Flaneurky

If I said I'd spent the week immersed in a tickertape of library order slips and in the dust of the archives, it would be an unforgivable lie. The problem is that the library at the Institute consists of one wall of windows that looks out on a courtyard with a small fountain in the shape of a grave and the autumn sun.

I come out of the metro in the mornings a hundred feet from the Institute, blink, feel the warmth, and head to a cafe.

Maybe it's because by the time I get to the library all I'm reading about is the cafe culture of interwar Vienna (cynical, ironic, nostalgic for a lost Empire) and the cafe culture of interwar Prague (vibrant, hopeful). There's no other remedy but to sit outside a cafe and think about it, sipping a small, strong shot of coffee.

You don't see people running around sipping bucket-sized coffees with straws, that faintly watery and bitter stuff, fueling non-stop flurry. People actually take the time to sit down and look. Maybe read. None of this laptop stuff. None of the striving. Just your coffee, the sun, and the street.

Last week I met with some of the professors at the Institute to talk about their project on censorship - I thought I was only going to meet with one, but five turned up for the hell of it, and we talked for a couple of hours; they made coffee and tea and then we went for lunch. Nora arrived and was talking about her research about the "flaneur" and made the point that there were no female ones (in Czech, "flaneurky" - a lovely word). They were too busy looking after kids, I said, or paying for the guy to go out and flaner.
But they exist now. I can attest to that.

We met Mateuz and his girlfriend Agniezka that evening and went to a couple of great bars under the castle. Agniezka is traveling around Europe doing a PhD on 16th century drawings, jointly between the Sorbonne, the Uffizi and Central European University. She was heading to Florence and then London to look at drawings. Utterly unpretentious, totally involved in what she's doing for the sake of it. We walked through Kampa, an island under Charles Bridge, half lit. We talked about Polish literature over beer and sausage.

On Saturday, I met Martina who, though from Prague, I've only ever met before in the US. And we went to the cafe at the Lucerna kino. My uncle used to manage it in the 70s and, though then dilapidated and ragged, still exuded some dull glamour of its Art Nouveau past. There's a horseshoe bar, but it's Cubist. And a beaten-up grand piano. They've done it up a little, but it's hard to tell. It just is. After dinner, we walked along the river, Prague Castle hovering over Petrin, and, deciding not to cross over Charles Bridge because it was still jam-packed, we went over Cechuv Bridge instead. It's my favorite bridge, Martina said, and I wondered why because I'd never really looked at it, it seems at first glance quite plain. But she started talking about it, showed me the dragon and snakes on one side of the bridge, the Art Deco panelling and then the winged Victories at the head of the bridge with a lamp beneath them. Gulls perched all along their razor sharp wings. We were the only people there.

Most of the rest of the weekend, I spent with my lovely cousin and her daughter. My cousin is possibly the kindest person I know, very funny. At one point we ended up in a giant Tesco supermarket, and we looked at each other and I knew we were both thinking how unimaginable this would have been 25 years ago. The general affluence here is striking (possibly because they're not part of the Euro), there is an actual middle class here, as opposed to the fake "middle class" in America - a euphemism all over the news - which translates as "working class people who've been f@#*ed by the banks". It's revelatory to see a country that three years after the Nazis left, had forty years of ruinous Communism, and seems still much better, for the average person, than America, in terms of a general standard of living.

We dropped my cousin's daughter off at her school, deep in the Old Town, on Sunday night, racing through the cobbled streets, side-swiping tourists, with 70s music, sung in English by Czechs, blaring out.

Okay, okay. I have been doing research. More of which later.

Cafe Imperial

Finally made it to the library at the Institute today. I called up Jesenska's translations from 1920 of Kafka's stories, in different issues of a couple of literary magazines from the time. I didn't realize that the first magazine she published them in was a very pronounced socialist periodical. Also, her first translation - of "The Stoker" (that was also the first chapter of his novel, Amerika) took up the whole magazine, with a note from the editor at the end, asking his reader's forgiveness but saying that the work was so great it deserved it. A fairly brave opinion in 1920 when no Czech-speaking Czechs had heard of Kafka - this was the first translation ever into any language of any of his work.

I was also reading a hilarious biography of Jesenska, "The Myth of Milena" by an Austrian-Czech (I think) ranter. She's actually quite right in trying to debunk all the romantic tosh surrounding Jesenska and her love affair with Kafka, but she just rants and says its wrong, producing none or dubious proof, but it's gripping reading. Like there's someone with a bullhorn to your ear, but there's a certain rhythm to their shouting. There are no chapter breaks, and you get the sense that she just typed it all in one frenzy.

