The last goodbye was said to Paul Wilson at the Wilson Train Station, now called Main Train Station, in Prague. Two police officers accompanied him from there to the borders of the country. His last words he shouted at his friends from the open window of the train were: “Až se

104 Machovec, Martin. Views From the Inside. Praha: Department of and Literary Criticism, 2006. 36 vrátím, tak to tady nechám zasklít. – As soon as I come back I will have the roof fixed.” It was due to the missing windows in the glass roof so it rained inside.105

105 „Bránil se jen kytarou.“ Fenomén Underground, 20 October 2017, https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10419676635-fenomen-underground/video/. Accessed 18 November 2019. 37

2.11 Back in London

After leaving Czechoslovakia involuntarily on July 15 1977, Paul Wilson went through Paris to London where he was supposed to wait for his wife Helena to join him. She was allowed to leave the country many months later, in November 1977. In the meantime, Paul Wilson decided to meet with Ivan Hartel, an exile artist, who was living in London at the time and who was a friend of Egon Bondy. Earlier when still living in Czechoslovakia, Ivan Hartel was part of the student movement during the Prague Spring in 1968. In London he was still in contact with his friends from Czechoslovakia and had access to underground material that was sent to him from behind the Iron Curtain.106

Both Paul Wilson and Ivan Hartel wanted to release the music of The Plastic People, so they started looking for someone who would help them. They were in contact with several publishing houses, however later they found out that many of those were frauds. On the other hand, many people wanted to release the PUU albums, but having only political interests in them. Therefore, Wilson and Hartel declined many offers they had received.107

Paul and Ivan once visited a punk concert in London where they met one of the close friends from the band Sex Pistols. Paul tried to talk to him and persuade him to help them with the album, however he responded: “The Plastic People? They’re anti-socialist. I don’t support fascist rock bands.”108

In the end, Wilson and Hartel decided to work with French Jacquesem Pasquiere, who was a music manager and The Plastic People caught his attention as they reminded him of the kind of music he used to play is France is the sixties and seventies.109 The album was published in 1978, compiled from the tapes with recordings Hartel was sent some time ago, with the name Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned. The author of the title was the band member Milan “Mejla” Hlavsa, who liked the reference to The Beatles album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band published in 1967. (Wikipedia) Hartel then invented the play on words – band/banned.110

106 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 438. 107 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 439. 108 Machovec. 109 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 440. 110 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 439.

38

The album Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned was issued together with the brochure The Merry Ghetto (Le ghetto joyeux) which was supposed to give the first comprehensive report of the whole Czech underground culture in other language than Czech – thus French and English.111 The Czech essays, articles and songs in the brochure were translated by Paul Wilson and Ivan Hartel, Paul Wilson is also the author of the preface and the whole publication accompanied by photos and pictures was issued in the Libération newspaper.112

Paul Wilson and Ivan Hartel also founded a publishing company called Boží Mlýn, the name taken from Wilson’s favorite song written by Egon Bondy present on the published album - Podivuhodný mandarin. The lyrics say: „Až vyčerpáš se v čtyřicítce a budeš celá hin / poznáš že život je jenom boží mlýn. – Once you are forty and tired you will / find out that life is just a God’s mill.“113

Apart from working on publishing The Plastic People music, Paul Wilson also continued on the cooperation with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation he had started before leaving Czechoslovakia. He was supposed to finish the interviews with the Czech dissidents and he used the tapes had been recording earlier before the StB came to his house. Together with Gwynne Dyer, Paul Wilson created five-part documentary film called Goulash Communism about differences between the regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland114. In London, Paul also wrote an essay called A Prague Odyssey printed in the Index on Censorship (May/June 1978) magazine. The article was published under the pseudonym Robert Hardy, as Paul’s wife was still in Czechoslovakia waiting for her documents to permit her to leave the country.115

111 „Paul Wilson, holder of the Revolver Revue Award.“ České dokumentační středisko, http://www.csds.cz/en/4263- DS. Accessed 18 November 2019. 112 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 441. 113 Mottýl. 114 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 459. 115 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 469. 39

2.12 Back in Canada as a Translator, Journalist and Essayist

Paul Wilson and his wife Helena decided to go back to Canada, Ontario province, where Wilson continued releasing the music in Boží Mlýn on his own, no longer with Ivan Hartel. Paul also had the logo of the company made by a Czech graphist living in Canada. The first album released in Toronto was another album by The Plastic People called Passion Play (Pašijové hry velikonoční) in 1980.116 Wilson’s translation of the libretto Pašije by the member of the band, Vratislav Brabenec, was broadcasted by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) during Easter and was very successful. That helped the recording with its popularity and Paul sold several hundreds of albums. Of great help were also Josef Škvorecký and Zdena Salivarová, putting a leaflet in each book released by 68 Publishers to promote the album.117 At the same time, Paul also started working on his first significant translation – The Engineer of Human Souls.

Paul Wilson was sent many tapes with recorded PPU music via special smuggling system being operated by Jan Karavan from London. The next albums published in Boží Mlýn were albums by The Plastic People called Hundred Points (100 bodů) released in 1980 and Leading Horses (Co znamená vésti koně) released in 1983. Paul Wilson was also in touch with Jiří Pallas (who, after signing Charta 77 moved out of the country to and started releasing gramophone records by Czech and Polish forbidden authors in his own publishing house called Šafrán 78) and thanks to their cooperation they were able to publish recordings of the songs by Svatopluk Karásek called Say No To The Devil, published in Boží Mlýn in 1979, and later also songs by Charlie Soukup named Radio in 1981. One year later in 1982, Paul Wilson and Jiří Pallas also managed to publish an album by DG 307, a Czech underground psychedelic rock band.118 The cover of the album called Gift To The Shadows (Fragment) says:

Produced in Canada by Boží Mlýn Productions and in Sweden by Šafrán; dedicated to Magor and Nico; lyrics translated from Czech; music and lyrics recorded in one flat in Prague in April 79 by musicians and no-musicians of DG 307.119

116 Mottýl. 117 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 444. 118 Paul Wilson, holder of the Revolver Revue Award. 119 DG 307. „Gift to the Shadows.“ Canada: Boží Mlýn productions, and Sweden: Šafrán, 1982, https://www.muzeum-hudby.cz/vinyl-detail/dg-307-gift-to-the-shadows-fragment-3319475, Accessed 20 November 2019. 40

Other albums by The Plastic People were not, however, as popular as the first one called Passion Play. Paul would give some releases to Recommended Records to resell them, some albums were sent to Japan. Though, Paul was able to make the most amount money by sending them via mail order, he even smuggled them over the border from Canada to the USA to save money on tax. The profit from the album Leading Horses was about seven thousand dollars and Paul used that to buy musical instruments and other equipment for the band.120

Paul Wilson decided not to continue releasing more music as he felt like no business man, moreover after buying equipment for the PPU he was not left with enough money to continue expanding Boží Mlýn. What is more, in the meantime, he was already a full-time translator of works by Hrabal, Havel and Škvorecký, thus he was very busy. The last album by the The Plastic People released by Boží Mlýn Productions was named Midnight Mouse (Půlnoční myš) first available in 1987. Wilson’s job was later taken over by Recommended Records, Chris Culter’s record label, who continued releasing music by The Plastic People (who renamed themselves to Půlnoc in 1988) via his imprint called Freeedonia.121

…

In the eighties, Paul Wilson was mostly occupied by his translations of Czech literature, as mentioned in the paragraph above. During these first ten years he spent back in Canada, he translated many works by Josef Škvorecký, Václav Havel and others. The translations mentioned below are the ones published in the 1980’s, however more detailed information on Wilson’s translations can be found in the following chapter called Works of Paul Wilson: The Power of the Powerless, Letters to Olga, I served the Kind of England, Indecent Dreams, Nightfrost in Prague, The Swell Season, The Engineer of Human Souls, Dvorak in Love and One (Party) Liners.

Paul Wilson also wrote and produced several other documentary series for the CBC, not only Goulash Communism. In 1986, he worked on a documentary called The Two Germanies and three years later in 1989, he and Gwynne Dyer collaborated again to create a sever hour long series named The Gorbachev Revolution.122

120 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 444. 121 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 446. 122 Wilson, Paul. “Biography of Paul Wilson.” Paul Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. Accessed 29 October 2019. 41

In 1986, Paul Wilson was working on Letters to Olga by Václav Havel. He had some problems with the translation due to Havel’s very difficult philosophical language, thus he decided to consult Jiří Němec, a Czech translator and philosopher while he was in Europe meeting with The Plastic People. Thus in 1986, Paul Wilson came to Vienna and later to Budapest to meet with the band. He brought the instruments and equipment he bought with the money he earned by selling the PPU albums via Boží Mlýn. They spent three days together in Budapest, however, when the PPU tried to cross the borders with their new instruments, custom officers would not let them. Thus, Paul took it back from them and met with Jiří Němec who then gave it to the Canadian diplomat who was then able to take the instruments to Prague with him. Paul and Jiří Němec than consulted the translation and solved most of the issues Paul had encountered.123

Apart from being a full-time translator, Paul Wilson started writing short articles and essays in order to inform the western audience about the European culture and life in totalitarian countries. By translating Czech literature and writing about the culture in the west he consistently promoted Czechoslovakia and its talents in English speaking world. In the 80’s while the communist regime still held on behind the Iron Curtain, Paul Wilson wrote many articles, for instance A Sense of Embarrassment, Prize and Prejudice, Keepers of the Looking-Glass, What’s it Like Making Rock’n’Roll in a Police State?, A Translator views glasnost warily, or Growing Up With Orwell. Those articles were published in several different magazines and newspapers, for example Musician Magazine, Books in Canada, Brick Magazine and so on. More information on the circumstances of the publication or content of the articles can be found in the chapter called Essays and Articles. Additionally, in years 1988 to 1992, Paul Wilson was an associate editor in The Idler magazine.124

…

Of course, Paul was still aware of everything happening in Czechoslovakia since his expulsion and he was paying a close attention to the events that lead to the Velvet Revolution starting in November 17, 1989. That autumn, Paul was working as a radio reporter in Eastern Germany and later also in Poland as he was still not allowed to enter Czechoslovakia. On

123 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 452. 124 Paul Wilson, holder of the Revolver Revue Award.

42

November 15, while he was getting ready to leave Warsaw, a Canadian diplomat told Paul that it was very probable that Václav Havel might become a president of the country in about two months. At that time, Paul Wilson did not share the same opinion.125 Few days after November 17, Paul was in Hungary working on interviews, finding out that Jaroslav Hutka, Czech folk singer, was permitted to enter the country, thus he thought he would try it as well. However, on November 24 he was still in Budapest feeling frustrated for not getting a visa yet, listening to Svobodná Evropa (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) about the news from Prague. Three days later, he informed the Canadian embassy about his arrival, just to be sure, and finally took a plane to Prague. There, at the airport, Paul was heartily welcomed by the Canadian ambassador himself.126 During his stay, Paul attended the Civic Forum (Občanské forum) debate and visited the several locations of the demonstrations that were full of candles and some walls were even stained with blood. In the streets during one of his walks, Paul met Havel’s brother who invited him to the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí) and Václav Havel was there, surrounded by reporters.127

During the visit, Paul also managed to do an interview with Olga Havlová called Not a Harlequin Romance (Žádná harlekýnka) in December 1989. He visited Olga and Václav in their flat in Prague, while Václav Havel was busy talking to reporters and being persuaded to run for a president.128 On December 10, Paul also attended Havel’s public speech that took place on the Wenceslas Square, remembering the atmosphere of it, seeing many happy faces and wondering about the system, seemingly so repressive and impossible to defeat, however, falling apart so easily and suddenly.129

Next two visits Paul Wilson paid to Czechoslovakia were the very next year, in 1990. First one was in February which Paul also combined with a journey to Poland, and the second was in June.130 The reason for going to Czechoslovakia in June was very important – first free election after many years of the population being forced to vote only for the Communist Party. And because Paul’s wife Helena did not want to be robbed of this, for her very unique experience, the family

125 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 127. 126 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 459. 127 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 129. 128 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 471. 129 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 130. 130 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 459. 43 together with their son Jake travelled to Europe so that Helena could throw an envelope of her choice into a ballot box on June 8, 1990.

Paul Wilson remembers the overall atmosphere in the democratic Czechoslovakia - he could smell the euphoric change in the society. Prague was full of colourful posters, musicians, rock bands, exhibitions and food stalls in the streets. He could see political banners all over the country and people being certain about the fall of the Communist Party, which in the end did not happen and the party ended up second in the election with thirteen percent of the votes. But overall, Paul was very happy to see how many people regained their optimism and zest for their lives. During the same visit, Paul Wilson also attended the Communist Party official press conference and the Prague Democracy Symposium.131

Few years later, when Paul started to feel uneasy about the events developing in Czechoslovakia, he was sent there for a work trip by Barbara Epstein from The New York Review of Books to observe the situation and describe it in an article. Thus, Paul Wilson visited Prague again in May 1992 during the election campaign which lead to the division of Czechoslovakia. Based on this trip two important essays of Paul’s were published – The End of the Velvet Revolution and Czechoslovakia: The Pain of Divorce.132 In the first essay mentioned, Paul Wilson describes the summer Prague and its atmosphere as he was strolling through the streets of the city. According to him, the city centre changed a lot – it was full of private restaurants, shops and tourist attractions. The workers on the scaffolding were actually working now and new buildings were being constructed.133

Paul spent five days in Prague and then rented a car to go to the East, Slovakia, where he checked into a hotel and started researching the political situation there, mainly the campaign of Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar and people’s opinions on the division of the country. With that information, he was able to put together the two articles mentioned above. Paul stayed in Slovakia until the autumn of 1992.134

…

131 Wilson, Paul. The High Road to Democracy. The Idler Magazine – September/October 1990. 132 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 473. 133 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 188. 134 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 204. 44

Paul Wilson continued translating books by famous Czech authors also in the nineties. He rendered a few more novels by Josef Škvorecký, for example The Miracle Game or The Republic of Whores. Nevertheless, these years Paul was mainly focused on writings done by Václav Havel as the president was getting more and more popular worldwide due to his democratic and peaceful speeches. Thus, he translated Disturbing the Peace, Open Letters, Summer Meditations and other essays or speeches by the Czech president. In years 1990 to 1994, Paul Wilson also translated three novels by Ivan Klíma. However, the translation was more of a side job for Paul in the nineties, his main occupation was now writing essays and articles as an editor or several different magazines or newspapers.135 In 1994, Paul Wilson became an official employee of the CBC and he worked as an editor of three national programmes called The Arts Tonight, Morningside, and This Morning, where he produced interviews for Shelagh Rogers, Eleanor Wachtel, Peter Gzowski and many others.136

However, he was more interested in writing, thus in 1998 he changed the work environment to become a senior editor in Saturday Night magazine, where he stayed until 2001.137 In the early nineties, Paul Wilson was mostly writing about the division of Czechoslovakia, for example the article Czechoslovakia: The Pain of Divorce published in The New York Review of Books, or later about the Czech president, for example in a short text named Václav Havel in Word and Deed, published in a book Critical Essays on Václav Havel in 1998.138

In 1999, The Plastic People of the Universe came to Northern America for a tour around the US and Canada and Paul Wilson attended their show in Toronto, where he also had a privilege to introduce the musicians. The concerts were successful and both Czech and Canadian fans came to support the band.139

…

From 2001 to 2003, Paul Wilson worked at The National Post where he edited the weekend cultural and historical supplement of the newspaper. In 2003 he co-founded The Walrus magazine,

135 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 455. 136 Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. 137 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 462. 138 Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa, and Phyllis Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. Print. 139 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 540. 45 being the deputy editor and later the editor of the journal, however, after having different opinions and problems with the publisher, Paul resigned in 2004.

Apart from being an editor, Paul Wilson continued translating works of Václav Havel, now mainly his plays of absurd drama. In 2001, Wilson translated play The Beggar’s Opera. In 2005, Paul Wilson came to Prague to work on a documentary about Václav Havel where Paul was in a role of a translator, interviewer and consultant. The documentary is called Turning Points of History – The Velvet Revolution and was created for the Canadian History Channel informing about the dissidents in the seventies and eighties and how their acts resulted in the revolution in 1989.140 Other very prominent plays of Václav Havel translated by Paul Wilson are for instance To the Castle and Back in 2007, Leaving in 2008 and the latest one, The Memo, published in 2012.

…

Paul Wilson has also received many awards, either for his translation or contributions to promoting Czech culture in English speaking countries. The first appreciation was expressed to him by Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls receiving the Governor General of Canada's Award in 1984, or by getting International Translation Award for his translation of Ivan Klíma’s short stories My Golden Trades in 1993, and he was given The Gratias Agit Award, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the for promoting the good name of the Czech Republic abroad in 2009.141 In 2013, Paul Wilson was awarded a very prestigious Jiří Theiner Prize which was given to him at the book fair and festival in Prague, Svět knihy. Paul Wilson received this prize for his translations from Czech literature and the release of the collection of his essays, Bohemian Rhapsodies, published in 2011.142

And on April 19, 2017 Paul Wilson received the Revolver Revue Prize for his contributions to the Czech culture and its promotion abroad, again. The event was held in Roxy club in Prague and was accompanied by the performance of music band W.W.W. and German band Anatopia. The Revolver Revue magazine has been awarding this prize since 1985 when established as a samizdat tribute to the youngest underground generation. A day prior to the prize awarding event,

140 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 462. 141 Paul Wilson, holder of the Revolver Revue Award. 142 Toman.

46

Paul Wilson also attended a debate regarding the topic of Donald Trump’s influence on the United States, held by Revolver Revue as well.143

…

The latest translation done by Paul Wilson is a collection of stories by Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, published in English in 2015. The publisher had asked Wilson to translate an earlier Hrabal’s work and when he offered to render Nežný barbar, the publisher’s preference was to release Mr. Kafka first. Thus, Nežný barbar is now on Wilson’s translation list as well as another Hrabal’s book, Autíčko, nevertheless, Paul still finds Hrabal’s language very challenging.144 For the future, he is also planning a re-translation of Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka by Jaroslav Hašek, as Wilson believes that every generation should have a new version of the famous novel. However, he is planning to keep this one to the end, to be his last translation. Currently, Paul Wilson, together with Markéta Goetz-Stankiewicz, is working on the anthology of Václav Havel’s texts called Havel on Theatre.145

At the moment, Paul Wilson lives in Heathcote in Canada with his second wife Patricia, who is also his editorial assistant. Paul Wilson has got three children – Jake from his first marriage with Helena, and Miranda and Gavin from his second marriage with Patricia. In his free time, while not working on translations, Paul likes to spend it sailing on his boat in Georgian Bay.146

143 Němec, Ondřej. „Cenu Revolver Revue získá bývalý člen Plastic People Paul Wilson, v Praze bude besedovat.“ Hospodářské Noviny, 11 April 2017, https://art.ihned.cz/knihy/c1-65693670-cena-revolver-revue-paul-wilson-roxy. Accessed 18 November 2019. 144 Email correspondence with Paul Wilson. 145 Paul Wilson, holder of the Revolver Revue Award. 146 Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. 47

3 Works of Paul Wilson

Paul Wilson is a publicist, essayist, literary critic and in a context of Czech literature, very important translator of famous Czech authors, his translations of the modern Czech literature are undoubtedly significant.

