Gavrilo Princip: Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? World War I - Franz Josef, Good Soldier Svejk

<body> <p><font face="Times New">By Zak Mucha "If anyone asks me to pick three literary works of this century which in my opinion will become part of world literature," Bertolt Brecht once said, "then I would have to say one of them is [Jaroslav] Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk." Hasek's book, written shortly after World War I, may be the first satirical absurdist antiwar novel. It's considered a classic in central European countries and has been translated into 53 languages, including Vietnamese.</p> <p>Yet the book is nearly unknown in America. Mike Joyce and Zenny Sadlon think that's because none of the book's virtues, beyond its satire, are evident in the only English translation currently available. That translation was done by Cecil Parrott, a British ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. "Have you ever seen a diplomat, British or American, who actually spoke the language?" asks Joyce. Sadlon, a professional translator and interpreter whose native language is Czech, suspects that Parrott had a secretary or someone with a passing knowledge of both languages translate the original into English before he polished it up. "There were just too many mistakes," he says disgustedly, "and too many liberties taken."</p> <p>Joyce and Sadlon became friends while working at the Voice of America bureau on South Dearborn. Joyce, who was born and raised in Cicero, had owned and tended a tavern for years before becoming a reporter. Sadlon who'd come to Chicago in the early 70s, became a journalist when he joined the navy. Later he worked a series of odd jobs and studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago before becoming a Czech correspondent for VOA.</p> <p>Sadlon had known since he was a student in Czechoslovakia that The Good Soldier Svejk was a classic, but he reread it in English and doubted his memory of it. He thought Parrott's translation was a different book and wanted a second opinion. He knew Joyce was a voracious reader. "It took me three years until I gave Mike the book," he says. "I was afraid to give it to him because-see, my wife is an insomniac, and when I started reading Svejk to her several different times, guaranteed, within 20 minutes she'd be dead to the world. This is a testimony to how bad the book is. Finally I said, 'Mike, just go through it and let me know what you think.'"</p> <p>"I got through the dreck and saw there were some sparks in there," says Joyce. "Parrott read like a hackneyed 19th-century British army novel."</p> </font> <p><font face="Times New">Sadlon showed Joyce some specific places where the translation was way off. Finally Joyce told him, "Well, I don't want to run your life, but you've got to retranslate this thing."</p> <p>"I needed that like I needed a hole in the head," says Sadlon. But the idea had been brewing in his head for years, and he passionately loved the book. "OK, I'll do it," he told Joyce. "But you have to help. If I'm going to do it, you're going to do it with me."</p> <p> </p> <p>Jaroslav Hasek was born in 1883 in Prague and was writing satirical articles for Czech newspapers by the time he was 17. He also published poetry and numerous short stories. The writing job that paid him the best was at Animal World magazine, where he worked quietly at his desk writing articles until irate letters started coming in from zoology professors. He was fired when his employers learned that rather than doing any research, he'd written descriptions of hybrid monkey dogs and other fantastical creatures<a name="BM_1_"></a> .</p> <p>Hasek had a taste for practical jokes. In 1911 he and a couple of his drinking partners ran for parliament calling themselves the Party of Modest Progress Within the Limits of the Law. Sadlon and Joyce see this as evidence that Hasek was using humor to get at a deeper truth. "He must have been a very insightful man, very lonely," says Sadlon. "He really was trying to decipher life."</p> <p>Hasek's life changed radically when he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He spent time in military hospitals and garrison prisons, but he also won a silver star for bravery during battle. Most photos of Hasek show him with a slight smirk, puffy eyes, and a wide, beer-bloated face. There are pictures of him attending literary salons, working on ice-breaking crews, swimming in a woman's bathing suit. There are also police mug shots. Only in his military pictures does he appear thin, somber, and sober.</p> <p>Like many Czech soldiers, Hasek let himself be captured by the Russians, then joined other POWs fighting in a special unit against the Germans. Some of them broke away and formed the Czech Legions to fight for Czech independence, though when the Russian Revolution started, Hasek, whose point of view had shifted far to the left, wanted to join the Bolsheviks. Leaders of the Czech Legions, who disliked the Bolsheviks, tried him and were ready to hang him for treason, but he escaped to Russia.