Amazon.com: The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk During the World War, Book One (9781585004287): Jaroslav Hasek, Zenny K. Sadlon, Emmett M. Joyce: Books
Some writers so capture the soul and spirit of a people that they are identified with them forever after. In England, it was Charles Dickens, in the United States, it was Mark Twain. For the Slavic nations, and to some extent for all Central Europeans, it is the Czech writer, Jaroslav Hasek.
Hasek's most important work was centered around a Czech soldier's experiences in World War One. It's actual title is The Fateful Adventures of The Good Soldier Svejk during the World War, but it is known by tens of millions of Central Europeans as simply, The Good Soldier Svejk. This monumental, humorous work is acknowledged as ". . . one of the greatest masterpieces of satirical writing" by no less a standard and exalted reference than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The book's central character is a quintessential, working-class citizen-soldier, often abused by the fates and the forces of the Austrian empire. In both civilian and military life, Svejk lives by his wits. His chief ploy is to appear witless to those in authority. In fact, he is fond of pointing out that he has been certified to be an imbecile by an official military medical commission. Consequently, he reasons, he cannot be held responsible for his sometimes questionable actions because he's a certified nitwit!
Yet, Svejk is not a coward, nor is he indolent. He is drafted back into the army as cannon fodder to die for an Emperor he despises. His method of subverting the Austrian Empire is to carry out his orders to an absurd conclusion. His is an inspired resistance. He holds the foreign authorities, and their Czech fellow travelers, accountable for their ridiculous platitudes and pseudo-patriotic blather.
"'Svejk,' a biting anti-war tale of a survival-bent Everyman, gets an English retelling that captures the charm of the original Czech novel." -- The Chicago Tribune, August 9, 2000
"The resurrection of the Good Soldier Svejk. New translation brings classic comedy to life. . . the diction . . . flows naturally . . . is a 'must read'." -- isyndicate.com, July 19, 2000
"[This] new translation is so joyful and audacious in its headlong hurtle through Hasek's story that it deserves to become the standard English version". -- The Oregonian, December 24, 2000
From the Publisher
If you enjoyed Heller's Catch-22, you'll enjoy the Good Soldier Svejk. But Svejk is a far more subtle and complex and interesting character than Yossarian. Here we have a unique and comic form of rebellion. Here we have a character whose unassuming behavior repeatedly shows up the stupidity of the people and the system that have labeled him as stupid. Here we have an ordinary man-of-the-street repeatedly tripping up officers and government officials, making a mockery of them, while seeming to maintain a childlike, almost holy innocence. He's a confidence man posing as a holy fool. His is the wisdom of the streets, the wisdom of the downtrodden playing on the naivete of those in authority.
Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 - January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist and satirist who became well-known mainly for his voluminous novel The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk, translated by now into sixty languages. He had also wrritten some 1,500 other stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker.
Hašek was born in Praha (Prague), Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic), the son of middle-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children -- another son Bohuslav, three years Jaroslav's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria -- to move often, more than ten times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank officer, but later preferred the liberated profession of a writer.
Hašek made fun of everyone and everything, including himself. He cared nothing for style or schools of literature -- he considered his work a job, not art -- and wrote spontaneously. He made jokes not only on paper, but also in real life, angering many who considered him lazy, irresponsible, a vagabond, a drunkard, etc.
In 1910 he married Jarmila Mayerová, herself an author. In 1911, he wrote his first stories about Švejk.
He was a keen observer of human affairs using his material as a newspaperman, entertainer, war correspondent, political outreach and propaganda writer (for ultimately irreconcilable parties to the WWI and Russian Civil War), among other things, and not an anarchist first and foremost. As for his military associations and exploits, during WWI Hašek was first a combatant of the Austro-Hungarian army. After crossing over to the other side on the Russian front (as did tens of thousands of Czechs), he spent seven months in the POW camp in Totskoye where he contracted typhus. Sent back to Kiev, he was a reporter for the Čechoslovan magazine as a member of the Czecho-Slovak Legions there and participated in the famous battle at Zborov.
After the collapse of the Russian Provisional Government's summer offensive in Ukraine, disagreeing with the Legions leadership's decision to transport the troops to France by going to Vladivostok in the east, he joined the retreating Russian Corps of Colonel Mikhail Artemyevich Muravyov who wanted to continue the war and push west with the help of the Czecho-Slovak Legions after coming to support them at Zborov. Muravyov ultimately sided with the Social Revolutionaries and Anarchists who also opposed Lenin's Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. When he was named the commander of the eastern front, his Corps were expected to fight the Czecho-Slovak Legions in the Volga region.
In early July of 1918, while Hašek was his courier communicating with the Czecho-Slovak Legions in Bugulma, Muravyov left the front open to join the Left SRs and Anarchists in the ill-fated attempt to tople the Bolsheviks in Moscow. When Muravyov returned to Simbirsk in the Free Volga Soviet Republic -- that was controled by the SRs and Anarchists -- as the Supreme Commander of its Army, he was shot resisting arrest in a setup by the Bolsheviks. The Civil War began in earnest.