After his return back to his homeland, Canada, he became a very active writer and started working as a freelance journalist and also continued with his translation work, utilizing his knowledge of the Czech language he mastered during his 10 year stay in Czechoslovakia, even though he has never studied this language or translation at a university. The most important are his translations of Czech authors living in exile, authors writing unofficially or publishing in samizdat, as this literature used to be overlooked by most Anglo-American Bohemists at the time.147

Translations

One of Paul’s first attempts for translations was a short article by George Orwell called A Farthing Newspaper that he found in George Orwell archive at University of London in 1966. This article was available only in French and therefore he decided to translate it into English so that the archive would be complete. This also helped him to put himself to a test as a translator. This article was about Orwell’s prophecy, suggesting that in the future the newspaper and magazines will be only full of propaganda and advertisement.148

Concerning the translations of Czech literature, Wilson’s first translation of prose has never been published. It was a book by Jiří Mucha, who was a peculiar decadent author living in the centre of Prague who found out about Paul and invited him over to talk about translation of his works. Before that, Paul had been already translating essays, mainly by a Czech author and philosopher, Ladislav Klíma, and also by Egon Bondy, an underground poet and writer. The translations of Ladislav Klíma were never published as for the western audience, his opinions were probably too radical. Paul Wilson once tried to create collection of his texts, wrote an introduction

147 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 480. 148 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 16.

48 and send it to George Steiner, a prominent literary critic. He responded with the hope that the collection would never be published.149

Wilson considers Příběh inženýra lidských duší (The Engineer of human souls) written by Josef Škvorecký to be his first successful and popular work of translation, though.150

In the essay Keepers of the looking glass: Some thoughts on translation, published in 1991 by Coach House Press in Toronto, Paul Wilson shares his opinions on translating texts by Czech authors, in this case mainly novels by Josef Škvorecký, and comments on his job as a translator. He says: „Translation is a strange craft where perfection is unreachable and success invisible. On the other hand, the translator has to pay almost an obsessive attention to the problem of meanings and it would be very unlikely that he would not be reflecting the purpose of translation in his own head very frequently.”151

Paul Wilson also talks about translation as a craft in an essay called Old Translator Never Retire, The Just… Thoughts for Ray Ellenwood, published in Open Letters Magazine in 2007:

The translation is rather a mission than a profession, something like a spiritual mission of a priest, nevertheless it is a job to which a person gradually works up to taking small steps, using every opportunity, not a career plan which can be later accomplished and terminated with satisfaction.152 In my bookcase there is a one shelf filled with books about translation, all very lengthy. Those books are all beautiful, inspiring, challenging, but later I started feeling guilty for not thinking the same way while translating a book. Not a single book has helped me with my translating job and I do not even know how they could have. Every time a translator renders a piece of writing, it is a very unique experience carrying very specific problems along. And solution to those problems cannot be found in any existing translation theory and if those answers to the problems really exist anywhere – if we cannot find those answer on our own, they are only in the book that is being translated and they are waiting

149 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 452. 150 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 450. 151 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 80. 152 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 402.

49

for the translator to find them. A good translation is not defined by the theory he had read but rather by his thorough and attentive work.153

Moreover, being able to formulate and write in your mother tongue might be according to Paul Wilson even more important that being the very best translator.154

The following chapters describe all the translations and others works done by Paul Wilson in great detail, comment on the circumstances of the publication and where possible also talk about Wilson’s experience of rendering a certain text. The translations are sorted according to the author of the novel or a short story and in then chronological order, the first one being the oldest translation to the last one being the newest. The chronological order of Wilson’s translations not taking the author into consideration is the following (sorted by the year of first official publication, not the year of the translation being finished by Paul Wilson):

Zdeněk Mlynář: Nightfrost in Prague (1980) Josef Škvorecký: The Swell Season (1982) Josef Škvorecký: The Engineer of Human Souls (1984) Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless (1985) Josef Škvorecký: Dvorak In Love: A Lighthearted Dream (1986) Pavel Taussig: Blbé, ale naše / One (Party) Liners (1987) Václav Havel: Letters to Olga (1988) Arnošt Lusting: Indecent Dreams (1988) Josef Škvorecký: The End of Lieutenant Boruvka (1989) Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England (1989) Václav Havel a Karel Hvížďala: Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (1990) Josef Škvorecký: The Miracle Game (1990) Josef Škvorecký: The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka (1991) Civic Freedom in Central Europe (1991) Václav Havel: Open Letters: Selected Writing 1963-1989 (1991)

153 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 405. 154 de Bruin Hüblová, Magda. „Povolání literární překladatel z češtiny.“ iLiteratura.cz, 25 June 2014, http://iliteratura.cz/Clanek/33361/povolani-literarni-prekladatel-z-cestiny. Accessed 18 November 2019. 50

Václav Havel: Summer Meditations (1991) Ivan Klíma: My Golden Trades (1992) Josef Škvorecký: The Republic of Whores (1993) Václav Havel: Toward a Civil Society (1994) Ivan Klíma: Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994) Ivan Klíma: The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (1994) Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion (1995) We Are Children Just the Same (1995) Václav Havel: The Art of the Impossible: Politics As Morality in Practice (1997) Václav Havel: The Beggar’s Opera (2001) Dark Blue Sky (2001) Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back (2007) Josef Škvorecký: Ordinary Lives (2008) Václav Havel: Leaving (2008) Václav Havel: The Memo (2012) Bohumil Hrabal: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult (2015)

Essays and other publications

Paul Wilson is also the author of many essays and short texts published in western magazines and newspapers. He also contributed to release or collection of many other publications, where he was not in a role of a translator. Other general information concerning Paul Wilson’s publications apart from translations will be described in closer detail in the relevant chapters below.

51

3.1 Translations of Václav Havel

Václav Havel was born in 1936 in Prague and as a part of a wealthy family and his ‘burgeois’ background he was not allowed to choose his own studies freely. He worked as a stage technician and later as dramaturge and director assistant in several Prague theatres. In 1963, his play Zahradní slavnost had a premiere at the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí). After 1968, due to the invasion of Russian Armies and the following normalization, Havel’s plays were forbidden and he could not publish his works officially. He was one of the founders of Charter 77, human rights organization, and for that he was constantly persecuted and imprisoned four times. In November 1989, he became one of the leaders of the Velvet revolution and in the same year in December, he was elected president of Czechoslovakia. He is famous for his plays, essays, articles, on the whole his thoughts on democracy are timeless. He was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. Václav Havel died in 2011.155

Paul Wilson found out about Václav Havel very early on while living in Czechoslovakia and in 1968 he read his text where Havel expressed the need for the true communist government opposition. At this time and after the invasion of the Russian Army, Havel was already a publicly known figure and Wilson generally agreed with his opinions, especially those on democratic society. The second Wilson’s notice of Havel was in 1974 when the essayist draw attention to himself with An Open Letter to Gustav Husák, at the time general secretary of the Communist party, later president of Czechoslovakia.156 Wilson felt inspired by the letter. According to him, this was the best, most true and thorough description of the normalization practices. Havel and Wilson both first met and shook hands at an unofficial private film screening, however, while Wilson still lived in Czechoslovakia, they rather only new about each other’s existence than having a close relationship.157 After being expelled from the Czechoslovakia, Wilson started translating Havel’s works.

Paul Wilson translated many texts of the former president, mostly his essays, anthologies, many of which he also prepared for publication. His first more significant translation of a longer

155 Havel, Václav. Letní přemítání. Praha: Odeon, 1991. 156 Macháček. 157 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 454.

52 work was Letters to Olga. Paul Wilson says: “At that time my more complex and rather challenging translations of Josef Škvorecký have already been published and received great reviews. I gained the reputation of being a translator with experience.”158 This helped Wilson to become a respected person in the field of translation. Additionally, in one of Wilson’s essays concerning the former president called Václav Havel in Word and Deed, he talks about how he started working on Havel’s texts:

I began in the early 1980s by translating the work of a little-known writer whose words were meant to give power and hope to people caught in the toils of a totalitarian regime in the middle of Europe. After 1989 I translated many of Havel’s major speeches and other writings, but now those same words and ideas, often delivered on world stages, had become agents in a political and economic struggle to build a new democratic edifice on the rubble left behind by totalitarianism.159

Shortly after translating Letters to Olga (originally called Dopisy Olze) and Disturbing the Peace (Dálkový výslech), Paul Wilson became Havel’s main translator as for the publisher it was essential that the translations have a certain continuity and uniformity, which Wilson was able to give them. After becoming president of Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic, Havel started sending Paul Wilson his speeches for translation. Paul Wilson speaks of this experience as feeling rather privileged, moreover he states that working for Václav Havel is wonderful, because he respects and trusts his translator, which is not, according to Wilson, a standard relationship between an author and his or her translator.160 Paul Wilson also comments:

A translator develops a peculiar intimacy with his or her author. Part of this has to do with the intellectual effort of engaging with what literary critics like to call “the text.” Far from being a sequence of words on a page, this text is actually a living piece of the author’s mind, and the trick in translation is to make it live as full a life in the new tongue as it did in the old.161

158 Macháček. 159 Goetz-Stankiewicz, and Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel, p. 22. 160 Macháček. 161 Goetz-Stankiewicz, and Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel, p. 22.

53

Nevertheless, the biggest significance should be given to translations of his famous speeches as well as plays written in the spirit of absurd drama, with the help of which Havel was able to criticize the irrationality of communist regime and the foolishness of the language used by politics at the time of normalization.162 Speeches uttered and written by Havel bear even more importance in the context of the world behind the borders of the Czech Republic and enjoy great popularity abroad.163 Havel’s plays were undoubtedly very difficult for the translation, as the focus is on the language and long sentences. However, the translator himself considers Letters to Olga and I Served the Kind of England to be the most challenging texts he has ever dealt with.164 Paul Wilson describes a general idea of Havel’s plays, that according to him “portray good people caught in the complexities and ambiguities of real life, and where their ideas, however good and true they may be, do not always triumph.”165

Paul Wilson is not the only translator of Václav Havel, indeed. Alena Brabcová, who has been Havel’s translator and interpreter for more than 12 years, also admits that his plays were sometimes difficult for her to transfer to English language. Long sentences are quite ordinary for Czech, however English does not naturally bear this feature. She says to have learned a lot from Paul Wilson, mainly that it is better to shorten or divide a sentence if the language requires a translator to do so for a particular piece of lexical phenomenon to sound casually, as he recommended to her.166

To conclude this chapter, I would like to add one more citation by Paul Wilson’s concerning translation of Václav Havel: “Václav Havel once told me that his texts seem more elegant in my translations than in his Czech original. To this day I do not really know whether it was supposed to be a compliment or a tactful criticism. I think that improving the text is one of the possible ways to commit a ‘treason’ in translation.”167

162 Goetz-Stankiewicz, and Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel, p. 23. 163 Macháček. 164 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 455. 165 Goetz-Stankiewicz, and Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel, p. 23. 166 Polák, Pavel. Kouřimský, Vojtěch. „Havlovu větu bylo někdy v angličtině potřeba rozdělit na dvě, vzpomíná jeho překladatelka.“ Český rozhlas, 18 December 2012, https://www.irozhlas.cz/kultura_literatura/havlovu-vetu-bylo- nekdy-v-anglictine-potreba-rozdelit-na-dve-vzpomina-jeho-prekladatelka_201212182035_vkourimsky. Accessed 18 November 2019. 167 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 400. 54

3.1.1 The Power of the Powerless

This essay was written in 1978, a year after the formation of the human rights movement called Charter 77. It was originally intended to be a discussion-collaborative piece as a Polish- Czechoslovak volume of essays on the subject of power and freedom. All the participants were expected to read Havel’s text and respond to it in writing, however, some of the contributors were arrested and thus the essays were published separately.168 The Power of the Powerless was originally published in Czechoslovak samizdat, but it has subsequently been translated into at least twenty-one foreign languages and published in even more editions (some of them, like the Chinese and Iranian, still in samizdat). Here, Havel speaks of the anti-democratic regime of the Soviet Union, totalitarianism, democracy, dissidents, ideology, and most importantly, the potential power of each individual to inhibit small changes in behaviour within themselves and having power of immense impact on the change in the society, showing the individual responsibility. To illustrate this in practice, Havel chose a greengrocer as a potential representative of the ordinary, average citizen.169

Wilson translated the essay in the early 80’s, while Havel was in prison for undermining the communist regime, sentenced for three and a half years. It was the first Havel’s work Wilson translated to English. In Wilson’s opinion, the translation felt very intense for the urgency of Havel’s imprisonment and his message. Wilson felt the need to convey the unaltered message with the same urgency to the people not living within the totalitarian state. He says: “Such an audience might understand Havel intellectually, but not with the emotional or visceral immediacy that a Czech reader might.” It was very important and at the same time challenging for the translator to show Havel’s intellectual intuitiveness and still preserve the emotional immediacy of this very text.170

In an article written about the experience of translating this essay, Wilson talks about the difficulty of conveying Havel’s special understanding of ideology and its role. The notion is

168 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies, vol. 32, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 353-408, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325418766625. Accessed 18 November 2019. 169 Krapfl, James, Barbara J. Falk. „Introduction: The Power of the Powerless at Forty.“ East European Politics and Societies, vol. 32, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 207-213, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325418765932. Accessed 18 November 2019. 170 Wilson, Paul. „The Power of the Powerless Revisited.“ East European Politics and Societies, vol. 32, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 232-238, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325417747972. Accessed 18 November 2019. 55 generally understood differently in different countries and places. In non-totalitarian countries, ideology can mean something such as set of beliefs one can have, or even what political parties stand for – and such ideology is a foundation for society and economic system. However, according to Wilson’s understanding of Havel’s philosophical introspection, ideology has a completely different meaning and function in totalitarian or even post-totalitarian states. According to Havel, ideology is a tool for clinging to power and it is so powerful that it influences all the individuals. This is expressed in a paragraph from the essay in English translation by Paul Wilson: “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality, while making it easier for them to part with them... It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, their adaptation to the status quo.”171 Wilson considers this part to be the most difficult to translate for him and after several times of coming back to it, rereading it in Czech in different time periods, he is still able to find new meanings in the text that he would, perhaps, translate differently. He even expresses his regret of finding nuances of meaning missed and also omission he can no longer explain. Nevertheless, he says: “Either way, the meaning of this passage is clear: that post-totalitarian ideology is an instrument by which people are integrated into the “automatism” of the system, becoming dehumanized cogs in the process.”172

In 1985, the collection of other essays together with Havel’s The Power of the Powerless was published. The anthology is called The power of the powerless: citizens against the state in central-eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an introduction by Steven Lukes. That volume includes a selection of nine other essays from the original Czech and Slovak collection. All the other authors reflect on the same topic as Havel – politics, socialism, isolation and human rights and of course, power. Wilson’s newly annotated version of the translation has also been published. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the translation appeared to be sometimes troublesome for Wilson and initially when preparing and publishing the first version, he found it difficult to see the text with fresh eyes. Therefore, editor and critic of the text, James Krapfl, closely looked at the original essay and the translated one and offered several alternations to the text, some of which Wilson adopted to the newest version after close evaluation, however keeping the most of his

171 Wilson, Paul. „The Power of the Powerless Revisited.“ 172 Wilson, Paul. „The Power of the Powerless Revisited.“

56 wording intact. Moreover, in many cases, footnotes with explanation were added.173 Wilson speaks of the alternations to the text in his introduction to the new edition. He divides them roughly into five categories and then he closely comments on those:

Errors: These were examples were Wilson admits to be completely wrong, for instance translating césaropapismus as theocracy.174 Césaropapismus, or in English caesaropapism, is, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, a political system in which the head of the state is also the head of the church. The term is most frequently associated with the late Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. On the other hand, theocracy is described as a government by a divine guidance.175 Therefore, the term can be translated literally.

Omissions: Those were instances in which words or phrases from the original Havel’s version are missing from the translation, many of these omissions are inexplicable for Wilson.

Alternate translations: These translations mostly include the critic’s objections to Wilson’s rendering of several phrases. In this case, Wilson mentions Havel’s understanding of the notions living within a lie (život ve lži) and living within the truth (život v pravdě), that occur very frequently in the first part of the text. Wilson says that some commentators have suggested different and according to them better translation – living in falsehood. Wilson has no objections to that, as the meaning is the same, however he clarifies his intentions he had when translating this collocation: “I would only say that “lie” has the same raw, emotional force as the Czech lež, whereas “falsehood” seems more abstract than Havel may have intended.”176 Here we can see the importance of any translator knowing his author, being able to think about the intentions of the author and understanding the context of any writing that is being rendered to another language. In this way, Paul Wilson’s translation is undeniably elaborate.

173 Krapfl. 174 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies. 175 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. „Caesaropapism.“ Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc., 25 April 2017, https://britannica.com/topic/caesaropapism. Accessed 18 November 2019. 176 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies.

57

Clarifications: Those are moments when Wilson felt he would have translated certain words differently, for example Havel’s expression bezradnost, originally translated as ineptitude. According to him, better translation could have been helplessness of bewilderment.177

Stylistic devices: When comparing the original Havel’s essay and the Wilson translation, it is not hard to notice the differences in the number and frequency of quotation marks. In the translation, these is much fewer number of those stylistic devices and as Wilson says, he has done it on purpose. According to him, overusing the quotation marks takes away from the strength of the message and can even irritate the reader.178

To conclude Wilson’s reflection of this translation, it is worth mentioning that probably no translation can be perfect. Wilson expresses an idea that if the original work is good, the impact of the message will be most likely preserved even with inexact translation, and he even adds: “Moreover, a well-written work, like a good wine, will mature over time, to reveal nuances of meaning that neither the author nor his translator could have anticipated,” which is perfectly correct, mainly in the context of Václav Havel’s works and plays, which are full of ambiguities and complex philosophical meditations requiring vast insight and experience.179

On the whole, Václav Havel’s Moc bezmocných - The Power of the Powerless have influenced Eastern Europe immensely at the time of publication and can still help us interpret our daily encounters with power and evaluate possibilities for personal action.180 The essay has been widely read all over the world, especially in totalitarian and post-totalitarian countries. The Spanish translation is still profoundly popular on Cuba.181

177 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies 178 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies 179 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies 180 Krapfl. 181 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 331. 58

3.1.2 Letters to Olga

In 1979, Václav Havel was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labour for his involvement in the Czech human rights movement, known as Charter 77. In prison he was allowed to write to his wife, Olga, once a week and only on “family matters”. He used the opportunity for profound reflections, and as he talks about himself, his past, his moods, his failings, philosophy, about the theatre and his own plays, he tries to express what is most important to him in a style sometimes elliptical and abstract, that will confuse the prison censors.182 Letters were published first in 1983 in samizdat and later on in Wilson’s translation, including his introduction to the publication, in 1988.183

Wilsons admits not being fond of writing long introductions, however he was asked by the publisher in chief of the Knopf publishing house to introduce Havel in detail as he was not generally known by the public outside Czechoslovakia. In his introduction, Wilson says more about the process of publication of the letters:

Havel’s original intention was to publish only the letters he considered of lasting interest, but fortunately his friends, old associates from Tvář magazine, intervened. Jan Lopatka (a critic who has saved many a writer from self-censorship) persuaded Havel to publish the letters more or less exactly as he wrote them. The argument was this: that since the letters indelibly bear the mark of their origin, to present them as anything other than prison letters would be to act against their essential nature. Consequently, of the 144 letters that Havel wrote to Olga between June 4, 1979 and September 4, 1982, all but nineteen were kept. Of those nineteen, four were never delivered and fifteen were dropped from the original edition because they repeat practical information contained in other letters.184

When Wilson received Dopisy Olze, the publisher wanted the translation of only the most important letters, Wilson did not agree, though. He thought the meaning of the whole book would be lost.185 Nevertheless, the English edition of Letters to Olga does not include all the letters, few

182 Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979 - September 1982. Pbk. ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Print. 183 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 470. 184 Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979 - September 1982. 185 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 452.