</p> <p>Eventually Hasek resurfaced as a deputy commissar in Siberia, where he wrote political tracts. "I grew up in a communist country," says Sadlon. "Once you get into the political ideology department of the Red Army, that's big." He also married a Siberian woman, though he didn't bother divorcing his first wife, whom he'd left in Prague. He didn't have a good track record as a husband. "He'd say, 'I'm going across the street with a pitcher to get some beer for after dinner,'" says Sadlon. "And he'd be gone for three weeks."</p> <p>In 1920 the Communist Party ordered Hasek to return to the new state of Czechoslovakia, and he reluctantly went. "It was assumed he would be facing charges for treason and bigamy," says Sadlon. "And he goes back anyhow." In Prague people knew he had a new wife and had fought for three different armies during the same war. "People on the street, former friends, wouldn't even spit on him," says Sadlon. "He was persona non grata."</p> <p>Unable to find work, Hasek began writing The Good Soldier Svejk, sitting in taverns, paying for his drinks by letting people read chapters from the book. Sadlon remembers that he wasn't particularly impressed when he read Hasek's earlier writings-the short fiction and magazine work. "But I realized what happened was, doing this for years, he learned his craft. When he started writing this book, he didn't have to worry. He wasn't a rabble-rouser. This guy was just sick and tired of all the bullshit. He was looking for the truth."</p> </font> <p><font face="Times New">At the beginning of the novel Svejk, having been discharged from military service after a military medical commission pronounces him an imbecile, is making his living by selling mongrel dogs as purebreds after forging pedigrees for them. He and a bartender are arrested in a tavern for treason for talking about the recent assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Svejk is sent to jail, and when the police too decide that he's an imbecile, he's transferred to a madhouse. He manages to persuade the doctors that he enjoys being in the asylum, and they release him. He's drafted again and eventually becomes assistant to a field chaplain, a raging drunk who curses throughout his sermons and chases women.</p> <p>The first edition, which was sold as three separate books, was financed by Hasek's few remaining friends and published in 1921. Hasek himself peddled copies to shopkeepers, who displayed the books in their windows. He'd planned to complete Svejk's story in six installments, but he died shortly after beginning the fourth one. "He basically drank himself to death at 40," says Joyce. For years before he died Hasek reportedly drank an average of 35 steins of beer a day. In the last days of his life he was confined to bed, unable to walk, complaining about the doctor's order to stay sober. Shortly before he died he said, "Svejk is suffering."</p> <p>Hasek hoped his novel would be seen as more than satire. In an afterword he wrote, "I do not know whether I will manage, through this book, to achieve what I wanted. Just the fact that I heard one man cussing at another by saying: 'You're as stupid as Svejk,' does not very much attest to my success. However, should the word Svejk become a new epithet in the flowery wreath of defamation, I will have to be content with this as my contribution to the enrichment of the Czech language."</p> <p>"Svejk" did become a part of the everyday language of central Europe-"svejking," "svejkism," and the verb "to svejk" are all still used. Czechs even speak of themselves as a nation of Svejks. When Gustav Husak assumed the presidency after the 1968 Prague Spring he told people in one speech to "Stop svejking!"</p> <p>"The masses love the gags," says Sadlon. "They used to have competitions in Czechoslovakia when I was growing up. In the town where Hasek retired to write the rest of the book, people would gather in summertime for a festival. They'd get onstage and recite the book by heart. The guy who got the farthest without making a mistake would win. These were nothing but beer and Svejk orgies."</p> <p>Curiously, communist officials held up The Good Soldier Svejk as a model work of literature. Joyce says, "The communists, to their eternal regret, I think, elevated him to the pantheon of their communist writers because of his military record." In 1968 the publishing arm of the Czech army even printed its own edition. Joyce and Sadlon have a hard time understanding how the apparatchiks could have missed seeing that the book is a condemnation of bureaucracy, totalitarianism, religion, and the general social order.</p> </font> <p><font face="Times New">Some Czechs still debate whether Svejk was a despicable imbecile. Joyce and Sadlon see him as an archetype, a subversive everyman shuffling and whistling his way through an upended world. They see his continually saying "Yes, sir" to his superiors as his way of protesting the system in which he's trapped-a way of saying "Yes, sir. I will be as absurd as you have made the world around me."