I had lunch at the Cafe Imperial, which has been totally spiffed up. Gone are the stale doughnuts and the frayed velveteen curtains. The Art Deco architecture is back on view, really stunning it has to be said, and the waiters - straight out of Hrabal's I Served the King of England - jette-ed around the tables, courteous white-aproned praetorians. When I asked for a coffee after a wolfed-down risotto, I got a silver tray with my espresso, an elegant tiny glass of water, steamed milk and a tiny poppy seed cake.

It's kind of how I imagined a Viennese coffehouse to be. Except, after the bookseller, I'd been too afraid to go in.

Ma Vlast Redux

Vysehrad is one place that I've thought about a lot since leaving Prague, definitely one of my favorite spots, an old fortress on the river in the south east of the city. Legend has it that Queen Libuse stood on the hill there and fancied building herself a nice gaff in the valley, and, hence, Prague was born. There are still the remnants of both the fourteenth and seventeenth century embattlements, a beautiful park, and a Gothic cathedral, Saint Peter and Paul with a cemetery that has most of the luminaries of Czech art squeezed in.

The views are outstanding, to the South, and to the North towards Prague castle, even from the concrete edifice of the 1970s metro station and what used to be the Communist parliament building (now I think an office complex with huge ads for Panasonic etc splayed across it). We saw a Laterna Magika show there in the late eighties, a retelling of the Odyssey, when it was still the parliament building. Laterna Magika were this innovative theatre company in the 60s, one of the first to use multimedia in theatre in Europe, but by the 80s (and certainly now) the shtick had grown thin. But to a hick like me, seeing Ulysses hanging up over the stage and sticking his spear into a projection of a Cyclops - sticking it into the screen - and having blood come out, was pretty shocking.

Vysehrad was always a haven, because it's a little off the tourist track, and there is this amazing underground complex ("a gothic cellar") of tunnels and rooms with vaulted ceilings and statues - we were there for a launch once and they had torches all along the tunnels. When you came out into the daylight, there was a table with free beer.

The cemetery is lovely, too, partially because the main period of interrment was the fin-de-siecle and the inter-war period, so a lot of the statues are far more interesting than the usual Catholic kitsch (my photos won't upload). It started getting misty when I was there, and at one, while I was mooching round looking for Karel Capek's grave (he invented the word "robot" in his play RUR), the bell-ringers at the cathedral started playing "Ma vlast."

Smetana, needless to say, is buried there too. Consigned to eternity to listen to the tune. Serves you right, Bedrich, that's what art does to you.

Two graves were for sale; "I'm selling a grave" their signs said, with the mobile phone numbers underneath.

Yes, friendly Vienna

So, I got thrown out of a bookshop in Vienna for browsing. As I neared a shelf, twenty seconds at most from crossing the threshold, the bookseller (a young man) walked up to me and snapped "What do you want?" and I started to say that I was looking for ... when he started shouting at me. All I understood was "this is not self-service" and "if you want to browse, look in the window." Taken aback, I said, "Das ist freundlich" and as I backed out of the shop, he screamed at me, now in English "Yes, friendly VienNAH!"

Yeah. My opinion hasn't changed about Vienna.

After pulling out of a grey Vienna on Saturday afternoon, the sun suddenly broke through as we pulled into the first Czech stop; a group of teenage girls got on the train singing in these gorgeous soprano voices and a beaming kind-faced nun came into my compartment. It's like I'm mainlined into the Czech tourist board. Even the nuns don't scare me.

But, okay, okay, I'll admit there are nice people in Vienna. The conference was good, non-stop, all time accounted for. After arriving at about 10pm on Wednesday, I was at the university by 9am and sat through about 10 papers, coffee breaks, lunch - schnitzel, strudel, more strudel in the afternoon. We were then all invited to a reception at Monaldi and Sorti's house in the vineyards in the Vienna hills.

Monaldi and Sorti? I hadn't heard of them either, but they've sold over a million copies of their historical thrillers, in 26 different languages, except their home one, as the Vatican have a hit out on them, for outing a pope as a Protestant ally. That's their story. A very nice couple it has to be said, living in a gorgeous, chandelier bedecked palace. They laid on outstanding Italian food, very smiley Italian waiters, and what seemed like endless wine.