59 more have been excluded due to the same reasons followed also by the Czech editor, that is either the repetitive practical information or the fact that some thoughts and meditations expressed by Havel were a part of other letters, though written in more lively or interesting way. All in all, the major part of the letters was published, as Wilson preferred.186

In the introduction to the Letters to Olga, Wilson closely describes the technical part of Havel’s imprisonment and the process of the letter writing. In prison, Havel could only write one letter a week, no more than four pages long. It was forbidden to use foreign vocabulary, quotation marks and the handwriting had to be perfectly legible. Moreover, no humour was allowed and that makes the letters very serious. The censorship was so strict that Havel and other prisoners made a game out of the letter writing – they read the letters to each other and guessed which one will be probably sent out from the prison.187 In Wilson’s interview from year 1989 with Olga Havlová, Wilson asks about the letters as the general public was always interested in them, especially women:

In the letters, Havel often complains that you don’t write to him very regularly or that you don’t write enough, while he is extremely curious about what is happening outside. Was writing to him hard?” and Olga responds: “Later on we found out that Vašek did not receive all my letters, because some were confiscated by the censor. Some letters were even given to him later and in the meantime Vašek already wrote to me asking why I was not responding to him. It was a vicious circle, they did it to us on purpose.188

Václav Havel himself was heard many times saying that the interest surrounding this book surprises him as it is quite a difficult read due to the philosophical and meditative aspect. He even admitted that he was not able to understand some parts of the text anymore. This definitely caused many problems to Wilson during the process of translation, he says there were countless moments that were challenging for him: “Translation is always more work than one bargains for, and this book – with its special difficulties – was no exception.”189 Wilson describes Havel’s language in the letters to be full of phenomenology, even drawing vocabulary from the German language. In

186 Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979 - September 1982. 187 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 98. 188 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 142. 189 Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979 - September 1982.

60 order to understand the meaning of Havel’s words he even studied translations of Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher: “I sent a letter to Havel, asking him for help. It took a month to get to Havel and two other months before I received the answer. He wrote that he does not know what he meant anymore, that he wrote it that way to escape the censorship.”190

In the end, Jiří Němec (Czech translator and philosopher) helped Paul Wilson with the translation, when Wilson visited Czechoslovakia in 1986. The English version was published two years later, in 1988, including the introduction as mentioned above.191

190 Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979 - September 1982. 191 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 453. 61

3.1.3 Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala

Dálkový výslech is a book published in 1986, where Karel Hvížďala, Czech journalist, playwright and author, introduces Havel to Czech people through an interview. The interview was connected to Havel’s fiftieth birthday intending to summarize his life in the theatre, the literary politics of his early years, his public life, years in prison and harassment by the police.192 Disturbing the peace, an English version of the interview, was published in 1989, shortly before the Velvet revolution, and is introduced by Wilson’s short text talking about Havel, Charter 77, samizdat, Civic Forum (Občanské forum) and reminiscing about his own experience in Czechoslovakia in the 70’s and expulsion from the country. Moreover, the introduction includes a short record from Wilson’s encounter with Havel in Czechoslovakia in December 1989 and comments on Havel’s busy days in the middle of the revolution.

“When Karel Hvížďala first proposed the idea of a book-length interview to Václav Havel in 1985, Hvížďala was living in West Germany, Havel in Prague, and neither of them could visit the other. Havel liked the idea because it would give him a chance to reflect on his life as he approached fifty; he accepted,” describes Wilson in the preface of the translated publication. Both Havel and Hvížďala worked on the interview for over a year, exchanging unofficial, underground letters. Hvížďala sent Havel a list of questions and between Christmas and the New Year, Havel recorded all the answers, the recording being about eleven hours long. Hvížďala than transcribed the spoken word asking Havel some additional questions and later in June 1986, Havel prepared a final version, which was published in Havel’s underground samizdat imprint, Edice Expedice.193

Later on in autumn, the book was brought to the west through the Czech exile publishing house based in London, Rozmluvy and in 1989, shortly after the Velvet revolution, the Melantrich Press in Prague had it published in seven days, making it the first samizdat book to come out legally in democratic Czechoslovakia.194

Wilson speaks of the translation process in the preface of the book:

192 Havel, Václav. Disturbing the peace: a conversation with Karel Hvížďala. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Print. 193 Havel, Václav. Disturbing the peace: a conversation with Karel Hvížďala. 194 Havel, Václav. Disturbing the peace: a conversation with Karel Hvížďala.

62

Translating this book was one of the most enjoyable tasks I’ve ever undertaken. Havel had said it would be “recreation” after the hard labor of Letters to Olga, and he was right. I followed his method of composition, translating it first into a tape recorder, and then editing the transcript. I’m not sure it was any faster that way, but I hope the result has something of the quality of Havel’s conversation in it.195

His translation was finished in 1989, shortly before the political changes in Czechoslovakia got moving, but also at the time when there was still no certainty about when the revolution could possibly start.196

In the preface, Wilson comments on the translation process of the title, which is not literal: “The Czech title of this book is Dálkový výslech, which means Long-Distance Interrogation. For a long time, this title stood over my translation too; it was awkward but accurate, and something of the irony of the original does seep through. My mind acknowledged the need for a different title, but it refused to work on the problem.” In the end, the title Disturbing the Peace was a suggestion by Bobbie Bristol, publisher from Knopf publishing house and Wilson liked it. According to Wilson, it is connected to a word ‘hooliganism’ – violent or rowdy behaviour typical for young troublemakers. It was behaviour people in Czechoslovakia used to be imprisoned for, for instance Ivan Jirous. And actually, the book really disturbed the peace of the totalitarian system.197

195 Havel, Václav. Disturbing the peace: a conversation with Karel Hvížďala. 196 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 471. 197 Havel, Václav. Disturbing the peace: a conversation with Karel Hvížďala. 63

3.1.4 Open Letters: Selected Writing 1963 - 1989

This publication, released in 1991 - two years after Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, is a collection his nondramatic works - political essays, letters, writings, interviews, speeches, short autobiographical texts, mostly written in years 1963 – 1989 when Havel fought the communist regime as a dissident. This volume was collected, edited and translated by Paul Wilson and contains almost all the writings by Havel that had not yet been translated at the time. Examples of the writings Wilson translated and included are an open letter to Gustav Husák, The Power of the Powerless essay, which was the first translation of Havel done by Wilson, the publication also contains some of Havel’s correspondence from his days of imprisonment or his private letter to Alexander Dubček.

This collection is an important closure of Havel’s most significant works written with an immediate reaction to the totalitarian era and dishonesty of the regime in Czechoslovakia, and what is more, those writings had an immense influence on the Eastern part of the Europe, once again, with the touch of Havel’s moral responsibility plus having the meditative and philosophical aspect to them. The translator of those works, Paul Wilson, wrote also an introduction to the volume, talking about his motivation for the publication, the translation work and gives explanation for not including some of Havel’s pieces. In the first part of the preface, Paul Wilson talks about his intentions preceding the publication: “The purpose was, and remains, for this to be a companion volume to Letters to Olga, Disturbing the Peace, and his plays. Open Letters will round out the picture these other works give us of Václav Havel as dramatist, writer, thinker, and future statesman.”198

As Wilson describes in his preface, the collection contains twenty-five pieces of carefully selected works by Václav Havel. The arrangement is naturally chronological, starting with the times of Havel being a playwright at the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí) before the invasion of the Russian Armies in 1968, and ending with his New Year's address to Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1990, shortly after he had become the president of Czechoslovakia:

198 Havel, Václav, and Paul R. Wilson. Open letters: Selected Writtings 1965-1990. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.

64

“When his pieces are assembled in the order in which he wrote them, they become a chronicle both of his intellectual life, and, implicitly, of his times as well,” Paul Wilson wrote.199

What is more, Wilson’s intentions were not only to present Havel as a political figure and a dissident, but more importantly as a man – to show the reader who Havel really was, through the short interviews and his responses to certain articles, his insights and arguments.200

Additionally, Wilson excluded many of Havel’s prose from the collection, some of it for being too long and abstract, and also his essays on theatre, the reason being similar as for excluding several letters from the collection Letters to Olga – Havel already said much the same things in his other writings and according to Wilson, more forcefully. After becoming very famous during the revolution and later on, Havel gave many interviews, which were quite repetitive, therefore Wilson did not include those either. The translator also continues explaining all the other omissions in the collection: “Finally, in the year and a half before the “revolution” of 1989, Havel was a regular contributor to the underground (now legal) newspaper Lidové noviny. As interesting as these articles are historically, I felt they were too closely tied to specific events.”201

On the contrary, Wilson admits to be regretting not including several Havel’s polemical articles: “One important exchange was with in late 1968 over the meaning of the popular resistance to the Soviet invasion—and more broadly, over how the Czechs and Slovaks view their own history. Another, in the late 1970s, was a debate with Ludvík over the kinds of activities that were worth risking jail sentences for.” However, the reason is simple, Wilson felt it would not be appropriate or fair to show only Havel’s point of view without including the texts by the authors he was arguing with.202

Similar as The Power of the Powerless and other Havel’s essays, this collection is valuable for anyone seeking to learn about democracy principles and even if Havel’s texts were written and published many year ago, they are still relevant to this current day.

199 Havel, Václav, and Paul R. Wilson. Open letters: Selected Writtings 1965-1990. 200 Havel, Václav, and Paul R. Wilson. Open letters: Selected Writtings 1965-1990. 201 Havel, Václav, and Paul R. Wilson. Open letters: Selected Writtings 1965-1990. 202 Havel, Václav, and Paul R. Wilson. Open letters: Selected Writtings 1965-1990.

65

3.1.5 Summer Meditations

A book he wrote in the middle of his first (and only) term as president of Czechoslovakia. There, Havel emphasizes the importance of our understanding of human identity, a notion that he explores most fully in his plays. He uses a metaphor based on the notion of home – or domov in Czech, which suggest something more fundamental than home in English, more like a dwelling place.203

Letní přemítání was originally written during summer months of July and August in 1991 and the following year, Summer Meditations found its place on the shelves of many bookstores in Canada and the United States, additionally this translation includes some revisions and remarks as of February 1992.

In his first book ever since he became president of Czechoslovakia, Havel openly states what he believes and what he wants for his country, and also reflects on his experience in office. He advocates a politics of decency, stressing that government officials have a moral responsibility to serve the people. Havel also talks about the economics, political change, nationalism as well as environmental devastation:204

I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy, in which everything belongs to someone-- which means that someone is responsible for everything. It is a system in which complete independence and plurality of economic entities exist within a legal framework, and its workings are chiefly guided by the laws of the marketplace. This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself205

It is a rather informal testament offering the key to understanding the post-communist society, and in Havel’s case as always, with the focus on morality and sincerity, using his common sense.206

203 Goetz-Stankiewicz, and Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel, p. 22. 204 Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. 205 Havel, Václav. Summer meditations. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print. 206 „Summer Meditations.“ Publishers Weekly. https://publishersweekly.com/9780679414629. Accessed 18 November 2019. 66

Paul Wilson closely comments on the text Letní přemítání in his essay called The End of the Velvet Revolution which he wrote in summer 1992, where Wilson, among other topics, deeply reflects on the June elections in the Czechoslovakia and how that led to the division of the two countries. Wilson often refers to Letní přemítání and to Havel’s thoughts on the current situation in Czechoslovakia as well as the campaign led by the two political leaders with intentions to split the nations.207

Havel’s meditations are, without a doubt, highly inspirational reflections for anyone interested on the matter of politics and government worldwide. The citation by the author expresses that perfectly: “There is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility, and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly. I’m aware that, in everyday politics, this is not seen as the most practical way of going about it.”208

207 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 188. 208 Havel, Václav. Summer meditations. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print. 67

3.1.6 Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings

Toward a Civil Society is a collections of Václav Havel’s speeches and writings, published in 1994. The book contains texts from years 1990 to 1994 and most of those were translated, edited and prepared for publication by Paul Wilson.

Some selected speeches are for example the New Year’s Address to the Nation, delivered on January 1 in all the years of 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994. In 1990, Václav Havel gave the speech at the first world summit conference devoted to children, with leaders from seventy-one countries taking part. He also spoke at the 150th anniversary of the birth of Antonín Dvořák, who was one of the greatest Czech composers, best known for his New World symphony. Havel delivered lectures also at the University of California and New York University, where he was also given an honorary doctorate by the university. Altogether, there are thirty-six texts included in the publication.209

209 Havel, Václav. Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings 1990-1994. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1994. Print. 68

3.1.7 The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice

The Art of the Impossible is a collection of 35 essays and speeches written by Václav Havel in years from 1990 to 1996, beginning with his address to the United States congress in 1990 and concluding with a 1996 speech about politics and theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts. The texts are translated from Czech originals and carefully selected by Paul Wilson and first published in May 1997. The name of the collection is a translation from Havel’s known saying about politics – he said that it is the art of impossible (umění nemožného in Czech).210

In the essays, Havel is reflecting about what is and will be necessary after the revolution, fall of the totalitarian regime and how to restore democracy in the community: “It will certainly not be easy," Havel writes in Wilson’s translation, "to awaken in people a new sense of responsibility for the world, or to convince them to conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.”211 The themes in the essays are, once again, reoccurring; Havel talks about experience of his early presidency, reflects on the division of Czechoslovakia, the individual responsibility of each and every person, and the later we read the more outward-looking thinking can be seen in Havel’s meditation, where he expresses the need for the coexistence and mutual peaceful relationships among different cultures, which is, according to him, a sign of a modern and postmodern society:212

In Wilson’s powerful translation, Havel once again uses the concepts of bytí, which Wilson translated as Being with a capital letter, and jsoucno, translated as existence. This phenomenon Havel talks about in his many texts (mentioned also in The Power of the Powerless or in Letters to Olga) is borrowed from the philosopher Heidegger and phenomenology: “Communism was not defeated by military force, but by life, by the human spirit, by conscience, by the resistance of Being and man to manipulation. It was defeated by a revolt of color, authenticity, history in all its variety, and human individuality against imprisonment within a uniform ideology.”213 Even though Wilson stands by his choice of using these expressions, he admits that for those being philosophical

210 Courries, Kevin. „Democratic Vistas: Vaclav Havel’s The Art of the Impossible.“ Critics At Large, 29 May 2010, https://criticsatlarge.ca/2010/05/book-vaclav-havals-art-of-impossible.html. Accessed 19 November 2019. 211 Havel, Václav. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. New York: Knopf, 1997, p. 27. Print. 212 „The Art of the Impossible.“ Kirkus Reviews, 1 April 1997 (posted online 20 May 2010), https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vaclav-havel/the-art-of-the-impossible/. Accessed 19 November 2019. 213 Havel, Václav. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, p. 90.

69 concepts they themselves require an extensive exegesis and the problem with the translation is obvious.214

In Kevin Courrier’s article, his own reflection on Barrack Obama’s presidential election in 2009, he uses some of the reference from the Art of the Impossible collection. It seems that Havel’s thoughts on democracy are valuable anywhere and anytime and that is a proof of this translation being very popular, even nowadays. Courrier compares Obama’s and Havel’s intentions and after reading Havel’s texts, he says: “What I think Obama is attempting to do, through his historic health care package and international diplomacy, is to cultivate a vision by using his instincts. That's what Havel does in The Art of the Impossible. He makes expedience irrelevant.”215

214 Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies. 215 Courries. 70

3.1.8 The Beggar’s Opera

The Beggar’s Opera is originally a famous play written by John Gay in the 18th century, full of political satire and allegory written in prose and interspersed with songs, where Gay caricatures government, society and marriage.216 Nonetheless, this work inspired not only Václav Havel, there are many adaptations of this play. Havel’s Beggar’s Opera, originally called Žebrácká opera na téma Johna Gaye, was written in 1972 during the times when Havel was not able to publish officially and was first performed secretly in a meeting hall outside Prague in 1976. It is full of absurd, difficult language, as typical for Havel.217 As Havel plays with the language, he perfectly shows how it can be used not only for communication, but also for manipulation, focusing on lies.

This adaptation was finally published in an English translation by Paul Wilson in 2001 as he worked on the translation in late 90’s. At this time, translation was not Wilson’s main focus anymore, compared with the 80’s and he was working mainly as a journalist.218 Philip Hopkins writes in his article about the play:

The relevance of this story to a totalitarian country which operated on graft, like Communist Czechoslovakia, is clear. Also, with severe limits on free speech, Czech audiences in the 1970s were accustomed to following subtext in literature and theater. The relevance of Havel's message to corruption in America, which is still viewed as exceptional rather than endemic, might be harder for some to grasp.219

The Cornell University Press, publisher of Paul Wilson’s Beggar’s Opera, comments on the translation as being lively, idiomatic and sensitive to underlying linguistic and political issues. This edition also contains an Introduction by Peter Steiner, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, that details the November 1, 1976 premiere of the

216 Kuiper, Kathleen. „The Beggar’s Opera.“ Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc., 8 July 2014, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Beggars-Opera. Accessed 19 November 2019. 217 Procházková, Tereza. „Žebrácká opera Václava Havla v inscenačním pojetí Daniela Špinara.“ Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Filozofická fakulta, 14 April 2014, https://theses.cz/id/mxkfu3/?lang=sk. Accessed 19 November 2019. 218 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 455. 219 Hopkins, Philip. „The Beggar’s Opera.“ Theater Mania, 8 August 2003, https://theatermania.com/new-york-city- theater/reviews/the-beggars-opera_3799.html, Accessed 19 November 2019.

71 play in the Prague’s suburb of Horní Počernice, the reaction of the Czech secret police, and the measures the government took to punish and discredit those involved in the production. Eleven photographs – of the playwright, the actors, the theatre, and the actual performance – enhance the texture of the book.220

220 Havel, Václav. The Beggar’s Opera. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Print. 72

3.1.9 To the Castle and Back

To the Castle and Back (originally called Prosím stručně) is a rare glimpse into a mind of Václav Havel, where he moves back and forth in time, mixing diary entries with his answers to an interview, adding some of his requests and memos written to his staff at the Prague Castle from 1993 to 2003 and even using a drama like structure and wit to not only entertain the readers, but also to reflect on the current situation in the European Union and the Czech Republic’s role in it, United States of America and their superpower, war in Iraq and so on.221

The book is extremely unusual, due to its non-chronological structure and collage like storytelling. Concerning the Wilson’s translation work on this publication, Havel even reflects on the fact that he is always repeating himself – on topics of household minutiae, the garden hose that needs lengthening and so on. A reader could consider the repetition to be due to Havel’s aging and the weakening powers. However, in this case, it is a matter of art that does not seem irritating and thankfully, the editors and translator, Paul Wilson, preserved this feature. The New York Times writes of this translation: “You find yourself applauding the faithful labour of Paul Wilson, Havel’s English-language translator.”222

The translation was published in 2007 and the same year in May, the launch party was organized by the Czech centre where Paul Wilson was also present, talking about the book, the translation, and answering questions. Havel also gave an interview about the book later. To the Castle and Back has received many great and positive reviews abroad not only for being a very originally grasped autobiography publication, but also for being wonderfully and lively translated by Havel’s trusted translator.

221 „Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back.“ Knihovna Václava Havla, https://vaclavhavel.cz/cs/aktivity/shop/77_vaclav-havel-to-the-castle-and-back. Accessed 19 November 2019. 222 Berman, Paul. „Velvet Revolutionary.“ The New York Times, 23 September 2007, https://nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/review/Berman-t.html. Accessed 19 November 2019. 73

3.1.10 Leaving

Václav Havel began writing this play in 1989, but set it aside to concentrate on more important matters at the time, which was leading the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia to help to bring down the communist regime. The play was published later on in 2007 and is, once again, full of allusions, play on words and very specific language. Havel writes of a man forced to leave the state-owned villa he has called home for years, when his time in public office has ended. It is drama of ethics and politics with, as always, a touch of the absurd and even reference to Samuel Beckett.223 The translation done by Paul Wilson was published a year later after Havel finished his play, in 2008.