</p> <p>In January 1997 Sadlon and Joyce began working on their translation. At night and on weekends Sadlon translated the original Czech, and each morning he went to the Voice of America office with a stack of pages for Joyce to take home to edit. Sadlon says any doubts he'd had about Hasek's talent were eliminated when he began translating Hasek's introduction. "The book is excellent," he says. "Having to take the book apart sentence by sentence, word by word, led me to believe the guy was ahead of his time."</p> <p>Joyce and Sadlon argued about word choices, about slang, about which English idiom was the closest equivalent. When Sadlon would come to a difficult passage he would go back and look at Parrott's version. He says he invariably found Parrott sloppier and more pompous than he'd realized. One passage in Parrott's version reads: "The whole establishment of the office of the judge advocate was magnificent. Every state on the brink of total political, economic and moral collapse has an establishment like this. The aura of past power and glory clings to its courts, police, gendarmerie and venal pack of informers." Joyce and Sadlon's version reads: "The apparatus of the military courts was grandiose. Such magnificent machinery is usually present and at the disposal of the government of any country approaching a comprehensive political, economic and moral crash. The limelight of bygone might and glory bolsters these courts, as well as the local police, the state security office, and all whoring informer scum."</p> <p>Another Parrot paragraph reads: "The spirit of alien authority pervaded the building of the police headquarters-an authority which was ascertaining how enthusiastic the population were for the war. With the exception of a few people who were ready to admit that they were sons of a nation which had to bleed for interests completely alien to it, police headquarters presented the finest collection of bureaucratical beasts of prey, to whom gaols and gallows were the only means of defending the existence of the twisted clauses of the law." Sadlon and Joyce's version reads: "The spirit of foreign authority wafted through the police headquarters. The authorities were charged with finding out to what extent the subject population was enthusiastic for war. There were several exceptions. But, most people didn't deny that they were the sons of a nation that was doomed to bleed itself empty for interests totally alien to them. Police headquarters was also home to the most beautiful gathering of bureaucratic birds of prey. As a means of defending the existence of their convoluted articles of law, they had an affection for the use of hard-labor prisons and the gallows."</p> <p>Joyce and Sadlon say that the differences might seem minor taken individually, but over 800 pages they shift the book's perspective. "It's not just a word-by-word mistake," says Joyce. "This guy got everything wrong. There was an attitude of 'look at these funny people.' I really think it was translated from the point of view of an upper-class Englishman-and Hasek was what we'd call a lounge rat, a pub crawler. Hasek was trying to expose probably exactly what Parrott represented."</p> <p>After three months Sadlon and Joyce had a draft of the first book, and they spent a couple more months tightening up the language. Joyce says, "Some people have said to us, when you have a classic of this stature you can't mess with it too much." But they believe they've turned out something that's close to its original form for English readers. Sadlon, who's both proud of his work and tired of doing it, says, "I cannot imagine anyone coming after us and doing it again." At least they want a chance to let readers decide who knew Svejk better.</p> <p>When Sadlon and Joyce began taking their book to publishers, they found that very few people had ever heard of the original. And those who had often responded, "Well, there already is a pretty good translation." Sadlon groans when he repeats this comment. One publishing house that specializes in Czech literary fiction responded to a letter from Sadlon and Joyce that said readers were being denied a classic because of Parrott's poor translation: "If you're going to put down translators, at least you should have the decency to name the translators and to not use words such as 'deny' which implies gross negligence....Such disrespect does not lead a publisher to want to take your own translation seriously."</p> <p>Trying to find a publisher who'll read two books just to compare them hasn't been easy. One editor who'd never heard of The Good Soldier Svejk suggested Sadlon and Joyce find an agent. "We don't need an agent," Sadlon responded. "Look at the European sales." A publisher asked, "Can you substantiate these numbers?" Still irritated by that response, Sadlon says, "What does he want? Receipts from bookstores? I should go to all the bookstores in Japan asking for copies of receipts for the past 50 years?"</p> <p>Sadlon and Joyce still don't have a publisher. But they've divided their book into three parts just as Hasek did, and they've put the first three chapters of the first book on their Web site (<u>www.zenny.com</u>), where they can be downloaded for free. The rest of the 200-page first book can be downloaded for $9.95. They're still working on the second and third books, and hope to have them available sometime next year.