They'd invited the deputy mayor of Vienna too back in February who, when she was handed the invitation (a package with their book) by a courier who ran off, did what you'd do in that situation and phoned the bomb squad. In her office, it's still known as the bomb book.

After another paper-filled day on Friday, we went to a wine tavern, again in the hills and sat outside in a courtyard covered overhead by vines, drinking "G'spritz" or white wine spritzers. "GeSCHpritZZ" a German professor, now based in Dublin, said to me, mouthing the word, it's so Austrian.

Hrabal

So the bags are being packed for Vienna, a place I'm intrigued by because I've only been there once, when I was nineteen, and it's the only place I've been that I took a violent dislike to. And it was only one day! The hope this time is that I'm a little less extreme in my reactions, having said goodbye to teenagerhood a lifetime ago.

The conference is at the University of Vienna which has a very established Translation Studies program and is on the fictional translator (in film and writing). I met Klaus Kaindl who's organizing the conference at another conference earlier in the year in Vancouver; he's a very funny, droll guy and, with a couple of fellow Translation Studies scholars, who are both going to be in Vienna, we spent a day walking around Vancouver, finding ourselves at one point in a junkie's flea market. Literally hundreds of junkies selling beaten-up kettles and old TVs. A pint was taken to recover.

Ben and Brian, the other two there, are also great, super-smart and two of only five or six Translation Studies scholars in the US (along with Rosemary Arrojo, a senior colleague who is lovely, extremely open and generous, who will also be there). It's such a travesty that the subject has so little traction in the States which is plurilingual country but in complete denial about it. It'll be fun to geek out over the latest stuff with a good bunch of people.

So yesterday went really well. The round-table lasted four hours. Four hours!!!!! The other three sitpendisti are very nice and gave interesting presentations. One is from Italy, working on the relationship between samizdat and exile literature; another, Nora, is from Germany, working on the idea of the flaneur in post-1989 literature; and, Mateusz, from Poland but now in France, is working on three Central European writers and the import of their diaries and ephemera on their work. He had a very impressive powerpoint presentation, and at one point showed the diary of one of the writers, who obsessively marked his mood four times a day, when he had sex, what kind of sex etc. Some graphic drawings too. It woke everyone up.

Six or seven professors turned up and grad students; they weren't afraid of asking questions, which I like. Sometimes you go to conferences and there's not much of a reaction, so it's great to develop your ideas through answering them. And all in Czech! A few of them took us for lunch and shot the breeze about various writers etc. By the end though I think all of us were exhausted; I think I spoke more Czech yesterday than I have in the last ten years.

There was a Chinese professor there too, who translates Czech literature into Chinese (via English); it was interesting, as he talked a little about Czech literature in China. Kundera apparently was a real bestseller in the eighties and Hrabal is very popular, but Havel's work is banned on the mainland - the Professor very ably skirted around the issue. It was interesting in the context of a room full of Czechs who'd lived through Communism and write about the effect of it on literature and a guy who couldn't or didn't want to be fully open about what is and isn't acceptable in one of the few Communist regimes left. Interesting, too, what Chinese readers take from Czech writers who wrote under similar conditions.

I met up with Nora and Mateusz that evening and we walked for miles to go and see the Hrabal wall. Part of it was done when we lived in Prague, but it has been extended. Bohumil Hrabal is the much-loved, and wonderful, writer who lived in the area and died feeding pigeons from his hospital window (he was in his 80s, there's some debate as to whether it was suicide); all in all, a very Hrabalian end. The wall is beautiful, part graffiti, part-cartoon, with a giant typewriter (paper coming up over the wall) and a host of cats and books and excerpts from his writing. We went for a couple of pints and both Nora and Mateusz turned out to be very funny; it was good to debrief after a very long day.

I hadn't been able to sleep much the night before, was up till 4am reading The Three Percent Problem, which I really enjoyed - a very telling take in general on the publishing industry and the apocalyptic situation big publishers are in. Three Percent have started publishing contemporary translated literature and I'd forgotten they were behind the best book I've read in the last year, Mathias Enard's Zone - Enard's Croatian-French and it's a 500 page novel written in one sentence about a Balkan war criminal on a train. If that doesn't put you off (!!), it's an amazing book; by the end the accretion of the effect of war on the European psyche from the Greeks onwards explodes your mind.

