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.