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So, why haven't YOU

         heard about S s hackem v cernem 36.gif (962 bytes)vejk?

It's not

Really?
your fault!
 
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 Has s hackem v cernem 12.gif (832 bytes)ek. He and his work are practically non-existent in the English-reading world, an influential audience of at least 500 million people.

Let them read Svejk!

"We're having a nice summer, aren't we?" asked Bretschneider. "It's all worth shit," replied Palivec, putting his coasters away. "They sure did it to us nicely in Sarajevo," Bretschneider continued, hoping to instigate a political discussion. "What Sarajevo?" asked Palivec. "That wine bar in Nusle? They fight every day there. That's Nusle, you know." "The Sarajevo in Bosnia, mister pubkeeper, where they shot the royal Archduke Ferdinand dead! What do you say to that?" "I don't get myself mixed up in such things," Palivec answered politely, while lighting his pipe. "Everybody can kiss my ass with stuff like that. Getting messed up in stuff like that nowadays can get you hanged. I'm a small businessman. When somebody comes in and orders a beer, then I draw it for him. But some Sarajevo --politics-- some archduke, that is nothing to me. It hold's no promise, except maybe a trip to the Pankrác prison."Bretschneider quietly stared across the deserted pub. After a while, he said out loud: "At one time, a picture of our Lord Emperor used to hang here. Right over there where that mirror is now." Yeah, you're right," said Palivec, "it used to hang there. And the flies kept shitting on it, so, I put it in the attic. You know that all I would have needed was for some busybody to dare to make some kind of comment. It could have resulted in some unpleasant difficulties. I don't need that kind of trouble."

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Literary critic Emanuel Frynta in his unsurpassed analysis of Jaroslav Has s hackem v cernem 12.gif (832 bytes)ek and his masterpiece
the Good Soldier Švejk wrote: "The structure of
Has s hackem v cernem 12.gif (832 bytes)ek's novel ... has much to say in particular concerning the conditions and process of development of dadaism and surrealism from the soil of wartime Europe. ... His place in that cross-roads generation of modern European artists is incontrovertible and well-deserved — it is merely for the time being well masked : on the one hand by the difficulties of transferring a Czech novel into a foreign language, on the other by the fact that the Good Soldier S s hackem v cerne.gif (857 bytes)vejk is a humorous novel and its main character usurps most of the attention to himself."

Frynta himself had others translate his own words into English. Had he known the language and it's nature so different from the other Continental languages, he'd probably have written "and it shall be masked by English translations forever."
The two English translations published so far were dismal, unreadable, and unfaithful to the original. Therefore, only rightfully, they were not heavily promoted. As a result of both, virtually nobody reads them. Most English language readers don’t know this masterpiece exists.

There is now a superb English language translation and faithful literary rendition of the masterwork :
Now the Good Soldier
S s hackem v cernem 36.gif (962 bytes)vejk is unmasked, and its title character himself steps from behind the English reader's veil of ignorance to convince him of his own flesh and blood reality.

Over the past few decades Americans have been subjected to some of the same social, political, economic, and moral phenomena that Europeans have endured for ages and which are the backdrop to this icono-clastic and soul probing epic. Now more than ever before, Americans will be able to relate to the story and its main character. And they will enjoy doing it.


 Ruth Cooper of Chicago did 
 and wants to tell you about it right here! 
 

 

Now that you have heard of, or might have even served in Sarajevo and Bosnia Herzegovina
why not buy
the Primer on World War
Madness Survival:

The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War ?!