Right, off to Thomas Bernhard land.

Chicken and mash

My bottle of Gambrinus just got opened.

There are definitely times when if I don't feel suspect, I feel a little bit of a fraud. Yes, I got the email a couple of days before I left that I'd have to take part in a round table to talk about my research here on Tuesday (tomorrow), but it was only in the Institute offices today when everyone was saying hello and telling me how much they were looking forward to my presentation, did I go into panic mode.

Presentation?! The two budgies in the secretary's office chirped and pushed themselves towards the bars of their cages to have a good gawk at the flailing visitor.

They showed me the office for visiting researchers, and I got to know it pretty well in the next few hours, trying to put together something that might sound feasibly intelligent in Czech. I felt like the limp, unwatered plants.

I'd actually been to the offices before, to one of the literary papers who have their office in the building too. I hadn't been able to get hold of some of their old issues with articles on Kundera (this is about 12 years ago, ay!) and I'd contacted them to ask if I could come in and look at their archive. Needless to say, for whatever reason, I was very hungover when I arrived and the editor not only sympathized but sat me down, made me a strong coffee, photocopied all the articles and gave me a blow-by-blow account of literary attitudes towards Kundera in the Czech Republic. It was one of the most productive hours of my PhD research.

The offices are in the Archa complex; Archa is an experimental theatre, at which me and Michael saw a number of plays, including a very experimental King Lear, which involved naked people in a square. Having seen two "normal" productions of the play this summer, it still makes no sense. The theatre is opposite the Cafe Imperial which is famous for its doughnuts - there's some deal that if you eat forty of them, you get them free and there's a pyramid of them perched on the counter. They look a bit stale.

I didn't get a chance to go into the library at the Institute, though I peeked in, and hope to get there tomorrow. By the time I'd panic typed some pages, I realized I hadn't eaten a proper meal in three days and fell into a restaurant next door, which turned out to be a really relaxing place; it's an old stone building with a little garden courtyard, with a lunch menu for Czechs (the main tourist prices were pretty steep). They took pity on me, I think, because I'd missed the lunchtime by a mile, but they gave me the leftovers which was a very welcome plate of chicken and mash. I went home and slept, got up, and started writing again.

After just finishing the Vienna paper on Sunday, it's hard to keep producing stuff that sounds half-way interesting. It gets to the point where you bore yourself. Translation, really? You don't say! Grrr.

I took a walk on Sunday - instead of heading towards the metro, I went left and found that we really are perched on a hill; the road goes immediately down through what is suddenly an old village with little cottages that had seen better days, though interspersed with new, modernist buildings. We're surrounded by villas from the 1920s, done in a functionalist style and some yuppie apartments that riff on that; it's interesting because it seems to be a mish-mash but then you realize some thought has gone into the newer buildings and their relationship with the other ones around. It is odd, though, I looked out of the kitchen balcony yesterday and noticed that one of the old villas, newly painted, has the names of every Shakespeare play painted onto it, in three lines right under the eaves of the roof. In English.

Because I'm not obsessed by translation, I just downloaded a new book of blogs from the University of Rochester's Three Percent Blog, so-called because only 3% of books published each year in English are translations. It's a real eye-opener, but it made me realize that in my talk tomorrow I'm going to be talking about the resistance to translations, to an audience who live in a culture that actually values translations and reads them (one of the pluses of a tiny language). I'm now wondering if it's going to make sense. According to the book, Lithuania has a program by which it translates its own literature into English with the hope of making it more sellable, and the only ones picking it up are the Germans and French. It's shocking how insular we are.

Talking of insular, I was hunched over my desk tapping away, when I looked at the balcony door and there was an incredibly deep orange sunset. I went out and to cap it all, there were fireworks breaking over the valley.

Like

"If you like the history of World War II and the holocaust, this tour is for you."

So says the guide book the taxi driver from the airport gave me. A small notion of the perils of translation, or the imperatives behind it, from, I'm guessing, a translator of the Facebook generation.

On a lighter note, the revamped lift/elevator in the residence has instructions for what to do if it gets stuck: 2/ press emergency button, 3/ talk to receptionist, but the first advised step keeps making me laugh: 1/ Be Quiet.

