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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.
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| Well, that is what has happened to the Czech people in the case of Jaroslav Hasek. He and his work are practically non-existent in the English-reading world, an influential audience of at least 500 million people.
Literary critic Emanuel Frynta in his unsurpassed analysis of Jaroslav Hašek and his masterpiece The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk wrote: "The structure of Hasek'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 : 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 Švejk 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."
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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 new English language translation and faithful literary rendition of the masterwork.
Now The Good Soldier Švejk 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.
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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 iconoclastic 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.
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