Two weeks later the Czecho-Slovak Legions issued an arrest warrant for Jaroslav Hašek. The following events would make for a grand Hollywood "eastern" movie. On August 6, 1918 the Legions captured the Tzar's treasure in the battle for Kazan, while Trotsky's armored train rushed to the region from Moscow. The Legions took the treasure on ships to Samara. In mid-August Hašek was ordered by Trotsky's reconnaissance troops leader, Larisa Reisner, to keep an eye on the treasure and report via the Bolshevik underground.
With the SRs and Anarchist defeated at the hands of the Bolsheviks, eradicating the vanquished with whom he's been working on one hand, and the Legions seeking his arrest and aiming for Vladivostok instead of going west on the other hand, Hašek didn't have much choice. He was given another chance by the Bolsheviks and made the best of it. Due to his literacy and knowledge of languages, he was quickly put to work cranking out propaganda for the Fifth Army of the Red Army among the Bashkir, Mordvin, Chinese, Volga Germans and other ethnic groups. He even became a Deputy Military Commander of the town of Bugulma and the Chief of the 5th Army's International Section of its Political Department. His multilingual propaganda work for the Communists during the Russian Civil War lasted almost three years. In December 1920 he returned to Prague to be shunned by his former friends and associates. He started working on his masterpiece, which is a result of unusually rich, varied and uncommon life experiences. [The last five paragraphs have been gleaned from the novel Osudy humoristy Jaroslava Haška v říši carů a komisařů i doma v Čechách (The Fateful Adventures of Jaroslav Hasek in the Empire of the Czars and Commissars And Even at Home in the Czechlands) by Pavel Gan who based it on a number of his contextual studies about Jaroslav Hašek.]
In August of 1921 Hašek arrived in Lipnice nad Sázavou where he wrote Books Two, Three, and the unfinished Book Four. Toward the end he was dangerously overweight. Before the New Year's eve of 1922 he became gravely ill and. In the end he no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom at Invald's pub. On January 3rd, 1923, he died in the cottage he bought shortly before that across the street from the pub where he worked on his masterpiece. He is buried around the corner, at the Lipnice Old Cemetery.
This review is from: The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk During the World War, Book One (Paperback)
This is the third translation of Svejk in English of which I'm aware. The first done in the 40's is highly bowdlerized and only of the first half. The second, by Sir Cecil Parrott in the early 1970's covered the whole work and was bolder. The present volume by Sadlon and Joyce seems to be the most accurate and literal translation (although admittedly I don't know a half dozen words of Czech) in view of the background and qualifications of those individuals. It does constitute only the first volume of four, although the later books are promised. I certainly found it worthwhile and fully intend to purchase the later volumes as they come out. One minor critique I have is that the prose reads somewhat more harshly and has an angrier and more proletarian diction to it. Knowing what I do of Jaroslav Hasek, I am sure that this is the result of painstaking efforts at accuracy by the translators. Unfortunately, this puts a rougher face on the text and, in my view, detracts from the uproarious humor that I found in the Parrott translation. I emphasize here that the Sadlon version is an absolute necessity and accept that the distinctions in the translations flow from greater care by him as opposed to the prior. On the other hand, Cecil Parrott's subtlety and innuendo often strike me as funnier than Jaroslav Hasek's brasher "in your face" writing style on its own. The comparison might be likened to one between Jerry Seinfeld and Sam Kinnison: each one is wonderful in his own right, but much different from the other.
Again this is intended more as an observation than a criticism, and I would urge any reader to buy both versions. Svejk is far too great a text to view through one lense only. In either version, it is laugh out loud funny in its descriptions of politics, bureaucracy, the military and the strong ethnic tensions among the Central Europeans of the first world war era. The best aspect of all is in Hasek's characters, and the book could be translated by Janet Reno and still be clever enough to keep you awake all night laughing.
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This review is from: The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk During the World War, Book One (Paperback)
I own this book and the Czech original. Before I got this particular translation, I used to feel sorry that my American son would never be able to get a glimpse into the mentality of a nation living at the bottom of the food chain, powerless but never defeated. This book captures perfectly the spirit of Svejk,his seemingly pointless rambbling, apparent half-wit, and his truly folk origin. I found only one(!) place were the translation did not convey a possible double meaning of the original, which is absolutely remarkable. If the reader does not "get" the book, it is not because of the translation. In fact, amongst my fellow Czechs and Slovaks, there are only two groups of people when it comes to Hasek's Svejk: those who love it and those who despise it. So the fact that there are the two extremal types of reviews of this particular translation constitutes the ultimate testimony of the translator's success.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 starsI must say that I am ecstatic about this new translation..., January 13, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk During the World War, Book One (Paperback)
I was entertained in the same degree (and in the same spots) as by the Czech original. In addition, this new translation also preserves the rhythm of the sentences, their overall sense and spirit.
That is all which the old translation lacks in a catastrophic measure. The old translation is awkward to a, as we say in Czech, "break-neck" degree, unreadable, and for the common reader hard to understand. I think that the old translation should have never appeared in the book marketplace - alas, it happened.
As a native Czech I can tell you that the author of the previous translation (perhaps due to his intellectualism) did not get what Hašek's novel is about at all. His language is the language of high society evening parties - while Hašek's Švejk speaks with the tongue of public houses in the fourth [i.e., grade D, the cheapest] price category.
I am convinced that thanks to this new translation the resurrection and the rediscovery of this never-to-die book for and by millions and millions of readers in Anglophone countries is taking place indeed.
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