The play had a premiere in Great Britain’s London in the Orange Tree Theatre, directed by Sam Walters (director of other Havel’s previously translated plays), and also in the United States in Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, directed by Jiří Žižka.224 The world premiere was, however, earlier in Prague’s theatre Archa, directed by David Radok, and has received great reviews in newspaper. In Orange Tree, the play was sold out and the audience was thrilled. Walters admits that Havel is known internationally rather for his political life, which according to him might not be a plus. Nevertheless, he still considers Havel to be one of the world’s best dramatists. British playwright and also Havel’s friend, Tom Stoppard, attended the premiere as well, saying to have enjoyed it.225

Arthur J. Sabatini, a literary critic of Broad Street Review, wrote: “Václav Havel's most recent play, Leaving, opened this week at the Wilma Theatre, with the 73-year-old former Czech president present.” The premiere in the United States was on the June 20, 2010, followed by discussion, titled, Václav Havel: The Art of the Impossible. This panel was organized and led by the Wilma Theatre's dramaturg, Walter Bilderback, and included director Jiří Žižka, as well as Paul Wilson, and the Czech-born philosopher Martin Beck Matustík, a professor from Arizona State University. Sabatiny continues with his comments about the debate:

223 Cameron, Rob. „Václav Havel – ‚Leaving‘, but also returning.“ Radio Prague International, 23 May 2008, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/arts/vaclav-havel-leaving-but-also-returning. Accessed 18 November 2019. 224 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 480. 225 „Londýn přijal Havlovo Odcházení nadšeným potleskem.“ Aura Pont, https://aura-port.cz/londyn-prijal.havlovo- odchazeni-nadsenym-potleskem-p2825.html. Accessed 19 November 2019. 74

Matustík opened the discussion by underscoring how, in the Czechoslovakia of the 1960s and '70s, "theatre, politics and moral philosophy were connected." In that context, Havel's writing and ideas were central to the political discourse and actions against the totalitarian regime then in power. Matustík added that, ironically, though Havel's work wasn't religious, performances and discussions of it took place in churches. Wilson joined in, commenting on how Havel's writing became an "event" that sparked a sense of a shared commitment. Writing, theatre and music intertwined with politics, he said, in a movement of "liberation through the arts.226

In addition, Wilson believes that this particular play, especially its topic not being specifically connected to communism but rather post-communism, has a bigger chance to address more people outside of the Czech Republic. Leaving is according to him more both time and topic universal in comparison with for example The Memo (Vyrozumění). Wilson also comments on the process of translation, saying to have finished the main text in two weeks, but admits having problems with colloquial expressions and slang, which was surprising for him. For the purpose of understanding those lexical units, he talked to a few friends and even to Václav Havel himself: “After that, Stoppard read the translation and had about thirty suggestions to make it clearer and more ‘English’. It is still an unfinished process. There were moments during the play where I thought there was a place for improvement.” Wilson was also pleased that music by The Plastic People of the Universe appeared in the performance, saying that Havel will definitely appreciate it as in the 70. he engaged in fight against the persecutions of the band.227

226 Sabatini, Arthur J. „Art, politics and humanity: Václav Havel, in theory and practice.“ Broad Street Review, 1 June 2010, https://broadstreetreview.com/theater/the_meaning_of_havels_leaving_4th_review#. Accessed 19 November 2019. 227 „Londýn přijal Havlovo Odcházení nadšeným potleskem.“ Aura Pont. 75

3.1.11 The Memo

This another absurdist (and considered Havel’s most popular) play was first written in 1965 and is originally called Vyrozumění in Czech. It was translated two years later by Vera Blackwell as The Memorandum. However, at Havel’s request, the translation by Paul Wilson was done in 2012, published with a shortened title as The Memo. As with a lot of absurdist drama and also with Havel’s plays in general, language, and sometimes the collapse of language, is at the play’s core. Here, the language is used to criticize bureaucracy and the absurdity of communism, Havel even incorporates his own constructed languages, called Ptydepe and Chorukor to satirize the language of the politicians, clerks and other official institutions.

In Canada, there was a very successful production of the play – a group of people was interested in the play not because of knowing Václav Havel, but because the play was relatable for them. Paul Wilson talks of the young group, who produced the play: “They liked The Memorandum – they thought it was funny, they thought it was relevant, and they put it on. They put it on in the most stunning way. The clarity of their understanding of what that play is about is really astonishing. To me that’s a tremendous sign of hope that there is something in his writing that transcends the period it was written in.” And Paul Wilson continues to describe the plot of the play as following:

The Memorandum is set in an office setting and it starts off with a man reading a memo in gibberish. He asks his secretary what it is and she explains that it’s the new official language, Ptydepe. So he goes around and tries to get the memo translated, and he runs into the most awful bureaucratic blockades, because they say: ‘Yes, I can translate it, but I can’t translate it unless I have an official statement from somebody and you have to have official ID and you have to be vetted.’ So he finds it’s impossible to get this memo translated. It’s a farce, but in the course of the play the director is replaced by his deputy, who is in favour of bringing this new language in and uses it as a lever to get him out of his job, so there is a power struggle which revolves around this language. For some reason or other, these young people who put it on in Toronto, all had jobs working for the government. The director of the play was working for a government organization where he went through a period of ‘repositioning’, where they restructured the whole ministry he was working in. So they brought in all these new expressions and new language. And he was completely

76

lost in the whole thing. He read this play and said: ‘This is my life. I have to put it on stage.’228

In the Ptydepe language, Havel wanted to minimize the similarity between any two words and make sure no piece of vocabulary could be ever confused with another one, therefore any word must differ by at least sixty percent of its letters from any other word in this invented language. Thus, the creation of this language is rather mathematical.229 The example from the play is following:

Ra ko hutu d dekotu ely trebomu emusohe, vdegar yd, stro reny er gryk kendy, alyv zvyde dezu, kvyndal fer teknu sely. Degto yl tre entvester kyleg gh: orka epyl y bodur depty-depe emete.230

The artificial language is very prominent feature of the play, however, it does not require rendering or adaptation to English language, therefore the translator Paul Wilson did not need to take the complicated Ptydepe into account. The only thing the translator had to be aware of were the similarities between some Ptydepe and English words and to possibly avoid those.231 Additionally, the names of the characters in the play were changed by the translator to simplify the pronunciation of those for the stage, e. g. Josef Gross is Andrew Gross, Jan Ballas is Max Ballas and so on.

228 Vaughan. 229 Popescu, Delia. „Political Action in Václav Havel’s Thought.“ Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012. https://book.google.at/books?id=TbwQ_4Q9ujkC&dq=ptydepe+language&hl=cs. Accessed 19 November 2019. 230 Havel, Václav. The Memo. New York: Theater 61 Press, 2012. Print. 231 Helsel, Patricia. „Creative and Working Process.“ Ptydepe, https://ptydepe.com/About.html. Accessed 19 November 2019. 77

3.2 Translations of Josef Škvorecký

Josef Škvorecký, who has died aged 87, belonged to that great generation of postwar Czech writers including Václav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvík Vaculík, Ivan Klíma, Arnošt Lustig and Milan Kundera. Their novels, plays, essays and memoirs defined modern Czech literature and gave the rest of the world a deeper understanding of ordinary lives under German fascism and Soviet communism, the two totalitarian systems that dominated their country for much of the 20th century.232

Paul Wilson new the name Josef Škvorecký already from the period of working as an English teacher at a translation course at the university in Czechoslovakia. At that time, Škvorecký together with Ivan Vyskočil, Czech playwright, wrote so called text-appeals, short entertaining drama texts, and Wilson decided to use them in his lessons. Students were supposed to translate those short texts to English and additionally, Wilson was able to learn Czech language from those: “I think that Škvorecký helped me a lot with my Czech. He was actually the first author I was translating, though purely for pedagogical reasons.” Even after the writer’s emigration to Canada, Wilson used his articles from his travels around USA and Canada in his English lessons – those articles were later collected by the author under the title Velká povídka o Americe – A Grand Tale of America.233

In 1976, Paul Wilson sent his father his translations of Ladislav Klíma asking him, whether he would be able to find a publisher. He turned to Josef Škvorecký, who responded with a very kind letter, and few months later, Wilson went to Canada to visit Josef and his wife Zdena Salivarová. After that, Paul Wilson and Josef Škvorecký became friends and stayed in touch.234 In 1978, Paul Wilson was contacted by Josef’s Canadian editor and publisher, Louise Dennys. They met in London and she asked him whether he would like to translate the famous novel The Engineer of Human Souls. This was more than convenient for Paul as he did not have a job and the amount of money he received enabled him to work on the translation in Canada for a whole year.235

232 Wilson, Paul. „Josef Škvorecký obituary.“ The Guardian, 9 January 2012, https://theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/09/josef-skvorecky. Accessed 19 November 2019. 233 Macháček. 234 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 451. 235 Macháček.

78

However, Škvorecký has never received such recognition abroad in Canada or the United States in comparison with his popularity in the Czech Republic, or rather his hometown, Náchod. Paul Wilson says: “Maybe he is a little sorry that his works have not had the same impact in America, I just hope it is not my fault.”236

236 Macháček. 79

3.2.1 The Swell Season

The Swell Season (Prima sezóna) with the subheading A Text on the Most Important Things in Life is a collection of six short stories about an adolescent boy Danny Smiřický, who is a well know character for readers of other Škvorecký’s novels and books, and the story is set during the Nazi occupation in Czechoslovakia, in the 40’s. The book was first published in an English translation by Paul Wilson in 1982.

As well as in other novels by Josef Škvorecký, where Danny is the main protagonist, the language is very specific, not only connected to the age of Danny and his friends, but also to the historical era, in this case war, occupation and communism. Therefore, for the translator the job is very challenging as described in detail in the following text commenting on the translation of The Engineer of Human Souls. However, Paul Wilson was able to grasp and present the atmosphere of the Czech original and is praised by many reviews, for example the World Literature Today, represented by Maria Němcová Banerjee, who has written:

Once again Danny is the narrator, and he is well served by his translator Paul Wilson, who has created a perfect North American equivalent of his voice. Here we sense an undercurrent tug of nostalgia, creating a simultaneity of closeness and distance that commands a double take in the imaginative act of reading.237

And very positive is also a review from George Steiner from The New Yorker saying that: “Josef Škvorecký is a novelist of the first rank. One of the masters of the current Czech literature. His novels are sad, funny, sad – and utterly gripping.”238

Many people having thoroughly enjoyed the novel indicates that the first Wilson’s translation of Josef Škvorecký was well executed and there is no wonder why Wilson was offered to continue transferring other novels by this author.

237 Němcová Banerjee, Maria. „The Swell Season: A Text on the Most Important Things in Life by Josef Škvorecký and Paul Wilson.“ World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 2, 1987, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40143199. Accessed 1 July 2019. 238 Škvorecký, Josef. The Swell Season: a text on the most important things in life. London: Vintage, 1994. Print. 80

3.2.2 The Engineer of Human Souls

Josef Škvorecký wrote more than 40 books, but Wilson considers this novel to be his masterpiece, further, Paul’s translation won the Canadian governor general's award for fiction in 1984. Set in the Czech émigré community in Toronto, the novel is, again, narrated by writer's alter ego, the cynical, skirt-chasing Danny Smiřický (Danny Smiřický is a character often appearing in Škvorecký’s famous novels) who is now a respected English professor at a Toronto university teaching his students about communist tyrannies, however not being fully understood due to the cultural differences he experiences. Paul Wilson says: “As Josef's translator, what I found most difficult to convey was his unique ability to capture how different political regimes affect the way his characters speak and write.”239

As already indicated in the chapter about works of Paul Wilson, the translator himself considers this work to be his first successful significant translation. Paul Wilson worked on this book in years 1978-1979, it was published in 1984 and the publication was very popular worldwide: “I had a wonderful editor, she helped my English to get rid of ‘Czechisms’ and after that I knew how to go about it.”240 Moreover, Wilson and Škvorecký were almost in everyday contact, consulting the translation, as Škvorecký is also a translator himself.241

Wilson describes his work on this translation in detail in his essay called Keepers of the Looking-Glass. Some Thoughts on Translation., additionally he summarizes the plot of the novel in the essay and mentions the problems he encountered while translating Škvorecký’s works. Translating a novel so profoundly connected with the regime of a certain era and with the language so specific, any translator certainly encounters many challenges on the way. Paul Wilson talks about the ideology of Marxism, absurd lexicon, play on words, figures of speech and how or whether it is possible to transfer those connotations and feelings from reading a novel to another language: “Political jokes and slang are even bigger problems for a translator.” Very typical and unique is also speech of Danny and his friends whose vocabulary, connected to a certain region

239 Wilson, Paul. „Josef Škvorecký obituary.“ 240 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 450. 241 Macháček.

81 and oral traditions, is quite troublesome for a translator to mimic. It would be inappropriate to use newfoundland or any other similar accent for the boys’ utterance, Wilson explains in his essay.242

Paul Wilson even expresses an idea that Danny’s experience of the communist regime is impossible to convey to the people who have never lived in such conditions and that therefore he is not able to assess whether the translation was successful or not. He even says that Engineer of Human Souls would be probably easier to translate into languages such as Spanish or Chinese, since Cuba and China have both undergone dictature: “This is the precisely kind of language that is hardest to translate into English, because the experience of living in dictatorship seeps into the words that people use and gives even the most ordinary vocabulary levels of significance and emotional resonance that their dictionary equivalents do not have.”243

According to Paul Wilson, translating a text is not as shooting on a precise target: “Reading The Engineer of Human Souls is not the same as reading Příběh inženýra lidských duší.” However, by saying that, Wilson does not mean that translating novels by Škvorecký is impossible or that translating anything in general is impossible. It is exactly the opposite - he considers translation to be one of the most humanly acts, because it should be accepted with all its flaws – moreover, seeking perfection in translation is very demanding for a translator, according to Wilson.244

242 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 86. 243 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 366. 244 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 88. 82

3.2.3 Dvorak in Love

Dvorak in Love: A Lighthearted Dream is, according to Josef Škvorecký, his ‘first attempt at writing a historical and biographical novel’, published in 1984 in Toronto with its original name Scherzo Capriccioso: Veselý sen o Dvořákovi.245 The English version by Paul Wilson was published two years later, and according to him the process of translation was very creative due to this novel being the first Škvorecký’s more significant work not tied to his hometown Náchod, his childhood or youth. Here, without the main protagonist Danny Smiřický, the language is not closely related to any specific Czech dialect nor is influenced by the ambiguous vocabulary of the communist regime or the second world war. Paul Wilson in his essay (written on the topic of translating this book) says: “I translated Scherzo Capriccioso almost twenty years ago; and rereading it again last summer reminded me of the sheer joy of the work. Instead of having to deal with the complexities of modern political language – of language corrupted, or at least influenced, by nasty political systems.”246

The novel is a tale of a famous Czech composer, Antonín Dvořák, and Škvorecký tells his story about leaving Bohemia and moving to New York to become the Director of the National Conservatory of Music.247 Antonín Dvořák lived in New York in years from 1892 to 1895, trying to help Americans to develop a distinctive style of music. Paul Wilson describes the novel as following: „The fact that Dvorak in Love – and this is not just my opinion – is such a wonderfully entertaining evocation of a distinctive period in American history, underlies the fact that as a novelist, Skvorecky is far more than a Czech chronicler of his own history, and that he a novelist who has transcended borders in a rather unusual way.”248

In this case, the uniqueness of this translation lies rather in the differences than similarities between the Czech and English versions. The core of the novel is in the many different series of monologues, letters and chapters, each told from the perspective of one of the narrators, real historical figures. But when looked at the table of contents in Scherzo Capricciozo, it will be very different from Dvorak in Love. Both Paul Wilson and Škvorecký’s editor Louise Dennys felt the

245 Racevskis, Karlis. „Dvorak in Love: A Light-Hearted Dream by Josef Skvorecky and Paul Wilson.“ World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, 1987, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40143918. Accessed 1 July 2019. 246 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 371. 247 Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. 248 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 370. 83 rearrangement of the chapters would benefit the English version. Paul Wilson himself explains this in his essay: “For Czech readers, what holds the book together is their knowledge of Dvorak’s life story, if only in its broad outlines. But for the Canadian or American or British reader, who is probably more familiar with Dvorak’s music than with his life story, the book in its original order could have proved confusing.”249 This theory was confirmed when Wilson gave the translation to several English readers, who found themselves lost with the non-chronological order of Dvořák’s live events depicted in the novel; thus, the only chapter that kept its place the same in the both Czech and English book is the opening one.

Concerning the language of the translation, it is not as prominent as in other Škvorecký’s novels, which has already been indicated in the first paragraph of this text. However, there are certain particularities, as the novel covers part of the American history being set around the 1890’s Moreover, several characters are of African American origin. And those were the reasons Paul Wilson was wondering about the language he would use while translating voices of those protagonists, Will Marion Cook and Harry Bourleigh, both talented musicians: “The English spoken by black Americans has always had a distinctive flavour to it, but what was that flavour like in the 1890‘s?“ Wilson speculates in his essay. With that in mind, Paul Wilson asked his friend, Josef Škvorecký, for help – this is, once again, an example of the cooperation between the translator and the author being extremely fruitful. Wilson wanted to go through several sources Škvorecký used for inspiration and research to write the novel and as a result, the translator was very lucky – Škvorecký provided him with two bags of photocopies from the books, newspapers, journals, and manuscripts he had dug up on his travels across America. There, in those plastic bags full of resources, lay a solution to the problems with translating voices of the several Afro-American characters – the autobiography written by Will Marion Cook himself. Paul Wilson describes this as a gift from heaven. The piece of writing was full of distinct vocabulary, containing all the peculiarities of the musician‘s language Wilson was looking for: “Where I could, I took bits of Will Marion Cook’s actual voice, or Harry Burleigh’s, and spliced them into the translations.” Using this approach with translation, Wilson was hoping to give the novel better and deeper connection to the American culture and history:

249 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 375. 84

In other words, Dvorak in Love is an American novel, yes, but filled with the kind of enthusiasm for American culture and a depth of knowledge of European culture, that no modern American author, certainly not in our time, could properly muster anymore, because no modern American author, I suspect, would bring to the subject the unalloyed enthusiasm and love for the period that Skvorecky does.250

At the time of publication, the novel received several heart-warming reviews, however, it has never become as popular as other Škvorecký’s novels in America, moreover, Wilson believes that the book was not recognized in the way it should have been – as a piece of lovingly rendered Americana. In other words, a novel deeply connected to the American history, culture and geography, while the reviews were focusing on the story of the Czech composer in New York.

At the end of his essay about translating Scherzo Capriccioso, Paul Wilson proposes that someone compare the two versions of the book focusing on the order of the chapters, the differences between the English and Czech translation and its impact to the story as such study has never been written and Paul Wilson considers this feature to be very curious about the book. This comparison might be an intriguing topic for a thesis focusing on both translation and American culture.251

250 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 376. 251 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 377. 85

3.2.4 The End of Lieutenant Boruvka &The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka

Paul Wilson is also a translator of the two books from the Boruvka detective series. The first part of the collection is the book called The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka (Smutek poručíka Borůvky), translated by Káča Poláčková-Henly, another translator of Josef Škvorecký, and the second book from the series by the same translator is called Sins for Father Knox (Hříchy pro pátera Knoxe).

Paul Wilson has translated the third volume with the title The End of Lieutenant Boruvka (Konec poručíka Borůvky) and this translation was published in 1989. The last of the books closing the series is called The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka (Návrat poručíka Borůvky) and was published two year later, in 1991.252

252 Škvorecký, Josef. The return of Lieutenant Boruvka: a reactionary tale of crime and detection. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Print. 86

3.2.5 The Miracle Game

The Miracle Game, in Czech Mirákl, is a black comedy novel with the traditional Škvorecký’s main protagonist Danny Smiřický and it sets the hilarious tale of Danny’s early life, commonly containing his romantic entanglements, however also adding a spin to it – a miracle. The story focuses on the two main events in the Czech history and that is an alleged miracle in 1949, followed by the political process with the priest, and the Prague Spring in 1968, followed by the invasion of the Russian armies.253

The translation by Paul Wilson was published in 1991. Taking the historical events into account, the understanding of the translated text might cause some troubles for the English reader, which was mentioned many times before as this is a common problem the translator encounters when transferring a work focusing on regimes or the culture of a historical era. Someone not familiar with the figures or the events of the Prague Spring nor the occupation and normalization might not be able to enjoy the novel in a way the writer had anticipated. The cultural difference might even seem more complicated by the profound use of double speak and German or Russian words. Thus, for this reason The Miracle Game can be considered quite demanding read.254 However, it has to be said that probably no one else is as qualified as Paul Wilson to translate such troublesome novel, moreover having so much experience working with the various texts by Josef Škvorecký.

