By Zak Mucha
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.’”
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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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.”
