#czechlit

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“Remember when your Kindle arrived, Christian? The way it came so immaculately wrapped in cellophane? The purity of the lines, the feel of the paper, the form-fitting box? Flawless. That comes from here, from China. An unpackaged product is a miracle, a thing in a state of pre-being, as yet untouched by existence. It’s a shame Heidegger didn’t live long enough to unbox a Kindle.”

—from the novel Logoz; or, Robert Holm, Danish Marketer (Logoz aneb Robert Holm, marketér dánský, 2019), by David Zábranský, translation in progress (excerpt) for Czech Literary Center

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MICHEL Who are those people, who walk around like that, singing?

CLERK Oh, that’s just what they do! They’re the ones in gray clothes! They came here just like you. Then they liked it so much . . . they didn’t want to go back! Instead of waking up from their dream, they stayed here!

MICHEL So they just dream all the time? Are you sure they’re not mad?

CLERK Hush! Don’t you ever use that word here! It’s true, out there they’re locked up in cells. But what do they care, as long as in reality they’re here.

MICHEL And if I were to stay here, would I be like them?

CLERK If you stay after you wake up, you’ll be one of them! That’s why I strongly suggest that you leave. When the watchman comes to close up, you had better be gone or else you’ll have to stay here forever! (Buries himself in his papers.)

MICHEL Forever? Forever? I’ll leave in time, I promise! But I’d like to stay and remember her right up until the last minute! I’m afraid that as soon as I leave, I’m going to forget the whole thing! And I don’t want to! That door there means the end of it all! The end! Dull, gray morning! Dull, gray life! And who knows? Who knows if I will ever walk through that doorway again? Who knows? (Turns around to find the CLERK no longer at his desk.) Sir? Sir! Gone! He was still here just a moment ago! (Suddenly the light goes out. MICHEL gropes his way in the dark.) Hello? Hello? Is there anybody there? Hello? Anyone!

—from the libretto of Juliette, or The Key to Dreams, an opera by Bohuslav Martinů, translation in progress

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For breakfast I had a smoke and a cup of bitter coffee. But the grumbling in my stomach ordered me to consume my daily doughnut intake. So now I’m eating a doughnut.

You are what you eat. I am flour and sugar and fat with something sticky inside.

—from the novel Dust Catchers (Lapači prachu, 2017), by Lucie Faulerová, translation in progress (excerpt only) for Apofenie 

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I don’t know exactly why, and by now you know why I don’t know is because I’m so intuitive, but I wouldn’t do a family troubles episode for my TV mystery series, and I’d even go so far as to say that any conscientious woman operating under the impression that she and I belonged to the same tribe and therefore I had personally demeaned her with my silly blather about family life, which I don’t know shit about, since, and this is what she would say, I’m a tarty cunt who thinks being a high-class indoor whore instead of a curbside tramp somehow makes her more interesting or less deserving of public disgrace, although either way, that’s just how I earn my living, yes, from the two-timing of so many heads of families you could count them on the fingers of both hands and still not even come close, so if some conscientious woman were to get an episode on family life, as I’ve heard it described by the mumsyfuckers, into the series over my objections, because she thinks she could do more justice to the material, since for a woman to be portrayed as sharing the guilt for her husband’s two-timing would be an outrageous injustice as she sees it, if this woman were to succeed in getting the episode into the series, and it would be a fierce battle, since I would really be strongly opposed, though I doubt any feline maneuvers, such as face scratching with fingernails or spreading slanderous rumors, would come into play, this conscientious woman, were she to succeed in spite of everything in having the episode run on the series and getting the material shot, although I don’t think that would happen, since I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but the director, the DP, the sound engineer, and the technical director, in short, everyone except the second assistant camera, who is the one who holds the clapper, would probably be men, since they make up the majority in the more important professions, but if, in spite of everything, she managed to get the material shot, in that case I would resort to shady feminine practices without any qualms whatsoever, and like the flexible comic-book heroine and crimefighter the Catwoman I would scale up the drainpipe into the film studio building, and, using a key borrowed from someone on the crew, you ask what they received in return and whether it was my body, and maybe, it might be, yes, using the key I would unlock the editing room and find all the above-mentioned material that had been shot and was now waiting to be developed, and cut it up with a big pair of scissors, and as the pièce de résistance, I would slide back down the drainpipe, tiptoe unseen past the entrance gate, and ride the late-night connections back to my fuckshop as if nothing had happened. I would leave no proof whatsoever, and naturally, as the creator of the series, I would act utterly stunned and crestfallen on hearing the news of the break-in.