The translation was ready for publication in 1990, just a year after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, which ended the communist regime in the country. Paul Wilson writes in his acknowledgement at the beginning of the novel: “This translation was completed in the aura of another miracle – one anticipated by the event of the novel – the ‘gentle revolution’ in Czechoslovakia in November and December 1989.”255 So perhaps the translation was finished and published in a perfect moment.

253 Brunnerová, Helena. „Translating Culture: Škvorecký into English.“ Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, 2018, page 62, https://is.muni.cz/th/m7kks/brunnerova_-_diploma_thesis.pdf#page=68&zoom=100,0,94, Accessed 20 November 2019. 254 Brunnerová, p. 67. 255 Škvorecký, Josef. The miracle game. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1990. Print. 87

3.2.6 The Republic of Whores

The Republic of Whores, having the original title Tankový prapor, is a novel which was not published in Czechoslovakia until the 1989 because of the censorship. The novel was first published in 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1971 and the translation done by Paul Wilson was released in 1993 in Toronto as well.256

Danny Smiřický is, once again, the main protagonist of the novel, now as a tank commander and he is counting his last months at the military base. Even though he is no saint (of course, romance in his life is not missing even here), his behaviour is very mild in comparison with the other recruits at the base. The novel is very satirical and the author makes fun of everyone and everything. Some might compare this book to the legendary Catch 22 or even another famous Czech soldier, Švejk. Hence, concerning the setting of the novel and its satirical note to it, this story should be appealing to the broader part of the readers, not just the fans of Czech literature.257

256 Škvorecký, Josef. The republic of whores: a fragment from the time of the cults. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Print. 257 „The Republic of Whores: A Fragment from the Time of the Cults.“ Publishers Weekly. https://publishersweekly.com/978-0-88001-371-0. Accessed 20 November 2019. 88

3.2.7 Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives is the novel written by Josef Škvorecký, published in 2004 with the original Czech title Obyčejné životy. The translation by Paul Wilson was published by Key Porter Books in 2008. This story closes the series of books with Škvorecký’s alter ego Danny Smiřický and in the author’s note preceding the novel, he describes the book as a summation as this book closes Danny’s live and ties together all his adventures and stories.

The novel describes Danny’s school reunions, one in 1963 and the second one in 1993 and functions as the protagonist’s retrospective where he focuses on memories and relationships he had with the other characters. The reader might be taken aback by the author directing the book primarily at an audience which is already familiar with other books about Danny, however, Škvorecký references the characters know from the previous novels with additional notes that are at the end of the book. This background information definitely helps the reader not familiar with Škvorecký’s work to orientate themselves in the story and relationships among the characters. Emer Savage, reviewing the English translation of the book, says:

New readers of Skvorecky will enjoy this book, and while they may not feel the same level of connection with the characters that a fan of the earlier novels may, Skvorecky’s depictions of the changing landscape of the Czech past and his rendering of the impact of this history on the lives of ordinary people is engaging. This novel would appeal to a wide range of readers, particularly those interested in history and memory studies, as Skvorecky’s treatment of memory in the book is particularly engaging.258

And the words of praise for the translation come from review done by Ken Babstock, who is talking about the novel being “rendered artfully into English by Paul Wilson, the author's long- time translator.”259 There is no doubt Paul Wilson has master transferring the voice and atmosphere of Josef Škvorecký’s novels to English.

258 Savage, Emer. „Relationships and Recollection.“ Canadian Literature, n. 206, page 190, 2010, https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=206. Accessed 20 November 2019. 259 Babstock, Ken. „Danny Smiricky, home again.“ The Globe and Mail, 6 December 2008, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/danny-smiricky-home-again/article1323789/. Accessed 20 November 2010. 89

3.3 Translations of Ivan Klíma

Ivan Klíma is a Czech writer, dramatist, essayist, screen play author and publicist. He was born in 1931 in Prague and later, still as a child, he spent three years in the concentration camp Terezín, where he also started his writing career. After the war he studied at grammar school in Prague and later graduated from the Faculty of Arts at , field Czech language and literary sciences. He started working as a publicist and during normalization he published his works in samizdat and exile. His most famous works are a novel Hodina ticha, a play Zámek and short stories Milenci na jednu noc and Milenci na jeden den. He is also a well know author of books for children.260

260 Uhlířová, Marie. „Ivan Klíma.“ Slovník české literatury, 1995, http://www.slovnikceskeliteratury.cz/showContent.jsp?docId=1253&hl=ivan+kl%C3%ADma+, Accessed 20 November 2019. 90

3.3.1 My Golden Trades

My Golden Trades, in original Czech Moje zlatá řemesla, is a first Paul Wilson’s translation of Ivan Klíma. The English version was published in 1992 by Granta Books in London. It is a collection of six short stories set in the mid-eighties, where Klíma draws from his own experience being forced to take a series of blue-collar jobs as a dissident and outcast of the society.261

The reviews of the book are more than positive, for instance Michael Dibdin from the Independent on Sunday says: “A consistent celebration of man’s freedom from the tyranny of circumstance … Klíma has turned the various humiliating trades which he was forced to practise into the purest artistic gold.”262 And the Publishers Weekly add: „This is an excellent addition to other works by the author now available in English.“ Moreover, the GQ magazine speaks of The Golden Trades being the Klíma’s best book yet. The translation was also shortlisted for The Independent Translation Prize in 1993.263

261 Klíma, Ivan. My golden trades. London: Granta Books, 1998. Print. 262 Dibdin, Michael. „Employment Exchange: My Golden Trades – by Ivan Klima.“ Independent, 18 October 1992, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-employment-exchange-my-golden-trades-by-ivan- klima-granta-books-pounds-1399-1558193.html, Accessed 20 November 2019. 263 Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html.

91

3.3.2 Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

The novel with the literally translated title from the Czech original Čekání na tmu, čekání na světlo was published in 1994 in English translation in the same publishing house as other both translations of Ivan Klíma done by Paul Wilson, in Granta Books in London.

The novel tells the story of a middle-aged man called Pavel, once a promising television filmmaker, working as a cameraman within the boundaries set by the communist regime. The story is set before, during and after the events that launched the so-called Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989. The irony of the story lies in the fact being that Pavel finds himself unprepared for what the world offers him after the fall of Communism.

The English publication was greatly praised, finding its place on A New York Times Notable Book of the Year list and also marked as A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1995. British The Spectator magazine mentioned the publication in their reviews, saying: “Although the book is about the Czech experience, it is of universal import. Klíma has some searingly truthful thigs to say about the wretchedness of human mediocrity, but with its hint of surrealism and its wonderful black humour, it is immensely enjoyable.”264

264 Klíma, Ivan. Waiting for the dark, waiting for the light. London: Granta Books, 1998. Print. 92

3.3.3 The Spirit of Prague

The book The Spirit of Prague and other essays, as the full title including the subheading implies, is a collection of essays and critical pieces written by Ivan Klíma, in English translation first released in the same publishing house and in the same year as Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, thus in 1994. The collection offers an introduction to Klima’s life, his literary development and valuable insight into his work, starting in author’s boyhood which he also spent in Nazi concentration camp. Other essays talk about his career as a writer or share his views on Václav Havel or Milan Kundera. He also comments on the communist government and creation of the opposition after the invasion of Russian Army in 1968, thus these essays are also a valuable source of historical information.265

The praise of these essays across the different reviewers is undoubtedly a sign of Ivan Klíma’s great ability to tell stories that should not be forgotten and of Paul Wilson’s attention to detail when rendering such texts, that require also a portion of cultural knowledge from the translator. To conclude all three Wilson’s translations of Klíma’s work I share a review from The New York Times Review of Books, that says: “For those who admire his fiction, this collection, translated by Paul Wilson, offers rewarding insight into Mr. Klima's life, his literary values and his personal experience of Czech history. Readers who have not yet discovered Mr. Klima will surely be encouraged by the essays to seek out the novels.”266

265 „The Spirit of Prague: And Other Essays.“ Publishers Weekly. https://publishersweekly.com/978-0-9645611-2-0. Accessed 20 November 2019. 266 Wolff, Larry. „Through Czech Eyes.“ The New York Times, 29 October 1995, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/02/22/home/klima-spirit.html, Accessed 20 November 2019. 93

3.4 Other translations

3.4.1 Zdeněk Mlynář: Nightfrost in Prague

Zdeněk Mlynář was well known mostly for being the leading theoretician of the Prague Spring and becoming the main supporter of the drive for ‘socialism with a human face’ advocated by Alexander Dubček. They both attempted to reform the political and economic system in Czechoslovakia, however unsuccessfully, which resulted in the country becoming for a period of two decades still more politically oppressive than it had been in the years immediately preceding the radical reforms of 1968. Following the Soviet invasion in August 1968, Mlynář also personally participated in the negotiations with the Soviet Politburo concerning the withdrawal of Soviet troops. In 1977, after the process with the underground community including The Plastic People, Mlynář became one of the organizers and signatories of the human rights movement called Charter 77. Consequently, this act of his lead to Mlynář’s exile from his homeland in 1977, but he still continued to support Czechoslovak dissidents from his new home in Innsbruck, Austria. Zdeněk Mlynář died in Vienna in 1997.267

The book Nightfrost in Prague, with its original name Mráz přichází z Kremlu, was first published in Germany in 1978, where Mlynář himself describes his political career and evolution beginning with joining the Communist Party in 1946. It is a story of a hopeless struggle for a reform in Czechoslovakia against Stalinism and Mlynář offers a unique perspective of an intellectual. The translation by Paul Wilson with the subheading The End of Humane Socialism was published in 1980 by Karz Publishers publishing house in New York.268

267 Gorbačev, Michail Sergejevič, and Zdeněk Mlynář. Conversations with Gorbachev: on perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the crossroads of socialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 6-7. Print. 268 The Associated Press. „Zdenek Mlynar, 66, a Reformer For Czech Dissident Movements.“ The New York Times, 20 April 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/20/world/zdenek-mlynar-66-a-reformer-for-czech-dissident- movements.html, Accessed 20 November 2019. 94

3.4.2 Pavel Taussig: Blbé, ale naše / One (party) liners

Pavel Taussig is a Czech writer and humorist who, as a child, spent many years in several different concentration camps, for example Mauthausen or Osvětim. After his liberation, he started writing a diary with his immediate feelings about everything that was happening around him. Everything he has gone through is described in his autobiographical book called Chlapec, který přežil pochod smrti (A Boy Who Survived the Death March). He is author of short stories and novels.269

Blbé, ale naše / One (Party) Liners / Sprechende Schnappschüsse aus dem realen Schilda is a very thin book published in 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1987. The forty-eight pages in the publication consist of black and white pictures and photos with bubble jokes on politics and government. The anecdotes are very satirical, making fun of communism and socialism. Each bubble joke is written in Slovak and translated below into English by Paul Wilson and as well to German by the author himself.270

Concerning the translation, Paul Wilson has done a good job keeping the witty tone of the satirical jokes, however, a certain knowledge of the historical facts and figures will be required from the reader to fully understand the point, some problems might even cause the cultural differences between the author and a possible reader. To fully understand the humour in these satires, one shall be familiar with socialist conditions in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Paul Wilson tries to make the understanding easier for the reader, such as in this example:

Slovak: “A až ten socializmus dobudujeme, deťúrence moje, všetkého bude dosť: liekov, kapusty i bicyklov. Temer ako za prvej republiky…”

Translation: “When we finally build socialism, my little ones, there’ll be plenty of everything – medicine, cabbage, bicycles – just like the old days.”

269 Výborná, Lucie. „Stačilo zakopnout, vzpomíná Pavel Taussig na pochod smrti. Z jeho deníkových zápisků vznikla kniha.“ Radiožurnál, 8 May 2019, https://radiozurnal.rozhlas.cz/stacilo-zakopnout-vzpomina-pavel-taussig- na-pochod-smrti-z-jeho-denikovych-7930893, Accessed 20 November 2019. 270 Taussig, Pavel. Blbé, ale naše. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1987.

95

A great example of Wilson’s lively and natural translation (and there are many in this little volume) is:

Slovak: “ÁÁÁ, to je ale nuda! Vidno, že to nie je samizdat!”

Translation: “What a bore! It sure ain’t samizdat…”271

Therefore, this short comic book can be recommended to anyone either familiar with any communist regime wanting to remember the old times or to anyone curious about the typical sense of humour of people who had nothing else left other than a good laugh about their living conditions, making fun of themselves.

271 Taussig. 96

3.4.3 Arnošt Lusting: Indecent Dreams

Arnošt Lustig is a Czech writer and director of Jewish origin, in 1942 he was transferred to Terezín concentration camp and also spent some time in Osvětim and Buchenwald. He was lucky to escape the death march to concentration camp in Dachau. Lustig is famous for his short stories and novellas where he is drawing from his experience he went through during the war, he often writes of the fate of Jewish people during the war or the objectives and feelings young people after the war has ended and they no dot know how to fit in or function in the society. His most famous works are Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night), Tma nemá stín (Darkness Casts no Shadows) or Modlitba pro Kateřinu Horovitzovou, which was made into movie, translated as A Prayer for Katerina Horovitz.272

Written much earlier, but first published in 1995 in Czech due to the censorship in communist Czechoslovakia, Neslušné sny is a collection of three short novellas called Modrý den (Blue Day), Dívka s jizvou (The Girl with a Scar) and Neslušné sny (Indecent Dreams). The English translation of the collection named Indecent Dreams was published earlier in 1988 by Northwestern University Press, each novella having a different translator. The publication contains an afterword written by Josef Škvorecký.273

Blue Day was translated by Iris Urwin-Levit, first published in slightly different form in TriQuarterly literary journal in Spring 1979, though, and The Girl with the Scar was rendered by Věra Bořkovec, who among many others translated also poems by Jaroslav Seifert. This novella was published in TriQuarterly journal as well, however later, in Winter 1981. Paul Wilson’s translation of Indecent Dreams had been published earlier as well – in Formations in Spring 1984.

Josef Škvorecký in his afterword says:

The stories marvellously succeed in creating a canvas of hysteria in which the bloody events blend with very private thoughts and dreams that seemingly have nothing in common with events in the objective world. Very few stories in world literature express so vividly the

272 Haman, Aleš. „Arnošt Lusting.“ Slovník české literatury, 1995, http://www.slovnikceskeliteratury.cz/showContent.jsp?docId=507&hl=arno%C5%A1t+lustig+, Accessed 20 November 2019. 273 Lustig, Arnošt. Indecent dreams. Evanston, III.: Northwestern University, 1988. Print.

97

madness in the minds of people living on the brink of death so close to peace and life…. The scenes are truly unforgettable, unlike anything in the vast bulk of war literature. They unveil a little-known aspect of the great killing, rendered humanely and with supreme artistry.274

274 Lustig, p. 159. 98

3.4.4 Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England

Bohumil Hrabal was a Czech writer, and by many Czechs he is considered to be the best writer of the 20th century. He is well known for his interchangeable style of writing, thus his works are often an object of interest among many linguists. He was born in Brno-Židenice in 1914. His non-biological father got a good job in Nymburk as a brewery manager, where Bohumil spent his all childhood. In 1934, he started to study law at the Charles University in Prague, and he finished later in 1946 (due to the closure of all universities by Nazis) with doctorate. In the meantime, he went through many different employments, e.g. dispatcher, worker at steelworks in Kladno, salesman, insurance agent, theatre technician; and those jobs were later a huge inspiration for his novels, same as the town of his childhood.275

Hrabal started his career as a writer very early on during his university studies, however those were only poems he was writing at that time. His first collection of short stories was published in samizdat and during his whole life he was on the edge of publishing officially and non-officially, as he had problems with censorship. His most famous novels are for instance Postřižiny (Cutting it Short), Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude), Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains) and others. The famous writer passed away at hospital in Prague in 1997. In words of Václav Havel, Hrabal is considered to be one of the most significant representatives of national culture.276

There are several translators who translate Hrabal’s works to English and Paul Wilson has, so far, translated just one novel by him and that is Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England). The novel is divided into five chapters, where Jan Dítě, the main character and also narrator of the novel, tells his life story during the 1940’s, which includes the Nazi occupation and then early communist era in the Czechoslovakia. Jan Dítě is a young man and he is rather short, which causes him a complex, and through the whole novella he keeps trying to make himself look taller. In the beginning of the novel, he is starting his career as a busboy in a hotel Praha, and then works as a waiter in several more restaurants. Though out the book, Jan Dítě is documenting his life events, however, within Hrabal’s prose, the language seems to be more important than the story

275 Heřmanová, Tereza. „Analysis of Lexical Units in Bohumil Hrabal’s Prose.“ Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Pedagogická fakulta, page 27, 2017, https://is.muni.cz/th/tgnps/?lang=en;id=171145, Accessed 20 November 2019. 276 Heřmanová, p. 28. 99 and the poetics of the author are possibly interchangeable with any other piece of writing there is. The storyline is composed of small snatches of conversation, memories, stories, anecdotes etc., which forces us to pay attention to the features of the language - Hrabal’s pábení, that is, according to the author himself, a type of poetry. Pábitel is a type of person who likes to entertain himself with his own talks, sometimes even without being in contact with other people. He talks about situations, whose importance are exaggerated and changed according to his liking. Pábitel fully admires the world around him and the infinity of beautiful visions he has do not let him fall asleep. Hrabal’s pábení of the language is based on using actual speech and properties of the unique utterance. The narration of Jan Dítě is also a type of pábení, as his storytelling seems to be never ending, he changes topics without continuity, and also admires the world around him. Therefore, the core of Hrabals’s novels is to reproduce the live speech and oral utterance, thus the text gets the impression of a live speaking.277

Not only has the translator deal with pábení when transferring Hrabal’s works, there is also an extensive portion of specific lexical peculiarities Paul Wilson had to keep in mind. Concerning this particular novel, the abnormal lexicon includes colloquial and informal language, with its rich amounts of slangs and Czech and Moravian dialects. Very typical in Hrabal’s prose is also his use of vulgarisms, diminutives, words of German and French origin and even neologisms. Moreover, Hrabal combines vocabulary with endings from literary Czech (jedné, maličký), and colloquial or informal Czech (každý, druhý, pokojský). This creates original and unique effect, however merely impossible to transfer to English. Paul Wilson was perfectly aware of the difficult features of Hrabal’s writings. In the translation, which was finished in 1989, he writes:

Bohumil Hrabal’s work, Czechs say, is untranslatable. This book is my response to that challenge.278

Hence, this book was possibly the most challenging and demanding translation work Paul Wilson has ever done. He admits that Hrabal’s stream of consciousness with no punctuation is problematic and moreover his play on words is often impossible to be transferred.279 Hrabal’s

277 Heřmanová, p. 30. 278 Hrabal, Bohumil. I Served the King of England. London: Vintage, 2009. 279 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 455.

