I first read this particular novel, back in 1998: a whole three decades after it was written, smuggled out of the country, and published abroad. I read it in English. Long before that, an illegal, mimeographed “edition” of the author’s shorter works had been made available to me; that thin volume of contraband literature was the singular collection of shattering epiphanies to mark and transform my youth. The novel, however, and its brilliant and troubling successor, Marušká Buys New Shoes required an odd sort of waiting-in-retrospect. I didn’t know that the novel and its successor existed, and I am aware of waiting only when I think back to the days I spent wishing that the author had written more than a handful of short tales. This novel, like Marušká Buys New Shoes extends the philosophical themes already laid out in the novella “Forty Mice” and the baroque nightmares: “Dašenká’s Hand” and “Two Fools and a Boy.” Oh, how I desired full explorations of the brooding, sometimes-hilarious nightmares the author penned so brilliantly! Now, after more than three decades, the novel was finally coming home: after three decades, I (and everyone else here) can finally read it in its native tongue. For years, no one on our side of the Soviet Curtain even suspected that the author had penned two important books. They simply did not exist in here. In 1998, our country was a new and renewed place, drunk on the collapse of Soviet restraint. In my own city of Pekkúr, in Preskiýn, and in small towns and villages, everyone said the same thing. The Clock, they said, had finally been reset: and so it was, in 1998, that the novel found its delayed and circuitous route home. How strange it was for a novel born in Pekkúr to arrive on a translator’s desk (mine!) so that it may be reconstructed with meticulous care, in the foreign language of its origin. For all Agaran eyes, the editions of the novel, published in French and in English, were the original text, despite their intimate relating of events and characters who could have been born only in the literary and socio-political cauldron of Pekkúr in the late 1960s. Like the author’s final literary opus, Marušká Buys New Shoes, the challenge of reverse translation and temporal discontinuity loomed larger than life itself here. The novel, like its successor, arrived in Pekkúr in English. The original manuscript—in our own tongue—remains lost: destroyed, perhaps, and all of today’s meticulous reconstructions are the bodies of a beguiling enigma. As in reading religious texts derived from dead languages, the honest reader must always be aware of a single question: “Are the words that I read the actual words of the author?” If and until the original manuscript surfaces, that question will forever haunt the novel and everyone who reads it. The author’s work gives shape and substance to its own species of literary metaphor; like the strangest of evolving, biological organisms, the author’s characters are cunningly anachronistic, as are the dramas they enact and embody. In this way, his works place him firmly in the ranks of Central Europe’s Kafka and Leppin, or Latin America’s Borges. As biological mutations enhance and strengthen organisms through the process of horizontal gene transfer, the author’s work (two novels and eighteen shorter pieces) enhances and strengthens itself through horizontal meme transfer. The author’s Europeans (mostly Central Europeans) enact the ritual lives (with mythic gravitas) of ancient Africans as easily as his Americans embody the inherited meanings and rhythms of Asia in their manners, speech, perception, and private thoughts (most often conveyed in the potent, ritualized brevity of haiku). This, as one might expect, presents countless challenges for even the most scrupulous of translators. This challenge is heightened by the unfortunate reality of the author’s death. Had the author lived to see the translation of his work into his native language, I—his translator—might have been able to ask about the use of staccato repetitions, and cryptic puns and hypnotic shifts into the implicative tense. Only in our language does a menu of tenses exist for nouns and pronouns, and so whole passages of the novel hide themselves from casual understanding. The novel, due to the imprecision of English might not be the novel we think it is, even though I’ve read carefully, and re-applied implicative pronouns where the text itself implies they should go. (In a sense, the entire novel has become an implicative pronoun: the strangest of accidental autobiographies. Surely this is not the author’s intent, and yet the very history of the book, its publication, and its delayed repatriation serve to make it into precisely that.) Though I am not responsible for the graceful translation of Marušká Buys New Shoes, I am aware that my own translation of this novel needs, as its focus, the capture of the complex repetitions evident in the English original and indicative of the atavistic, pagan, incantory nature of an implied manuscript rendered modern Agaran, but