—from the novel Three Plastic Rooms, by Petra Hůlová, a translation in progress for Jantar

Image: From the poster series CLIMB by Nicholas Hyde

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           Red flags and banners hung here and there along their street, as they did on every other. LENIN LIVES, NOW MORE THAN EVER, AND HE WILL LIVE ON, AS OUR CONSCIENCE, OUR STRENGTH, AND OUR WEAPON! declared a poster next to the building’s front door. About a week after Hooks moved in, someone drew swastikas in Lenin’s eyes and horns on top of his head. The first time he saw the devilized portrait, Hooks got worried. It might be for him. Since he’d just moved in. But the very next day someone tore it down. Leaving only the rusty thumbtacks. Before long, they were pinning something else in place. Whatever it was, he barely noticed. Nowhere else had he felt so immune to that tired propaganda. And nowhere else had he ever seen children battered so viciously. The neighbors’ little girl got a beating almost like clockwork. Sometimes at night he could hear her cries.

           What’m I sposta do? he thought, tossing in bed. I gotta get up at four a.m. I oughta say somethin to Machata . . . it’s not like I can go to the authorities . . . if I turn em in, what’ll they say, I’ll lose the flat . . . they’ll say I’m a pervert, they’ll say . . . Hooks’s teeth chattered. In the dark. The girl stopped screaming. He fell asleep.

           Business was brisk, both in and around the building. Some days the courtyard would be stacked with crates, five or six burly guys lounging around on top of them. Their flashy, pseudo-suave clothing made them stand out in this neighborhood. But their drink-worn faces, muscular arms, and paunches bulging out of their white polyester shirts attested to their membership in the local underworld. They addressed the cops on the street by name. The women on the balcony, spent, shapeless hags who spent their lives in factories and lines, cheerfully hollered down at them, inviting them up for a beer.

           I’m surrounded, Hooks thought. What do those old bags want with them . . . oh, those’re their moms, take it easy, he said to himself.

           In the hallway he tried to be polite, and always said hello first. His neighbors would look back at him, surprised and suspicious.

           Any one of these characters could kick in my door an stomp on my face, just for laughs. Maybe they think I’m an agent, or a spy from the competition, or maybe just nuts . . .

           One day he noticed spatters of blood on the staircase. He walked around them but rubbed against the wall. The blood was there too. One day he opened the front door, guy came running out with a knife in his hand. Slammed into Hooks, knocked the paper bag out of his hand, it smashed on the steps, the bottles broke. Sometimes screams woke him at night, the neighbors, fighting or partying or both. He didn’t get much sleep. Pills scared him, but he soon found he could get to sleep after a couple beers. In the time until he nodded off, the alcohol altered his senses, the noise from the courtyard, the slamming doors and curses, sounded like they came from another world, a world away.

           For food he had a supply of cheap army rations. Purchased downstairs, of course. Sometimes he felt sick to his stomach. His job at the furnace drained him. One day a rat in the cellar bit him on the boot, he busted its spine with a shovel and smashed in its head. The next day the carcass was gone. Had the other guys cleaned it up, or was it just a hallucination? Maybe it was time to get back to the books. Is this a trap? Maybe I oughta find myself some other job, a new place to live. But how? Where?

           Whenever Hooks ran into someone he knew, they ended up over beer. Where you been holed up? his buddies would ask. Where you at? Cops hasslin you?