It's 1.15am and the jet lag has got me - I managed to stay awake till about 10, but then woke up at midnight. I'm sitting out on the terrace, Prague is all lit up and there's a full moon. It's an interesting area, here. The residence is about 2 or 3 blocks from the metro which was being extended up here when we lived in Prague - it's converted what was a 30 or 40 min tram ride to the centre into a 15 min metro ride. The metro, even though it was relatively recently built, is done in full brutalist style, maybe to go with the surrounding high rises from the 70s - think Bladerunner meets Brezhnev. There's a shopping mall in the same style by the metro, with three or four pizzerias / Czech food places, one of which, a one-storey concrete bunker, has its name emblazoned boldly in lights: "LAS VEGAS."

The surprise - apart from the huge rise in prices - is how friendly everyone is; I'd got inured to the brusque rudeness of Czech public life (very different from the real private sweetness and generosity); this new friendliness is a little disconcerting. "Mejte se hesky!" the checkout woman said to me, in her Smurf-themed outfit, "Have a nice day!" I moved to let a woman sit down on the metro and she looked me in the eyes and thanked me effusively. When I got back there was a strapping woman in her mid-fifties skipping - skipping! - along with her grandkid in a pram, singing to the baby with absolute joy.

I did get into the centre and was also pretty surprised; this metro line goes into Muzeum which is a station I avoided at all cost when we lived here, because it was so seedy and sketchy. It has been cleaned up; the only dodginess was a group of English guys - a stag party - leering at me. I've got glasses! I wanted to say. I'm going to a bookshop! The free guide book mentioned above jauntily chirps about liking the holocaust and the nice red light district one might want to visit. Jeez.

The bookshop was the one place I liked on Wenceslas Square. I sneaked in there a lot when we lived here, partly because I loved the quality of Czech books; they're really lovingly made, nice textures and usually a place marker. They'd wrap the book you bought in thick paper, sellotape it up. When I sent off to Prague for Havel's collected works (very aesthetically pleasing box set in field green, each volume with two place markers in them), the person who sent them had taken so much care in wrapping the large box, tightly cosseted, shrink wrapped, bubble-wrap, and exhaustively neat brown packaging, it gave me a lump in my throat. Just the sense of respect for what these were.

Nerdorama.

I was a bit nervous about what my reaction would be coming back - when we left back in 2002, I was ready to leave. Michael was going to start law school and I'd got the Fulbright and I was excited to be heading to New York (for what would turn out to be a great year). But it's a little unexpected; in no way did I think it would be a dramatic return to the homeland, but I worried it would feel awkward. I never feel Czech when I'm here (though I have to admit, quite sentimentally, that when I used to arrive back here on Czech airlines, I'd get teary-eyed when they played Smetana's slushy patriotic "Ma vlast" / "My country" when the plane landed, partly from the absurd nobility of a kind of resigned patriotism for a tiny landlocked country that's incessantly invaded). Surprise though; it feels like I'm not away anywhere - not that I never left, but it just feels natural that I'm here.


I've got absurdly attached to my dorm room. I think it's some atavistic urge to be a student again (even the tiny 2 foot long desk, I'm fond of). The eternal round of class prep, teaching, grading, administration and committees kicks the passion out of you after a while; the thought of having a month of thinking, reading and writing, without having to consider "real life" is such a thrill. Wouldn't it be a great, eccentric world if everyone had enough to get by and pursue their monomania? Real life sucks - who the hell invented it?

I read Elif Batumen's book of essays, The Possessed, on the plane; most of them had been published and it turned out I'd read them - the ones that hadn't been published kind of deserved not to be. But they're about the life of a Stanford comp lit grad student and the eccentric academic life (the trope being that academics are like Dostoyevsky's obsessed characters in the novel of the same name). Needless to say the profs come out of it looking pretty bad, vain, self-obsessed, but Batumen bravely reaffirms her faith in the academic life by the end of the book. Which is a crock because now she's a non-fiction writer etc. Her descriptions of the Russian novels she reads, though, made me want to read and re-read them; she conveys her passion (if not in great depth) about them. To some extent she's right, you need to be an obsessive, but ideally not about your career and any ensuing vainglory. The coy undertone of the book smelt of the latter.


I'm re-reading the three Jesenska biographies, starting with her daughter's memoir, which is a really flawed and idiosyncratic take, but quite wonderful and briskly moving. She beings with finding out about Jesenska's death from a fellow inmate of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She had been in denial about her mother being actually dead and the ex-inmate came to visit her, telling her she had something of her mother's. When they sat down, the woman put a tooth on the table. It was all that was left of Jesenska.