</p> </font> <center> <a name="INTRODUCTION_TO_THE_NEW_ENGLISH_EDITION"><b><font face="Dutch 801 Roman">INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW ENGLISH EDITION</font></b></a> </center> <font face="Dutch 801 Roman"><b> <p align="left">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 Hašek.</p> <p align="left">Hašek’s most important work was centered around a Czech soldier’s experiences in World War One. It’s actual title is <i>The Fateful Adventures of The Good Soldier Švejk during the World War</i>, but it is known by tens of millions of Central Europeans as simply, <i>The Good Soldier Švejk.</i> 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 <i>Encyclopedia Britannica</i>.</p> <p align="left">This new translation and rendition of <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i> is our attempt to make this Central European masterwork accessible to the modern reader of English. There have been two other attempts and both are, in our opinion, failures in both practice and spirit. The only attempt at a complete English translation has often been criticized, by those who have read the novel in another language, as a clumsy rendition that left <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i> reading like a hackneyed novel about the British army in the 19th century. We consider this both an injustice to Jaroslav Hašek and a tragedy for those denied the insight and enjoyment of a hilarious and rollicking modern classic.</p> <p align="left">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, Švejk 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!</p> <p align="left">Yet, Švejk 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.</p> <p align="left"><i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i> is as entertaining as any book of the 20th century. And, though it is set in World War One and written shortly thereafter, most readers will find it thoroughly modern. There is good reason for that. Jaroslav Hašek was more than <i>avant garde</i>. He was an iconoclastic revolutionary, both in his life and as an artist. The First World War liberated the Czech Lands and Jaroslav Hašek simultaneously. For the first time, he was free to write and create without censorship or fear of imperial reprisal.</p> <p align="left">Like many great artists, Jaroslav Hašek was a happy confluence of genius, talent, time and place. His talent and genius are widely acknowledged by scholars worldwide. They point to his ground-breaking contribution in transforming and modernizing the novel and making it relevant for our time. And, in the non-English-speaking world, his work has long been loved by legions of regular folks. At any rate, you will soon be able to judge his talent and genius for yourself.</p> <p align="left">One of his biographers, Emmanuel Frynta, writes:</p> <p align="left"><i>"He was one of that generation which fully fought with the problems of the modern world. He was one of the artists at the start of the century who so splendidly cast light on the question of a live, valid, meaningful art worthy of the time. He was a curious, not easily understood person, too mobile and opaque for portrayal. As a creator, (he was) seemingly careless, natural, (and) spontaneous, ... but, in reality (he was) sharply discerning and refined in his specific type of non-literariness ... (he) was working farsightedly in the field of language and style, with something that was to become the shape of (the) speech of the century."</p> </i> <p align="left">And just what is it we have been denied? A host of literary critics acknowledge that Jaroslav Hašek was one of the earliest writers of what we have come to know as modern literature. He experimented with verbal collage, Dadaism and the surreal. Hašek was writing modern fiction before exalted post-World-War-One writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, to name just a few. A literary analyst has pointed out that Hašek is one of the few writers <i>of all time </i>to combine political with misanthropic satire. In fact, <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i>, he says, is the only example of this genre in the 20th century.</p> <p align="left">It seems unconscionable that Hašek’s work has been inaccessible to English readers for so long. What if Victor Hugo or Leo Tolstoy had been kept from us? It’s hard to imagine literature without them.</p> <p align="left">Let’s reverse the situation. What if you suddenly became aware that, because of some problem with translation or some other oversight, Mark Twain’s work had been virtually hidden from Europeans for 75 years? Most Americans would consider that a lamentable travesty. Well, that is what has happened to the Czech people in the case of Jaroslav Hašek. He and his work are practically non-existent in the English-reading world, an influential audience of at least 500 million people.</p> <p align="left">Finally, literary critics agree that Jaroslav Hašek wrote the grandaddy of anti-war novels. According to one critic, only the first two-thirds of <i>The Red Badge of Courage</i> precedes it. <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i> even predated that quintessential First World War novel, <i>All Quiet on the Western Front.