100 syntax is often even more complicated than lexicon. He uses long, almost never-ending sentences with a profound use of a conjunction and, which can be also few pages long. The thoughts are disordered, and there is a repetition of the words or phrases within the sentences, which has a rhythmical factor.280

All above having been said, Paul Wilson, after spending ten years in Czechoslovakia, getting to know the culture Bohumil Hrabal also lived in, perfecting his Czech and already having plenty of experience in translation, was probably the best candidate possible for choosing to translate Bohumil Hrabal. In consequence, in terms of the cultural and historical equivalence of the novel, the translation is more than satisfactory. On the other hand, achieving the lexical equivalence was probably impossible in the case of this novel, which cannot be, however, blamed on the translator. As Paul Wilson himself says, English language has not been through the similar historical development as languages in eastern Europe, Spain, Cuba or North Korea, being influenced by the rhetoric of communist propaganda and occupation during was where common people create their own vocabulary and culture of inside jokes about the regime and other similar events. This makes it even more difficult for the English reader to understand perfectly what the translator was trying to achieve in his transferred version.281 Besides, in Wilson opinion, the expressions that are impossible to translate are wonderful as they help us get to the core of a language and understand the real differences between nationalities and cultures.282

Wilson’s translation of Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále is still greatly popular and has received many admirable reviews praising his job. The Publishers Weekly speak of Wilson’s beautiful translation and National Public Radio describes the book as being magical, adding that: “it may not be for everyone, but it is a novel that proves true the words proffered to Ditie by a sagacious salami scale salesman: ‘Just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful.’”283

280 Heřmanová, p. 36. 281 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 282 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 411. 283 Marra, Anthony. „A World A Few Degrees Of Whimsy Away From Our Own.“ National Public Radio, 28 July 2013, https://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/192675279/a-world-a-few-degrees-of-whimsy-away-from-our- own?t=1571653245067, Accessed 20 November 2019. 101

3.4.5 Civic Freedom in Central Europe

Civic Freedom in Central Europe is a collection of over 20 essays written by a number of dissidents and leading people from Charter 77, including Václav Havel, Eva Kantůrková, Ivan Jirous, Zdeněk Rotrekl, Petr Pithart and many others. The authors examine topics such as democracy, independent or parallel society in Central Europe and give opinions on the purposes and aims of parallel activity. The whole book is introduced by an extensive study of the Central and Eastern European context, written by H. Gordon Skilling, who is also the editor of the publication. Paul Wilson helped edit and translate some of the essays in the book which was published by Macmillan in 1991.284

284 Skilling, H. Gordon, and Paul R. Wilson. Civic freedom in central Europe: voices from Czechoslovakia. London: Macmillan, 1991. Print. 102

3.4.6 Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion

Is a collection of short stories published by Whereabouts Press, San Francisco in 1995. The volume is supposed to serve as a guide to a traveller wanting to get to know the capital city of the Czech Republic from a different perspective – perspective of the finest Czech writers. Many of the stories are well known, written by famous writers, the others are by relatively unknown artists, moreover translated to English for the very first time.285

Paul Wilson is the editor of the volume, he is the author of the prologue to the publication and he has translated nine of the total twenty four short stories:

Daniela Hodrová: I See a Great City… Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic: Bells Jindřiška Smetanová: American Heating Jaroslav Hašek: A Psychiatric Mystery Bohumil Hrabal: The Hotel Paříž Ota Pavel: A Race Through Prague Josef Škvorecký: Tenor Sax Solo from Washington Ivan Klíma: The Spirit of Prague286

The collection is divided into several parts, where the stories are organized according to their topic and the setting, those are for instance Petřín, Hradčany, Malá Strana, Kampa, Charles Bridge or The Old Town. Other authors appearing in the collection are for example Jan Neruda, famous Czech poet and journalist, Alois Jirásek, author of the Czech historical novels, Franz Kafka, Karel Čapek, and also the postmodern contemporary authors such as Michal Ajvaz or Jáchym Topol, rendered by many translators, i.e. Gerry Turner, Alex Zucker or Michael Henry Heim.287 Some texts were translated to English from German.288

285 Email correspondence with Paul Wilson. 286 Wilson, Paul. Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, 1995. Print. 287 Wilson. Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. 288 Email correspondence with Paul Wilson.

103

The book is still popular among travellers and many issues are being sold till this day.289 The reviews are praising Paul Wilson’s choice and assembly of the collection, saying that only such literature is able to deliver the reader such vivid intimacy with the city (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and that this collection of short stories if for the serious reader who does not want just to scratch the surface when traveling, adding a special dimension to a Prague trip (International Travel News).290

289 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 456. 290 Wilson. Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. 104

3.4.7 Screenplay Translation: Dark Blue World

Dark Blue World, in Czech well known as Tmavomodrý svět, is a movie released in 2001. The screenplay was written by Zdeněk Svěrák and Jan Svěrák, who also directed the film. It was primarily acted in the Czech Republic, however released in the United Kingdom. The film is still very popular having received 8 awards and seven nominations in 2001, mainly for direction, camera and soundtrack, it has also received Film Critique Award, and won the main award at the Varna Movie Festival.291

Paul Wilson is the author of the English translation of the screenplay for this film, which also premiered at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. Firstly, the intention of the director was to shoot the film only in English, so Paul Wilson was offered to translate the screenplay, which he really enjoyed working on, more so because his uncle used to fly Spitfire during the war so he was able to help him with the difficult vocabulary. However, after Paul’s translation was finished, many changes were made to the screenplay and in the end, it was partly shoot in Czech. Parts of his translations were used, however Paul did not receive any credit for it.292

Paul Wilson and his family went to see the movie in Toronto, which they thoroughly enjoyed, however the very next day it was September 9 and the terrorist attack in New York got all the attention it could, thus in Paul Wilson’s opinion the movie did not get the chance to be appreciated as it should have been.293

291 Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. 292 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 458. 293 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 458. 105

3.4.8 Bohumil Hrabal: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

Second Bohumil Hrabal’s book translated by Paul Wilson was published in 2015 in American publishing house New Directions, and later also in British Penguin Books. The original name of the publication is Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet, thus the change in the translation of the title is obvious. The book is a collection of seven very short stories from Hrabal’s early stage or his career as a writer, where he writes about normal people living their lives, working, talking. Four of the stories are set in the smelters in Kladno, other stories describe the capital city, bizarre situations and atmosphere of the fifties.294

Wilson’s translation was introduced in Prague in Václav Havel’s Library, where the audience could listen to the parts of the book being read by Czech writer Jáchym Topol and the translated English version was presented by the translator himself.295

Bohumil Hrabal is one of the most famous Czech writes and many people abroad know him and want to read his works. Paul Wilson believes Hrabal is getting more and more popular and the demand is high, that is why he decided to translate more of his texts. The New Directions publishing House reached out to Wilson, wanting to publish three titles by Bohumil Hrabal – Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet, Krasosmutnění and Něžný barbar. Wilson was leaning towards working on Něžný barbar first, at it happens to be his favourite book from Hrabal. However, the book was written rather to remember and honour Hrabal’s friends, Vladimír Boudník, an artist and graphic, and Egon Bondy, a controversial poet, who are rather unknown to the western readers. The publishing company thus decided Paul Wilson should translate the collection of short stories written in the 1950’s first.296

Same as translating I Served the King of England, this short collection turned out to be quite troublesome for the translator, however not in the same way as the novel Paul worked on many years earlier. Paul Wilson says that having translated Hrabal once before was no use to him in this

294 Vrbová, Daniela. “Recenzenti nepochopili kontext doby, aneb jak se překládá Hrabal.” Český Rozhlas Plus, 17 July 2016, https://plus.rozhlas.cz/recenzenti-nepochopili-kontext-doby-aneb-jak-se-preklada-hrabal-6534731, Accessed 20 November 2019. 295 Vrbová. 296 Vrbová. 106 case as the early writer’s style was completely different and poetry like. In an interview, Paul Wilson closely describes the problems he encountered when working on this collection:

Some of the stories begun life as a prose poetry, it was very early period in his life when he was writing prose poems, long epic poems such as Krásná Poldi or Bambino di Praga. Problem is that the poetic features remain in the prose, but if you translate it into English, it seems very strange, it is like a foreign element.297

Another problem for the translator was the setting of the story, the post war communist Czechoslovakia in the fifties, and even though Hrabal does not touch on any politics in the stories, the atmosphere is very unique and impossible to understand for the western reader. That is the reason many reviewers did not comprehend the intentions of the author as they were lacking the experience of living in the police state.298

However, as with any other Hrabal’s work, the most complicated to transfer is the lexicon. Paul Wilson comments on the notoriously difficult words, neologisms, that Hrabal liked to make up, saying that he was using a special dictionary focusing on the writer – Slovník Bohumila Hrabala. In the dictionary there is a part called hapax, which is a word of which there exists only one example in the whole work of an author. Novels of Hrabal are full of such hapaxes and neologisms, meaning that he is the only one using such vocabulary, many times only once. This makes the work of a translator very troublesome.299

As mentioned before, several of the stories are set in the Kladno smelters, were Hrabal recorded the talks of the workers, who use slang words taken from German typical for their profession. Paul Wilson comments: “The main problem for me was that the stories are set in Kladno in the iron works. Hrabal is describing these people working and it is all in slang - they have slang words for the tools, the materials they are working with and it was very hard for me to imagine what these people are actually doing as they are talking.”300 Thus, his translation work consisted of not searching in dictionaries but rather going back to people living in those times who used to

297 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 298 Forbes, Malcolm. „Book review: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales From the Time of the Cult – an uncovered Czech treasure.“ The National, 29 October 2015, https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-mr-kafka-and-other- tales-from-the-time-of-the-cult-an-uncovered-czech-treasure-1.88003, Accessed 20 November 2019. 299 Vrbová. 300 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 107 work in Kladno, knowing the language they used in the past as even the experts on Hrabal’s language did not know the vocabulary Wilson was looking for.

Concerning the already mentioned title of the book, the publisher did not want a literal translation so Paul Wilson came up with a title still being relevant to the contents of the short stories, mainly to the protagonist of the first one - Kafka. Nevertheless, the change started a discussion in the Czech Republic, this was not surprising for the translator, though. All in all, the reviews are generally positive, for instance The National speaks of a neat Wilson’s translation.301

301 Forbes.

108

3.5 Essays and articles

After the expulsion from the Czechoslovakia, Paul Wilson started reminiscing his days he spent there in his short essays and articles, originally intended for the western world. This way he hoped the American and Canadian readers would get a glimpse and taste of his experience of living in totalitarian world and show how such regime works – from the eyes of the outsider of the regime. This chapter includes only the more prominent articles and texts, mostly available in other collections or publications, mainly Bohemian Rhapsodies, or the ones possible to be found and read online on the websites of the mentioned periodicals.

Paul Wilson wrote a first more significant article after his expulsion from Czechoslovakia in London, while waiting for his wife Helena. The article is called A Prague Odyssey and was published in 1978 in Index on Censorship magazine (May/June) under the pseudonym Robert Hardy as Paul’s wife Helena was still in Czechoslovakia and Paul was worried they would not let her join him after finding out what he had written. The short article is about the censorship, campaign against Charter 77 and most importantly about the controversial Odysseus novel written by James Joyce being published in Czech translation in Czechoslovakia. The circumstances of this novel being published seemed very bizarre and curious to Paul, thus he decided to write about it.302

When Paul Wilson came back to Canada, he was mainly occupied by his translations. However, he continued writing short articles that were being published across several different magazine and newspapers, mainly in Canada, the US and Great Britain. Those were for instance Shade, Books in Canada, Musician Magazine, The Idler, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Book, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The National Post and so on.303

Another quite significant article of Paul’s is called A Sense of Embarrassment, published in 1984 in Books in Canada magazine and is also included in Paul’s collection of essays Bohemian Rhapsodies. In this article, the author writes of a congress that was held in Canada on a topic of human rights and how a writer can be influenced by those. Paul Wilson critiques Canadian writers who complain about state censorship without even realizing that they live in a free country. Moreover, authors from Czech Republic, Russia or Argentina were present at the congress as well,

302 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 62-65. 303 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 479. 109 having completely different experience with censorship. Paul Wilson thus comments on many people not being appreciative of their freedom and not being able to imagine what living in a real police state is like.304

A year later, in 1985, Paul Wilson wrote an article reacting on the awarding the Nobel Prize to a Czech poet and writer, Jaroslav Seifert in 1984. The article is called Prize and Prejudice and was published in Books in Canada. The article was written in order to inform the Canadian readers about the little-know writer, as the world was quite surprised about the winner – nobody knew Jaroslav Seifert and his works were impossible to be found in English translations. Paul Wilson even mentions 68 Publishers based in Toronto, who helped to publish some of Seifert’s poems as in Czechoslovakia he was able to publish either very scarcely or only in samizdat. Paul Wilson also informs the reader about the problems with Seifert’s publication in Czechoslovakia and talks about available English translations, however, in some cases, he even offers a more precise rendering of the poems as there were some shortcoming for the translator not sticking to the original text.305

Paul Wilson also shared his views on his job as a translator in an essay called Keepers of the Looking-Glass, Some Thoughts on Translation published in the Brick Magazine in 1986. There, he writes about the experience of translation The Engineer of Human Souls, about problems he had encountered during translating novels and also about the difficulty of rendering a text written in language that is influenced by a certain ideology.306 In the same year, Paul Wilson’s article called What’s it Like Making Rock’n’Roll in a Police State? was published in samizdat Revolver Revue, but first written in 1983 and published in Musicians Magazine. The English original was also published in a collection of essays from Czech underground authors called Views from the Inside in 2006. There, Paul lively and thoroughly describes his experience playing with The Plastic People, many events they held and also the farewell concert they did together before Paul’s expulsion in 1977.

In an essay named A Translator views glasnost warily, published in a Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in 1987, Paul Wilson talks about a translation once again. He implies that a translator is very intrigued by anything that is said to be untranslatable as he believes

304 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 70-73. 305 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 74-79. 306 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 80-89. 110 that there is an equivalent for every word in every language. However, glasnost, as the translator explains in great detail, was a favourite expression of Michail Gorbačov at the time of the issue of the article. It was meant to be a kind of a political slogan that was supposed to show the growing transparency of the Soviet Union. In the essay, Paul Wilson lightly touches on the double speak issue, the rhetoric of the communist regime and also discusses the history of the expression. In case of such word, Paul Wilson is affirmative about the complicated rendering and based on the circumstances of the use of this word, he would not definitely present it as openness.307

Paul Wilson is a translator of Letters to Olga, written by Václav Havel to his wife during the four years he spent in prison. As Václav Havel was not a well know figure in the western world before being the face of Velvet Revolution and later becoming the president of Czechoslovakia, Paul Wilson was persuaded to write a more extensive introduction to the collection and familiarize the English-speaking audience with the author of the letters. The Introduction to Václav Havel: Letters to Olga was published in 1988.308

An article written in 1988, originally meant to be a Festschrift for Josef Škvorecký but rejected by the editor for being probably too personal, is called Growing Up With Orwell and was eventually published in The Idler magazine in 1989. It is an appealing and entertaining insight into Paul Wilson’s experience with his favourite author and how, without knowing, he lead him to London and later to Czechoslovakia.309

In 1990, Paul Wilson published four other essential texts: The Mobilisierungseffekt: Paul Wilson watches Central Europe re-awaken, published in The Idler magazine, where Paul talks about his experience coming back to Czechoslovakia after many years, now full of optimism and euphoria in reaction to fall of the Iron Curtain. In the follow up article published in the same magazine called The High Road to Democracy, Paul describes the first free election in the country and his impressions on the current political situation there.310 In the same year, Paul Wilson was intrigued by the essay written by Timothy Garton Ash, a British historian and journalist, who came to Czechoslovakia as soon as possible during the revolution to be able to observe the changes very closely. Thus, he asked Saturday Night magazine to publish his review of Garton Ash’s book and

307 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 122. 308 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 470. 309 Wilson. Growing up with Orwell. 310 Wilson, Paul. The High Road to Democracy. 111 the Wilson’s text is called Inside the Revolution. Additionally, Paul Wilson is also the author of the translation of Disturbing the Peace, which is an interview with Václav Havel edited by Karel Hvížďala, to which Paul also wrote an Introduction.

In 1989, during the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Paul Wilson was visiting the country and during the hectic days he was able to visit Olga Havlová and make an interview with her. At first, she was positive that Paul came to talk about Václav Havel, however later she understood that Paul is only interested in her. In the interview, Paul Wilson is curious about the letters from the prison (Letters to Olga) and Mrs. Havlová also talks about her childhood, growing up during the communism, about meeting Václav and working with him in a theatre. The interview is called Not a Harlequin Romance and was published in The Idler magazine in 1991.311

The revolution was followed up by many more essays by Paul Wilson in 1992. The text called The End of the Velvet Revolution, published in New York Review of Books, is a Paul’s testimony of the election in June of 1992, just a few months before the division of the country. The essay is divided into three parts – in the first with the thorough description of the political campaign, privatization after the revolution, the second explains the constitution of parliament and government and touches on the problems between Czech and Slovaks and the third one shares stories from Paul’s visit of Slovakia.312

While working on another essay, Czechoslovakia: The Pain of Divorce, Alexander Dubček, the promoter of the socialism with human face, died in consequence of a car crash on a motorway between Brno and Prague, thus Paul Wilson immediately wrote a short article to honour the memory of the influential politician. The article is called The Gardener of Bratislava and was published in The New Yorker. Living Intellects is another text published in 1992, serving as an introduction to the second part of the book Good-bye, Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing. In the introduction, Paul Wilson reflects on the history of the samizdat culture in the whole Eastern Europe and compares the censorship and the look of samizdat books across different countries, e. g. Hungary or Poland.

311 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 141-471. 312 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 186-221. 112

Another text concerning the politician Alexander Dubček, Unlikely Hero, was written in 1993 and published as a review of a book Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček (Naděje umírá poslední). It is a collection of political memoirs being an interesting insight into Dubček’s mind and thus his way of thinking. Paul Wilson’s review of this book was published in The New York Review of Books and Wilson talks about the creation of the book, he even interviews the editor of the publication and ads brief information about the politician’s childhood.