with a meticulous (and poetic) overlay of Medieval modes of speech, including the archaic implicative tense. Though modern Agaran still finds uses for its archaic antecedent, questions remain and will always remain as to what the author initially wrote, or what contemporary Agaran readers are expected to think. My work is what returns this novel to a semblance of its former self, but perhaps my brother has graced present and future readers with the most useful of insights. My brother, like me and legions of other devotees to the author, managed to get into contact with the author. The author agreed to a meeting. When my brother arrived at the author’s apartment, the author—an old man—by this point simply stated that he was no longer a writer. He was interested, he said, in going mad, though he wasn’t quite certain if he had the fortitude for so monumental an endeavor. For the rest of the visit, the author simply sat and smoked, listening (graciously, as my brother points out) to heaps of fawning praise and desperate pleas to write again. Midway through my brother’s display of fawning idol-worship, the author laughed and dismissed the novel with the wave of a hand. “It is little more than a work of desperation,” the author reputedly said to my brother. “I wrote it by hand, with a stolen pen.” And with that alleged confession, the meeting ended. The author is reputed to have said such a thing to others, and perhaps in relaying that anecdote, I have touched upon what I hoped in translating his works into his language. It wasn’t the pen that was stolen, but the author’s own ability to publish in his own country, and perhaps the doubts arising in the mind and in the work of a translator is little more than a map of the novel’s journey away from home and back. Perhaps in confessing to the theft of a pen, the author was simply saying that he was afraid to write any more, afraid to wait so long to know that his own countrymen might eventually hear what he has to say to and of them. As you hold this translation of the author’s novel in your hands, I can only hope that I’ve done justice to the author himself, a stolen pen, and a journey through three decades, and two languages. —Anton Miýr * After a quick journey back in time (to 1902) I felt the burn of un-expressed writing still coursing through me. Muse-residue can sometimes be an annoyance, especially in the pinched hours between 3 and 5 in the morning, when smarter people (who don’t work night shifts) are sleeping, dreaming, and getting the good night’s sleep. Muse-residue sometimes interrupts sleep, and so in a pinched hour, I committed this to digital paper. Anton has rather strong feelings about the author and the novel he’s apparently just translated, and I’d like to read that novel. The initial drive to write what you’ve presumably just read, came from the Czech author, Ivan Klíma: known as one of the greatest writers to emerge from Czechoslovakia (back when there was a Czechoslovakia), he became internationally famous before anyone at home knew who he was. He lives in Prague, and is, presumably, still writing (and doing all of that other fantastic stuff that people do in Prague: it’s an art-friendly city, after all…and writers get respect and free drinks.) Anyway, I wondered what other traits my fictional country of Agara had in common with the Czech Republic (And Czechoslovakia, back in the old days) and that got me to thinking about writers. I asked myself what it must be like to write something, to live as a writer, and to never have one’s work read at home. If I ever get the chance to talk to Ivan Klíma, I’ll either ask him, or clam up, but it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll meet him, and speak to him, like the translator’s fawning brother…ah, but one never knows. At any rate, I asked questions of myself, and though “the author” wasn’t alive enough to say anything about that experience, Anton Miýr was kind enough to step forward and keep me away for a few pinched, nearly-delirious hours. * I classified this as "Alternative" simply because I can't think of a Renderosity genre that actually fits what this piece might be. It's alternative in many ways, and it shares quite a lot in common with a lot of stuff coming out of Central Europe and South America. Jorge Luis Borghes is probably the most pronounced practitioner (and probable progenitor?) of this particular literary art, and though this isn't one of his little "ficciones". It is a little, oddly convoluted piece of…something: a fictional story pretending to be a non-fictional note included in the introduction of a fictional work of fiction that isn’t even there! (Sometimes I wonder about a few of the thought-things that live in my brain.) I suspect that there may be more to this, especially since I’m now rather interested in just what sort of a novel Marušká Buys New Shoes might be. Agaran literature: it seems rather quirky, if you ask me (which, of course, you didn’t.) As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope your'e all having a great week.