</i> More familiar to today’s readers, perhaps, is<i> </i>Joseph Heller’s <i>Catch 22, </i>set in World War Two. Hašek’s biting satire and humor is its direct ancestor also, as well as that of many others. It might be hard to imagine, but "anti-war" was not "in" before <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i>. And, it should be noted that Hašek’s Švejk preceded Joseph Heller’s Yosarrian by almost 50 years.</p> <p align="left">Hašek’s talent and genius are obviously well documented. Now, let’s look at place. How did location effect Hašek and his work? Obviously, as you will soon read, that place was the city of Prague.</p> <p align="left">Again, in our opinion, Emmanuel Frynta explains it best:</p> <p align="left"><i>"...Prague, at the turn of the century, was a collage city. Phenomena torn from different, mutually antagonistic contexts met there and clashed. Stage sets were grotesquely displayed there, set in motion, on the one hand by the natural demands of the advancing modern age, on the other by inert or artificially preserved myths. We can clearly consider this fact to have been exceptionally worthy of attention both in regards to the works of Franz Kafka and the works of Hašek....Myths and pseudomyths quite undoubtedly influenced these two Prague authors. (These were) myths that substituted in so many ways for objective law and order. (They were) out-of-date, incomprehensible and unacceptable myths.....</p> <p align="left">"In the concentrated atmosphere of collage-style Prague, right from the very start of this century, political, social, moral and philosophical problems made themselves felt (in Prague) which were only made explicit in the rest of Europe by the (time of the) First World War. This was natural and highly understandable: in societies which were entering the modern age more smoothly, and in a more organic manner, these problems were kept hidden better. They came to the surface less blatantly. Prague (however) was ‘Dadaist’ and ‘surrealist’ (and) </i>avant la letter<i>."</p> </i> <p align="left">By the turn of the century Prague had become a boomtown. Large numbers of people had come to the city from the countryside to participate in the industrial revolution. The rise of a large working class spawned a cultural revolution. The empires of Central Europe ignored these intrinsic changes and became more and more decrepit and anachronistic. As the system decayed, it became absurd and irrelevant to ordinary people. When forced to respond to dissent, the imperial powers did so, more often than not, with hollow propaganda and repression.</p> <p align="left">The Austrian Empire attempted to conduct the First World War as if it were still a vibrant, viable entity. It expected its subjects to fight, die and foot the bill for what everyday people saw as nothing more than a quarrel among greedy and egotistic rulers. In the empires’ Slavic possessions, resentment reigned. And, with good reason.</p> <p align="left">World War One, amplified by modern weapons and techniques, quickly escalated to become a massive human meatgrinder. It has been eclipsed in many memories by World War Two, the most horrendous conflict of all time. However, if you set that debacle aside, World War One would easily dwarf any other in human history. Fifteen million people died, one million of them Austrian soldiers. Jaroslav Hašek participated in this conflict and examined it in <i>The</i> <i>Good Soldier Švejk.</p> </i> <p align="left">Hašek knew that a momentous, fundamental change in human history was occurring. For Central and Eastern Europe, it was the end of the old order. It was the demise of a social structure that had evolved from prehistoric times and affected every human life. Tribal and clan chieftains had evolved into Dukes, Counts and Lords, and then into Monarchs and Emperors. These despots caused and lost World War One and suddenly vanished. The decrepit empires were replaced by democratic republics, except in Russia where the bolsheviks instituted their own fatally flawed dictatorship and empire. However, as most historians agree, enough perverse elements and limbic memory of the old order remained in Central Europe to foment and fuel the biggest meatgrinder of them all, World War Two.</p> <p align="left">So, as you can see, the setting of <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i> is<i> </i>right there on the cutting edge of historical change. It is Jaroslav Hašek’s peek, <i>a la</i> Charlie Chaplin, at the dawn of truly modern times.</p> <p align="left">Isn’t this great? By reading <i>The Good Soldier Švejk</i>, you will get a heavy dose of culture and a glimpse at modern social history in the making. You will have read an important book. And, best of all you’ll laugh and have a really good time doing it. How often does a situation like this come along?</p> <p align="left">Rarely.</p> <p align="left">What better way to "close the books" on the twentieth century, than by looking back at where it all began?</p> <p align="left">So, kick off your shoes, make yourself comfortable, and enjoy.</b></font> <center> </p> </center> </body>