Paul Wilson did an interview with the Canadian novelist and short stories author Rohinton Mistry and their conversation was titled Giving Free Reign, published in Books in Canada in 1996. Rohinton Mistry is a writer of an Indian origin who emigrated to Canada and later attended the University of Toronto. He has written three novels and three collections of short stories so far, nevertheless Paul Wilson’s interview was made after the issue of Mistry’s second novel in 1995, A Fine Balance, which was awarded with the Giller Prize and the very next year with Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Paul and Rohinton talk about his early days in Bombay, about moral fiction and of course, about his new novel.313

In 1998, Paul Wilson contributed to the Cross Currents, A Yearbook of Central European Culture published by the both University of Michigan and Yale University Press. Wilson’s article is called Religious Movements in Czechoslovakia: Faith or Fashion? where he reflects on the religion in communist countries and the relationship between the Church and State. Paul Wilson was also one of the contributors of the Good-bye, Samizdat and therefore he was not supposed to review the book. Nevertheless, he felt so intrigued by it thus he decided to write a short article, just for himself. Later, when the editor in chief of Books in Canada needed more material for the new issue of the magazine, Paul Wilson offered him his text warning him that he might not be able to publish it.314 In the end the article called When absurd was normal was published in the magazine in 1998 as the book was originally released few years earlier thus it was safe for Paul to write such review, promoting a publication that he was a part of.315

313 „Rohinton Mistry.“ British Council, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/rohinton-mistry. Accessed 20 November 2019. Wilson, Paul. “Biography of Paul Wilson.” Paul Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. Accessed 29 October 2019. 314 Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa. Good-bye, Samizdat: twenty years of Czechoslovak underground writing. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, c1992. Print. 315 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 474. 113

In 1998, Paul Wilson also wrote an article Václav Havel in Word and Deed published in a book Critical Essays on Václav Havel. The text was put together while it was uncertain whether Havel’s political career would still carry on. Wilson describes Havel not only as a president of Czech Republic but rather as an author, intellectual and a moral ideal and representative. He also goes back to the division of the two nations, Czech and Slovaks, the roots of their relationships and Havel’s efforts to unite the countries.316

In 2000, an American-Canadian author and activist Jane Jacobs published her sixth book called The Nature of Economies, which is a dialog between friends exploring the similarities and relations between the functioning economies and ecosystems, a book trying to revolutionize our way of thinking about the economy. In reaction to the release of the book, Paul Wilson arranged an interview with Jane Jacobs and his article called Urban Legend was published in Saturday Night Magazine in 2000, the ‘urban’ in the title referring to Jacobs’ contribution to the development of urban studies and her arguments about urban planning and its shortages.317

In 2002, the president of Czech Republic Václav Havel officially travelled to the United States to visit the country. His first stop was in Miami, where he was warm-heartily welcomed by a group of Cuban dissidents who spent many years in a Cuban gulag during the rule of Fidel Castro. During the visit, Václav Havel attended many events on human rights, for example in New York or in the capital, Washington. He also spoke at the Florida International University on communists using the speech as a tool to confuse and what is more, control the society. Paul Wilson wrote a reportage of this Havel’s tour around the United States, named The Velvet Revolution Moves to Cuba, Havel Gest his Groove Back and it was published in the Canadian newspaper National Post.318

Another essays concerning the Czech president written by Paul Wilson was published in New York Review of Books in April 2003. The essay named Wonderful Life examines Havel’s present-day popularity, which was rather declining in the country as many people thought his presidential days shall be better over. Paul Wilson describes how a first democratic president’s journey will always be demanding, being watched closely, and easily blamed for any bad event on

316 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 320-332. 317 Martin, Sandra. „Urban expert Jane Jacobs dies at 98yrs.“ The Globe&Mail, 25 April 2006, https://www.mail- archive.com/[email protected]/msg03446.html, Accessed 20 November 2019. 318 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 320-332. 114 the rocky road leading from communism to capitalism. Paul Wilson also talks about Havel’s positives and negatives and also touches on the problematics of his nonpartisan politics. Moreover, Paul also met with Havel’s former spokesman thus the text also contains extracts from their conversation.319

The article Velvet Revolution: Cuban Style is Paul Wilson’s reportage from a summit about the future of Cuba and its plans after Fidel Castro, held in Prague in 2004. The summit was organized by the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba founded by Václav Havel. Among other things, one of the important questions discussed was the position of other countries towards the Cuban politics, especially United States’ and Canada’s. With this article, Paul Wilson tried to raise awareness in Canada concerning the people’s views on the situation as he felt that Canada’s policy towards Cuba is rather impassive and could be improved.320

Paul Wilson translated Škvorecký’s novel Dvorak in Love in 1986, however, in 2004 he revisited the topic of translation in his text called Radost z překládání aneb od Scherza capricciosa k Dvorak in Love that was published in Czech in an anthology released to the event of the international conference about work of Josef Škvorecký, held in the writer’s hometown Náchod on September 22-24, 2004 to celebrate his 80 birthday. Paul Wilson was invited to the event and asked to give a speech, thus he decided to write about his favourite novel. Paul first starts reminiscing his first experience with translating Josef Škvorecký and also talks about The Engineer of Human Souls. Later on, he describes the process of rendering Dvorak in Love, his consultations with Škvorecký and in the end, expresses his regrets about the novel not being as popular and appreciated in the west as he had wished for it to be.321

Saturday Night magazine printed Paul Wilsons article called Ottawa in Bohemia in February 2005. There, Paul talks about a very peculiar person, Edvard Outrata, who emigrated to Canada from Czechoslovakia in 1968. After the revolution in 1990, they both met in Prague and Paul was intrigued by Mr. Outrata’s manners and opinions on Czech politics. The article describes Mr. Outrata’s interesting childhood, adolescence and adulthood, but mainly the changes he managed to introduce while working in Czech Republic after deciding to come back.322 And a

319 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 337-355. 320 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 356-362. 321 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 362-378. 322 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 379-394. 115 month later in March 2005, the Toro magazine published Paul Wilson’s article The Real Havana, a short insight into the Cuban economy written with a good portion of wit, comparing life of an ordinary Cuban with the point of view of a tourist the Paul Wilson also was. At the end of the article, Paul Wilson offers a well-arranged short guide: what movies or books to look into before coming to Cuba, how to get to Havana, how to arrange accommodation or what to eat there and most importantly, what to bring as a gift to the locals.323

In 2007, Paul Wilson was asked to contribute to the special issue of the Open Letters magazine released as a tribute for the Canadian translator from French to English Ray Ellenwood, old friend of Paul’s. The text called Old Translators Never Retire, They Just… Thoughts for Ray Ellenwood is mainly about the translation as a profession, its drawbacks and untranslatable expressions, but also about Paul’s experience working on rendering many beautiful novels, each experience being new and unique for him.324

In years 2011 and 2012 Paul Wilson wrote two obituaries about two of his friends for The Guardian, first one about the poet and artistic director of The Plastic People, , the second one about Josef Škvorecký. Concerning Ivan Jirous, a book commenting on his works was published in 2014, called Magorova konference, full of contributions from the historically first symposium held by Revolver Revue in Autumn 2013 to commemorate the artist. Paul Wilson is one of the authors who contributed with their texts.325

Paul Wilson is also the author of several essays explaining and commenting on Václav Havel’s short diary entries, that were published in a collection called Zápisky obviněného in 2016. Václav Havel’s texts had been found almost by mistake, only few years earlier, in old boxes of a Czech translator, essayist and Havel’s friend, Zdeněk Urbánek. The little snippets of texts were written by Havel while in custody, thus it is a very authentic testimony of the author, even more than his letters to Olga that were influenced by the censorship. Paul Wilson, Martin Palouš and

323 Wilson, Paul. „The Real Havana.“ Toro, March 2005, https://paulwilson.ca/pw_articles/pw_toro_cuba.pdf. Accessed 20 November 2019. 324 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 397-415. 325 Onuferová, Edita, and Terezie Pokorná. „Magorova konference.“ Revolver Revue, 2014, https://revolverrevue.cz/err-792014-magorova-konference, Accessed 20 November 2019.

116

Michael Žantovský helped to clarify many of Havel’s ideas and philosophical concepts present in his diary entries from 1977.326

In recent years, Paul Wilson have been writing articles for Revolver Revue, as well as for their online magazine called bubinekrevolveru.cz, which are being published in Czech. For instance, in 2016, Wilson wrote a polemical reflection concerning the group of artists Paul was also a part of – Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu - published in the 102/2016 issue of Revolver Revue. The text with the title Zemský ráj was originally written on the occasion of exposition held in Roudnice nad Labem about the history of the Křižovnická škola. In the article, Paul Wilson reminisces mainly Jan Steklík and Ivan Jirous and reflects on their arguments started by Jirous’ published article.327

In 2016, Revolver Revue held a conference to commemorate the literary critic, editor and publisher Jan Lopatka and a year later, a book Jan Lopatka (1940–1993) was published, presenting the texts from the conference as well as commemorative texts, photos and documents from the StB files. Paul Wilson attended the event and for this occasion, wrote an essay Předpoklady Jana Lopatky: vzpomínky a úvahy that was published in the book in 2017. In the text, Paul Wilson talks about how he met Jan Lopatka and describes especially the days after Charter 77, which also had Jan’s signature. They also very often discussed George Orwell, Wilson’s favoured writer, and talked about interrogation with the police. Paul Wilson also shares some of his diary entries he used to write while being in Czechoslovakia, and adds Lopatka’s critical opinions on Bohumil Hrabal.328

In November 2017, Bubínek Revolveru published another Wilson’s article, this time dedicated solely to Jan Steklík. Wilson writes about the first time meeting him and about his joining Křižovnická škola and among many other things also tries to explain the meaning behind the full

326 Dušek, David, and Václav Havel. Václav Havel: zápisky obviněného / Diář Václava Havla 1977. Praha: Knihovna Václava Havla, 2016. Print. 327 Tuckerová, Veronika. „Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu a její dějiny.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 16 March 2016, https://bubinekrevolveru.cz/krizovnicka-skola-cisteho-humoru-bez-vtipu-jeji-dejiny, Accessed 20 Noveber 2019. 328 Wilson, Paul. „Předpoklady Jana Lopatky: vzpomínky a úvahy.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 5 June 2017, https://bubinekrevolveru.cz/jan-lopatka-1940-1993-esej-paula-wilsona-film-zaostreni-pozornosti, Accessed 20 November 2019.

117 name of the group – čistého humoru bez vtipu – pure humour without jokes. The article is called Za Janem Steklíkem.329

The most recent article written by Paul Wilson, Několik vzpomínek na Nikolaje Stankoviče, was published in Bubínek Revolveru in November 7, 2019. Paul Wilson could not attend the conference held in October dedicated to the poetic and critical work of Nikolaj Stankovič, however, he was kind enough to send this text that was published a month later accompanied by the photo of Paul Wilson captured his first wife Helena in 1969. In the article, Paul Wilson shares nine short episodes based on his friendship with Nikolaj, some more bizarre than the others, that will definitely make anyone smile, or even laugh out loud.330

329 Wilson, Paul. „Za Janem Steklíkem.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 26 November 2017, https://bubinekrevolveru.cz/za- janem-steklikem, Accessed 20 November 2019. 330 Wilson, Paul. „Několik vzpomínek na Nikolaje Stankoviče.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 7 November 2019, http://www.bubinekrevolveru.cz/nekolik-vzpominek-na-nikolaje-stankovice, Accessed 20 November 2019. 118

3.6 Other publications

The chapter Other publications includes works of Paul Wilson where he was neither in a role of a translator nor is the publication as short to be considered an essay or an article. These publications include books We Are Children Just the Same, 57 Hours and last but not least, Bohemian Rhapsodies. In many cases, Paul Wilson functioned as a co-editor of these publications and concerning Bohemian Rhapsodies, that book is an original Wilson’s idea he was able to realize with the help of other editors and translators, being the perfect read for anyone wanting to dive deeper in the author’s views or other biographical data that are not already present in this thesis.

119

3.6.1 We Are Children Just The Same

This publication with the subheading Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezín was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1995. The texts in the publication were prepared by Marie Rút Křížková who is a member of the Society of Christians and Jews, and Kurt Jiří Kotouč and Zdeněk Ornest who are both Terezín survivors. The foreword was written by Václav Havel and the translations from Czech were made by R. Elizabeth Novak. Paul Wilson is the editor and associate translator of the publication.331

During the war at the Terezín ghetto, children were housed separately from adults and at the same time girls were separated from boys. However, there was one supervisor for each group who often held illegal classes for the children as they had no other chance of education there. One home, which housed boys aged 13 to 15, set up their own government and also secretly created Vedem.332

Vedem (meaning In the Lead) is the magazine produced secretly at the model concentration camp, Terezín. The magazine was coming out weekly from 1942 to 1944 and was prepared by a group of young Jewish boys and it was full of poems, articles, columns, dialogues and artwork those boys had created or written. The material for this publication was saved by one of the few boys who survived the Holocaust. These works were published in 1995 for the first time simultaneously in English, Czech and German. One of the boys in his diary writes:

When children all over the world have their own rooms, we have bunks 70 x 30 cm. They have their freedom; we live like chained dogs. Truly, then, in place of their closet full of toys, you must allow us to have at least half a meter of shelf space behind our heads. You must realize that we are still only children, like children everywhere else. We may be mature, thanks to Terezín, but we are children just the same.333

331 Křížková, Marie Rút, Kurt Jiří Kotouč, and Zdeněk Ornest. We are children just the same: Vedem, the secret magazine by the boys of Terezín. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1995. Print. 332 „VEDEM, Terezin 1942-1944.“ My Jewish Learning, https://myjewishlearning.com/article/vedem-terezin-1942- 1944/, Accessed 20 November 2019. 333 Křížková, Kotouč, Ornest. We are children just the same: Vedem, the secret magazine by the boys of Terezín.

120

As Václav Havel writes in his introduction, this book does not serve us as a symbol of desolation, but rather should fill the reader with hope and show us how talent can have the capacity to be stronger than death.334

334 Křížková, Kotouč, Ornest. We are children just the same: Vedem, the secret magazine by the boys of Terezín. 121

3.6.2 57 Hours: A Survivor's Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama

Paul Wilson is a co-author of the Vesselin Nedkov‘s book called 57 Hours, published in publishing house Viking Canada in 2003. It is a drama about being held hostage, written from the point of view of the hostage himself – Vesselin Nedkov – who was lucky enough to survive the event. The story is describing real events associated with the capture of almost 800 Moscow theatre audience, actors, musicians, and other staff by Chechen fighters in 2002. The book includes 57 hours of closely described events, written in a very terrifying and gripping way, which provide the reader with the insight of the mind of the hostage. The author writes in the introduction:

When we first started working on this book, I was apprehensive. It was only a couple of months after the horrific events in a Moscow theatre when, along with eight hundred other people, I was taken hostage and held for two and a half days by a band of Chechen terrorists who threatened to kill us all if the Russian government didn’t withdraw its troop from Chechnya. I survived, but there were many who didn’t. Whenever I thought about those traumatic day, I found myself becoming agitated and upset. At first, I thought it might be enough to try to shut it out of my mind. Yet regardless of how hard I tried, I found I couldn’t escape – certain images and sound kept recurring in my brain….

Now, almost a year later, such moments are rare, but the still occur. Why, then, did I decide to work on this book, knowing that it would force me to relive the experience again and again, not just whenever a memory happened to resurface, but deliberately, almost every day? The decision came gradually, as I came to understand that suppressing my memories was not the answer….

Terrorism can old us all hostage, whether we are directly involved in an incident or not. I have learned that this current was on terror, whatever form it takes, is a clash not so much of one civilization with another, but of civilization itself with forces that are utterly alien to it. Understanding that, I believe, will help us in our struggle against terrorism. It is in the spirit of that understanding that I have chosen to tell my story.335

335 Nedkov, Vesselin, and Paul Wilson. 57 Hours: A Survivor’s Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2003. Print.

122

At the end of the book, Vesselin Nedkov expresses his gratitude and appreciation to Paul Wilson for helping him present the story in a way that is compelling and appealing for the readers, as Nedkov was in a role of a storyteller and Wilson put his words onto a paper.336

336 Nedkov. 123

3.6.3 Bohemian Rhapsodies

The book Bohemian Rhapsodies is a collection of carefully selected essays and articles Paul Wilson wrote after his expulsion from Czechoslovakia in 1977, more specifically the essays chosen come from the years from 1978 to 2007. They were originally intended for the western readers to educate them on the European totalitarian regimes and other topics connected to the small country in the middle of Europe, however, they are very valuable, thought-provoking and relatable even for the Czech audience. The original idea of publishing such collection struck Paul Wilson himself, including the selection of the texts and the title of the publication. In 2008 Paul contacted Viktor Stoilov, founder of the publishing house Torst, offering him this short collection he had in mind. Stoilov immediately agreed and the book was published in 2011, about two years and a half later after they started working on it.337 The official launch event of the book took place in Václav Havel Library in Prague on Tuesday, May 29, 2012. The video from the event is available on the library website, including an interview with the author and reading of the chosen parts from the publication.

Bohemian Rhapsodies are divided into several parts. First is the preface written by the author, where he reflects of being half Canadian and half Czech and also speaks of his ideas for this publication. There, Paul Wilson also talks about not being sure whether any Czech would be still interested in these articles as they were not intended for Czech people in the first place. Moreover, as Paul says, those essays were written always on the spur of the moment, immediately reacting on the events happening in Czechoslovakia or in the Czech Republic later, and Paul was worried that those moments were already gone.338

The next and at the same time the most important, longest part are the essays and articles themselves. Those are, on purpose, not sorted in a chronological order as how Paul Wilson originally wrote them. The order of the texts is supposed to function well for the readers to orientate in the historical events well and later on get to know and understand Wilson’s translation work. Wilson writes about his arrival to Czechoslovakia, playing with the PPU and so on:

337 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 14. 338 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 14. 124

There’s another piece which I wrote in the early eighties about The Plastic People. That was partly because they were still in terrible trouble with the police and I wanted to give them some kind of profile abroad. That was published in a big magazine called Musician. Then there are book reviews and essays on translation and a series of essays I wrote for The New York Review of Books on the elections of 1992 and the break-up of the country. And there’s a lot about Havel, because people asked me to write about him.339

Martin Machovec helped Paul Wilson choose the texts and organize them. The texts were translated from original English version to Czech by several translators, most of them by Martin Machovec and others by Kateřina Sidonová, Alena Příbáňová, or Jaroslav Riedel.340

Following the essays is a quite long interview with Paul Wilson done by Jaroslav Riedel, which is called Chtěl jsem vědět jak to s tím socialismem doopravdy je (I wanted to know what was really up with the socialism). Jaroslav Riedl asks Paul about his intentions of coming to Czechoslovakia, about his teaching career, his feelings and impressions from the socialist republic and of course, The Plastic People. The interview is very specific, Riedl even familiarized himself with the StB file on Wilson, which they also talk about in great detail. The text is concluded by a short conversation about the play Rock’n’Roll by Tom Stoppard, which partly touches on the topic of the PPU and other Czech dissidents. The whole interview with Wilson was done between the years 2005 and 2011 and in the book is accompanied by many pictures either from the years Wilson spent in Czechoslovakia or from the moments of him coming back to visit the country after the revolution.

The interview is followed by the editorial note translated to Czech where Paul Wilson shortly comments on every essay included in the book, why the essay was included and the circumstances of its publication, e.g.:

Jaký je to dělat rock v policejním state? – What’s it Like Making Rock’n’Roll in a Police State? The same as anywhere else, only harder. Much harder: published in the Musician Magazine in February 1983. The Czech translation made by the unknown translator was published in samizdat Revolver Revue, č. 3/4 in 1986. And Paul Wilson comments on this

339 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 340 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 467. 125

essay: An unbelievable story is connected to this article. I went to Havana in 2004, representing the Toronto magazine called Toro, and there by a coincidence I met with a Cuban rocker, in the past having long hair, now very much bold. At the time of the publication of this article about The Plastic People, he was in jail for playing in a rock band. At our second encounter he showed me a dirty notebook with this article rewritten by hand that he copied from the smuggled issue of the Musician Magazine. “Are you really the Paul Wilson?” he asked me with amazement. “I can’t believe this. So, tell me, how are the PPU? And DG 307? And UH II. And III.?” I don’t know which one of us was more startled.341

The whole book is closed by a brief summary of Paul Wilson’s biographical data together with the list of his most important translations of the Czech literature.

As mentioned before, the title ‘Bohemian Rhapsodies’ was given to the book by the author. However, Paul Wilson did not know how to name the book for quite some time and even though he had a concept of publishing his essays, ‘Bohemian Rhapsodies’ came much later as he and the publishing company were looking for a title expressing the spirit of what was in the book. In the end, Paul thought that ‘Bohemian Rhapsodies’ is a perfect name – firstly, anyone, even people who do not speak English, can understand the title, secondly, there is an irony to the name - there are no rhapsodies in the book, some of the articles are rather critical of the politics in Czechoslovakia. Moreover, it is an allusion to the famous Queen song and Paul Wilson closely explains the irony in the interview with David Vaughan at the event of the launch of the book in Václav Havel Library in Prague:

There’s definitely an element of tongue-in-cheek, and there’s an even bigger one, because Ivan Jirous, the fabled, now passed-away, artistic director of The Plastic People of the Universe and the godfather of the underground – I don’t know how else I could describe him – hated Queen. Ivan had very strict musical tastes, and, according to some young people I talked to – people who were young then – he forbade them to listen to Queen.342

There are two elements that complete each other perfectly while reading Bohemian Rhapsodies – it is the Wilson’s devotion to his second Czech home, his deep interest in the

341 Wilson. Bohemian Rhapsodies. p. 468. 342 Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel. 126

Bohemian culture and the peculiar people of underground and at the same time the view of an outsider, brought up and educated in a completely different world. This way his perspective is absolutely unique and can help the Czech reader see things in a different manner. Not only are Wilson’s essays and articles entertaining, but are also a valuable historical document that can be, and should be, used as teaching tool during history lessons at Czech schools. In detail, Paul Wilson comments on the conditions in Czechoslovakia during communism, occupation, normalization, underground culture and later on also on the political situation after the revolution, the importance of the first free election, creation of political parties, their advertising skills, Havel’s opinions on privatization and most importantly, on the division of the country together with the campaigns of the politics, their arguments against staying together and so on.