           A lot of people got locked up in those days. Including some he knew. Usually they didn’t keep them for long. The powers-that-be were losing confidence; brutality was on the rise. At the factory they said one of the managers got caught at a demonstration, they drove him to the woods outside of Prague and beat his ass. Hooks could believe it. Stork, a guy he’d met at the pub, got kicked in the head by the cops. They’d killed Mitlin’s cousin. Soldiers shot him at the border, dragged him out of no-man’s-land and left him to bleed to death in the middle of the Czech woods. There were whispers the trials were starting up again.

—from the novel Angel Station, by Jáchym Topol, a translation in progress

Image: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live forever!” (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

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     In the community of the Faithful to the Living Advent, all of the women were named Yeria. Luria was the men’s name. Apart from that, the Lord made no distinctions in his flock. For now, they were still living in darkness, the world was in Satan’s power. Only occasionally were they able, by means of some modest gesture, to remind other people, the animal eaters, base and perverted creatures who married for money and orgasms, that the time was drawing near.

—from Angel Station, by Jáchym Topol, a translation in progress

Image: Portrait of the devil from the Codex Gigas, or Devil’s Bible, thought to have been created in the early 12th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, Bohemia 

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I step up to the mirror, see my pale face, beads of sweat on my forehead. Who taught us this? Who? I hold out a trembling fist to punch myself in the stomach, hit myself as hard as I can wherever I can reach. But someone grabs my arm. Not in the face, the cameraman says, and someone else repowders my nose, wipes off my forehead. Fifteen seconds. They give me the signal, nod, it’s time. Let’s go! I walk, I breathe, eyes all around, a thunder of applause, big bang, the stage lights, most people have no idea how much you can survive, how much you can get used to, when you’ve got no choice, my brain is a lotus flower, I’m approaching total enlightenment, I’m close, researchers at every university in the world recently discovered that the iron in our blood comes from extinct stars, from explosions of supernovas eons ago, and they are absolutely right, friends, there is a direct link between us and the stars, the whole universe runs through my veins, I step into the blinding glare, step into the light. Here I come. Showtime.

—from the story “Showtime,” in Map of Anna (Odeon, 2014), by Marek Šindelka, a translation in progress for Das Magazin

Image: On Stage in Brazil

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By the time I got to the camp, it was already dark. I went straight from the airport. It was a cool October night, drizzly with a wind blowing in from the west. It was stronger toward the southern tip of the island, swirling between the old tenements with their strings of tiny lighted windows.      I had a backpack, a warm coat, and a sleeping bag.      I breathed in the damp smell of underground and fog, I could always tell Manhattan by that smell.      I stopped at the outer edge of the encampment, on the border where it ended and the police zone began: service vehicles with flashing lights, vans, extension ladders. Dozens of raincoated cops.      I walked down the stairs to the camp, set in the ground below street level. At first all I could see were dark sheets of plastic, billowing and snapping in the wind like sails.      After a moment or two, I was able to make out people in the dimly lighted space. They stood squeezed in at the east end, where the stairs formed a kind of amphitheater. Calmly and quietly, letting the water run over them. They had no umbrellas. A girl was explaining the rules for voting. Her voice kept getting lost in the gusts of wind, but the ones closest to her repeated her words loudly after each sentence, so even the people all the way in the back could hear.      I walked down the main path that ran from east to west through the improvised shelters. I passed the kitchen where homeless people lined up for food, an information table and a station distributing warm clothes, a tent with a sign up in front of it proudly proclaiming LIBRARY. When I got to the lower end of the square I was alone. The arms of cranes rose up across the street and the spotlighted torsos of buildings under construction for a new shopping center. I found the tree, encircled by a ring of granite benches.      I picked up two sheets of cardboard, which was laying around everywhere. I put my backpack down on one and sat down on the other. The rain was letting up. I spotted a few stars in the cracks between the scudding clouds.      I pulled out my phone and texted: “I’m here. Waiting at tree. Jan”      A moment later an answer beeped back: “Five min. Marius”

—from The Attempt, by Magdaléna Platzová, a translation in progress for Bellevue Literary Press

Image: Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder, “Mapping Liberty Plaza: How Occupy Wall Street spatially transformed Zuccotti Park”