Therefore, Paul Wilson’s worries about this collection possibly not being attractive enough for Czech audience he expresses in the preface of the book are thus, not only in my opinion, based on the author’s modesty. The reviews the book has received are all more than positive, the translations to Czech are very natural and as witty and entertaining as the original English texts. Wilson can brilliantly describe any situation and tell it as a story, sometimes even hard to believe to, and this makes the essays very intriguing and educational at the same time. The book can be recommended to anyone looking for amusement, anyone wanting to reminisce the old times before the revolution, anyone keen on the Czech underground and rock music, anyone interested in a foreigner’s opinion on our culture, anyone seeking to educate themselves in history of Czechoslovakia and the independent Czech Republic, anyone teaching history or civics and their students, anyone wanting to learn more about Václav Havel or Josef Škvorecký, anyone fond of translation and language and in the end, for anyone at all.

127

4 Conclusion

This paper dealt with the description of biographical data and work of the prominent Canadian translator from Czech to English, Paul Robert Wilson, who spent ten years in Czechoslovakia experiencing the Prague Spring and the following normalization. He was expelled from the country and coming back to his homeland Canada, he dedicated himself to translation of the works by many renowned Czech authors.

The topic of this thesis was chosen mainly for the lack of complex biographical data about the translator, who, with no doubt, deserves recognition and appreciation which hopefully the thesis has achieved to express and deliver. Moreover, the topic has been selected also due to my bachelor thesis’ focus on Paul Wilson’s translation of I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, which has sparked up my interest in his persona.

The thesis is divided into two main parts – Life of Paul Wilson and Works of Paul Wilson. The first part focuses on the biographical data of the translator where the information was mainly collected from Wilson’s collection of essays, Bohemian Rhapsodies, but also from many interviews and articles. I must say, reading Bohemian Rhapsodies was extremely gripping and educational. Paul Wilson’s essays on various topics and some even biographical were the biggest source of my enrichment as Paul Wilson’s experience is connected to a very important part of our history. I would happily recommend many of those essays to history or civics teachers – Paul Wilson often writes about life in communist Czechoslovakia, he shares unbelievable stories from a point of view of an outsider, and he also describes the Velvet Revolution and later the political situation after the fall of the regime. Moreover, in the text of the thesis, many quotations are included as I believe they enrich the text and allow the reader to understand Paul Wilson’s intentions even more. Wilson’s biographical data is concluded by brief comments on his careers in various newspapers and magazines, as well as his activities after leaving Czechoslovakia to Canada.

The second part commenting on Wilson’s work is divided into many subchapters, i.e. Translations of Václav Havel, Translations of Josef Škvorecký, Translations of Ivan Klíma, Other translations, Essays and articles and last but not least, Other publications. The research regarding the different translations was carried out by looking though the publications itselves and also focusing on the reviews of the books and translations. Where possible and available, Paul Wilson’s

128 comments about the process of translation are mentioned. While working on this part of the dissertation, I found myself mainly being interested in works by Václav Havel, which motivated me to start reading his essays that I have been thoroughly enjoying and I certainly will be coming back to this author again in the future. Václav Havel’s work is, in my opinion, extremely timeless, especially in the recent years and thus the translations done by Paul Wilson are of huge importance, being still widely read not only at the universities all over the world.

To conclude, I hope this thesis will be found useful for anyone seeking to learn more about Paul Wilson or about translation. I would like to thank Mr. Wilson one more time for being extremely kind to me, answering all of my questions regarding his work and providing me with needed material, i.e. his essays and articles. Working on this dissertation was exceptionally amusing and inspiring for me and I believe it has extended my knowledge in many fields.

129

5 Bibliography

5.1 Print Sources

Wilson, Paul. Bohemian Rhapsodies. Praha: Torst, 2011.

Machovec, Martin. Views From the Inside. Praha: Department of Czech Literature and Literary Criticism, 2006.

Wilson, Paul. Growing up with Orwell. The Idler Magazine – July/August, 1989.

Wilson, Paul. The High Road to Democracy. The Idler Magazine – September/October 1990.

Havel, Václav. Letní přemítání. Praha: Odeon, 1991.

Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979 - September 1982. Pbk. ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Havel, Václav. Disturbing the peace: a conversation with Karel Hvížďala. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Havel, Václav, and Paul R. Wilson. Open letters: Selected Writtings 1965-1990. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.

Havel, Václav. Summer meditations. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Havel, Václav. Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings 1990-1994. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1994.

Havel, Václav. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa, and Phyllis Carey. Critical essays on Václav Havel. New York: G. K. Hall, c1999.

Havel, Václav. The Beggar’s Opera. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Havel, Václav. The Memo. New York: Theater 61 Press, 2012.

130

Škvorecký, Josef. The Swell Season: a text on the most important things in life. London: Vintage, 1994.

Škvorecký, Josef. The return of Lieutenant Boruvka: a reactionary tale of crime and detection. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

Škvorecký, Josef. The miracle game. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1990.

Škvorecký, Josef. The republic of whores: a fragment from the time of the cults. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Klíma, Ivan. My golden trades. London: Granta Books, 1998.

Klíma, Ivan. Waiting for the dark, waiting for the light. London: Granta Books, 1998.

Gorbačev, Michail Sergejevič, and Zdeněk Mlynář. Conversations with Gorbachev: on perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the crossroads of socialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Lustig, Arnošt. Indecent dreams. Evanston, III.: Northwestern University, 1988.

Taussig, Pavel. Blbé, ale naše. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1987.

Hrabal, Bohumil. I Served the King of England. London: Vintage, 2009.

Skilling, H. Gordon, and Paul R. Wilson. Civic freedom in central Europe: voices from Czechoslovakia. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Wilson, Paul. Prague: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, 1995.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa. Good-bye, Samizdat: twenty years of Czechoslovak underground writing. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Dušek, David, and Václav Havel. Václav Havel: zápisky obviněného / Diář Václava Havla 1977. Praha: Knihovna Václava Havla, 2016.

131

Křížková, Marie Rút, Kurt Jiří Kotouč, and Zdeněk Ornest. We are children just the same: Vedem, the secret magazine by the boys of Terezín. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1995.

Nedkov, Vesselin, and Paul Wilson. 57 Hours: A Survivor’s Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2003.

132

5.2 Online Sources

Wilson, Paul. “Biography of Paul Wilson.” Paul Wilson. paulwilson.ca/biography.html. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Machovec, Martin. „Paul Wilson – Krátká Biografie.“ Přítomnost, 19 May 2012, http://www.pritomnost.cz/2013/06/11/paul-wilson-kratka-biografie/. Accessed 29 October 2019.

„Galérka Chátry – Paul Wilson.“ Fenomén Underground, 2012, https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10419676635-fenomen-underground/412235100221010- galerka-chatry/8104-paul-wilson/. Accessed 29 October 2019.

„Talks in English – Paul Wilson and Václav Havel (15. 5. 2014).“ Youtube, uploaded by knihovnavaclavahavla, 22 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osoiLsPLFPc&t=2552s. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Mottýl, Ivan. „Plastic People jsem učil zpívat anglicky, vyprávěl v Lese kanadský překladatel Paul Wilson.“ Ostravan, 1 June 2019, https://www.ostravan.cz/56198/plastic-people-jsem-ucil- zpivat-anglicky-vypravel-v-lese-kanadsky-prekladatel-paul-wilson/. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Konrád, Daniel. „Paul Wilson: Havel má pověst rytíře v nablýskané zbroji.“ Hospodářské noviny, 21 December 2011, https://domaci.ihned.cz/c1-54258200-nemel-tak-ostre-lokty-jako-jeho- oponenti. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Štráfeldová, Milena. „Paul Wilson: ‚Strach je pryč, ale práce je ještě dost, ne?‘“ Radio Prague International, 30 April 2018, https://www.radio.cz/cz/rubrika/udalosti/paul-wilson-strach-je- pryc-ale-prace-je-jeste-dost-ne. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Macháček, Jan. „Paul Wilson: O zpívání s Plastiky, zmlklém národu a Havlově zemitosti.“ Respekt, 31 March 2006, https://archiv.ihned.cz/c1-18147590-paul-wilson-o-zpivani-s-plastiky- zmlklem-narodu-a-havlove-zemitosti. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Toman, Marek. „Překladatel a bývalý člen Plastiků Paul Wilson: Močit proti zdi, dokud nespadne.“ Novinky.cz, 3 July 2013, https://www.novinky.cz/kultura/salon/306785-prekladatel-a-

133 byvaly-clen-plastiku-paul-wilson-mocit-proti-zdi-dokud-nespadne.html. Accessed 29 October 2019.

„Canadians and Czechoslovaks in the Age of Normalization.“ Youtube, uploaded by Československé dokumentační středisko, 6 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JIZ0_7fmE. Accessed 29 October 2019.

Velinger, Jan. „Paul Wilson – The impact of The Plastic People on a communist universe.“ Radio Prague International, 31 May 2005, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/one-on-one/paul-wilson- the-impact-of-the-plastic-people-on-a-communist-universe. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Vaughan, David. „Paul Wilson – Pure humour without jokes in 1970s Prague.“ Radio Prague International, 24 May 2014, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/books/paul-wilson-pure-humour- without-jokes-in-1970s-prague. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Chuchma, Josef. „V Galerii Josefa Sudka je vystaven jedinečný obraz života v ‚paralelní kultuře‘.“ iDNES.cz, 9 November 2009, https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/archiv/v-galerii-josefa- sudka-je-vystaven-jedinecny-obraz-zivota-v-paralelni-kulture.A091109_143840_kavarna_bos. Accessed 18 November 2019.

„Bránil se jen kytarou.“ Fenomén Underground, 20 October 2017, https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10419676635-fenomen-underground/video/. Accessed 18 November 2019.

„Paul Wilson, holder of the Revolver Revue Award.“ České dokumentační středisko, http://www.csds.cz/en/4263-DS. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Němec, Ondřej. „Cenu Revolver Revue získá bývalý člen Plastic People Paul Wilson, v Praze bude besedovat.“ Hospodářské Noviny, 11 April 2017, https://art.ihned.cz/knihy/c1-65693670- cena-revolver-revue-paul-wilson-roxy. Accessed 18 November 2019. de Bruin Hüblová, Magda. „Povolání literární překladatel z češtiny.“ iLiteratura.cz, 25 June 2014, http://iliteratura.cz/Clanek/33361/povolani-literarni-prekladatel-z-cestiny. Accessed 18 November 2019.

134

DG 307. „Gift to the Shadows.“ Canada: Boží Mlýn productions, and Sweden: Šafrán, 1982, https://www.muzeum-hudby.cz/vinyl-detail/dg-307-gift-to-the-shadows-fragment-3319475, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Polák, Pavel and Vojtěch Kouřimský. „Havlovu větu bylo někdy v angličtině potřeba rozdělit na dvě, vzpomíná jeho překladatelka.“ Český rozhlas, 18 December 2012, https://www.irozhlas.cz/kultura_literatura/havlovu-vetu-bylo-nekdy-v-anglictine-potreba- rozdelit-na-dve-vzpomina-jeho-prekladatelka_201212182035_vkourimsky. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Havel, Václav. „The Power of the Powerless.“ East European Politics and Societies, vol. 32, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 353-408, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325418766625. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Krapfl, James, and Barbara J. Falk. „Introduction: The Power of the Powerless at Forty.“ East European Politics and Societies, vol. 32, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 207-213, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325418765932. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Wilson, Paul. „The Power of the Powerless Revisited.“ East European Politics and Societies, vol. 32, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 232-238, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325417747972. Accessed 18 November 2019.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. „Caesaropapism.“ Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc., 25 April 2017, https://britannica.com/topic/caesaropapism. Accessed 18 November 2019.

„Summer Meditations.“ Publishers Weekly. https://publishersweekly.com/9780679414629. Accessed 18 November 2019.

Courries, Kevin. „Democratic Vistas: Vaclav Havel’s The Art of the Impossible.“ Critics At Large, 29 May 2010, https://criticsatlarge.ca/2010/05/book-vaclav-havals-art-of-impossible.html. Accessed 19 November 2019.

„The Art of the Impossible.“ Kirkus Reviews, 1 April 1997 (posted online 20 May 2010), https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vaclav-havel/the-art-of-the-impossible/. Accessed 19 November 2019.

135

Kuiper, Kathleen. „The Beggar’s Opera.“ Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc., 8 July 2014, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Beggars-Opera. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Procházková, Tereza. „Žebrácká opera Václava Havla v inscenačním pojetí Daniela Špinara.“ Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Filozofická fakulta, 14 April 2014, https://theses.cz/id/mxkfu3/?lang=sk. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Hopkins, Philip. „The Beggar’s Opera.“ Theater Mania, 8 August 2003, https://theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/reviews/the-beggars-opera_3799.html, Accessed 19 November 2019.

„Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back.“ Knihovna Václava Havla, https://vaclavhavel.cz/cs/aktivity/shop/77_vaclav-havel-to-the-castle-and-back. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Berman, Paul. „Velvet Revolutionary.“ The New York Times, 23 September 2007, https://nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/review/Berman-t.html. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Cameron, Rob. „Václav Havel – ‚Leaving‘, but also returning.“ Radio Prague International, 23 May 2008, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/arts/vaclav-havel-leaving-but-also-returning. Accessed 18 November 2019.

„Londýn přijal Havlovo Odcházení nadšeným potleskem.“ Aura Pont, https://aura- port.cz/londyn-prijal.havlovo-odchazeni-nadsenym-potleskem-p2825.html. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Sabatini, Arthur J. „Art, politics and humanity: Václav Havel, in theory and practice.“ Broad Street Review, 1 June 2010, https://broadstreetreview.com/theater/the_meaning_of_havels_leaving_4th_review#. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Popescu, Delia. „Political Action in Václav Havel’s Thought.“ Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012. https://book.google.at/books?id=TbwQ_4Q9ujkC&dq=ptydepe+language&hl=cs. Accessed 19 November 2019.

136

Helsel, Patricia. „Creative and Working Process.“ Ptydepe, https://ptydepe.com/About.html. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Wilson, Paul. „Josef Škvorecký obituary.“ The Guardian, 9 January 2012, https://theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/09/josef-skvorecky. Accessed 19 November 2019.

Němcová Banerjee, Maria. „The Swell Season: A Text on the Most Important Things in Life by Josef Škvorecký and Paul Wilson.“ World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 2, 1987, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40143199. Accessed 1 July 2019.

Racevskis, Karlis. „Dvorak in Love: A Light-Hearted Dream by Josef Skvorecky and Paul Wilson.“ World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, 1987, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40143918. Accessed 1 July 2019.

Brunnerová, Helena. „Translating Culture: Škvorecký into English.“ Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, 2018, https://is.muni.cz/th/m7kks/brunnerova_- _diploma_thesis.pdf#page=68&zoom=100,0,94, Accessed 20 November 2019.

„The Republic of Whores: A Fragment from the Time of the Cults.“ Publishers Weekly. https://publishersweekly.com/978-0-88001-371-0. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Savage, Emer. „Relationships and Recollection.“ Canadian Literature, n. 206, 2010, https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=206. Accessed 20 November 2019. (strana 190)

Babstock, Ken. „Danny Smiricky, home again.“ The Globe and Mail, 6 December 2008, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/danny-smiricky-home-again/article1323789/. Accessed 20 November 2010.

Uhlířová, Marie. „Ivan Klíma.“ Slovník české literatury, 1995, http://www.slovnikceskeliteratury.cz/showContent.jsp?docId=1253&hl=ivan+kl%C3%ADma+, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Dibdin, Michael. „Employment Exchange: My Golden Trades – by Ivan Klima.“ Independent, 18 October 1992, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-employment- exchange-my-golden-trades-by-ivan-klima-granta-books-pounds-1399-1558193.html, Accessed 20 November 2019.

137

„The Spirit of Prague: And Other Essays.“ Publishers Weekly. https://publishersweekly.com/978- 0-9645611-2-0. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Wolff, Larry. „Through Czech Eyes.“ The New York Times, 29 October 1995, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/02/22/home/klima-spirit.html, Accessed 20 November 2019.

The Associated Press. „Zdenek Mlynar, 66, a Reformer For Czech Dissident Movements.“ The New York Times, 20 April 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/20/world/zdenek-mlynar- 66-a-reformer-for-czech-dissident-movements.html, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Výborná, Lucie. „Stačilo zakopnout, vzpomíná Pavel Taussig na pochod smrti. Z jeho deníkových zápisků vznikla kniha.“ Radiožurnál, 8 May 2019, https://radiozurnal.rozhlas.cz/stacilo-zakopnout-vzpomina-pavel-taussig-na-pochod-smrti-z-jeho- denikovych-7930893, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Haman, Aleš. „Arnošt Lusting.“ Slovník české literatury, 1995, http://www.slovnikceskeliteratury.cz/showContent.jsp?docId=507&hl=arno%C5%A1t+lustig+, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Heřmanová, Tereza. „Analysis of Lexical Units in Bohumil Hrabal’s Prose.“ Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Pedagogická fakulta, 2017, https://is.muni.cz/th/tgnps/?lang=en;id=171145, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Marra, Anthony. „A World A Few Degrees Of Whimsy Away From Our Own.“ National Public Radio, 28 July 2013, https://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/192675279/a-world-a-few-degrees-of- whimsy-away-from-our-own?t=1571653245067, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Forbes, Malcolm. „Book review: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales From the Time of the Cult – an uncovered Czech treasure.“ The National, 29 October 2015, https://www.thenational.ae/arts- culture/book-review-mr-kafka-and-other-tales-from-the-time-of-the-cult-an-uncovered-czech- treasure-1.88003, Accessed 20 November 2019.

138

Vrbová, Daniela. “Recenzenti nepochopili kontext doby, aneb jak se překládá Hrabal.” Český Rozhlas Plus, 17 July 2016, https://plus.rozhlas.cz/recenzenti-nepochopili-kontext-doby-aneb- jak-se-preklada-hrabal-6534731, Accessed 20 November 2019.

„Rohinton Mistry.“ British Council, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/rohinton-mistry. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Martin, Sandra. „Urban expert Jane Jacobs dies at 98yrs.“ The Globe&Mail, 25 April 2006, https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03446.html, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Wilson, Paul. „The Real Havana.“ Toro, March 2005, https://paulwilson.ca/pw_articles/pw_toro_cuba.pdf. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Onuferová, Edita, and Terezie Pokorná. „Magorova konference.“ Revolver Revue, 2014, https://revolverrevue.cz/err-792014-magorova-konference, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Tuckerová, Veronika. „Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu a její dějiny.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 16 March 2016, https://bubinekrevolveru.cz/krizovnicka-skola-cisteho-humoru-bez- vtipu-jeji-dejiny, Accessed 20 Noveber 2019.

Wilson, Paul. „Předpoklady Jana Lopatky: vzpomínky a úvahy.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 5 June 2017, https://bubinekrevolveru.cz/jan-lopatka-1940-1993-esej-paula-wilsona-film-zaostreni- pozornosti, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Wilson, Paul. „Za Janem Steklíkem.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 26 November 2017, https://bubinekrevolveru.cz/za-janem-steklikem, Accessed 20 November 2019.

Wilson, Paul. „Několik vzpomínek na Nikolaje Stankoviče.“ Bubínek Revolveru, 7 November 2019, http://www.bubinekrevolveru.cz/nekolik-vzpominek-na-nikolaje-stankovice, Accessed 20 November 2019.

„VEDEM, Terezin 1942-1944.“ My Jewish Learning, https://myjewishlearning.com/article/vedem-terezin-1942-1944/, Accessed 20 November 2019.

139