On Translating Václav Hrabě

In 2024, I was browsing the Luxor “palace of books” on Wenceslas Square while I was visiting my family in Prague. I was determined to read more Czech poetry in my first language, because throughout my MFA I’d primarily read Slavic poets in English translation. On a warm spring day in the city center, I picked up a copy of Blues, the collected poetry of Václav Hrabě (1940–1965). As I read Hrabě, I found poems that bustled along the streets of Prague, lamented the weight of war on the shoulders of soldiers, and—like the title of his only complete poetry collection—sang the Blues for a Crazy Girl. Hrabě was strongly influenced by jazz music and American writers such as Allen Ginsberg, while writing poems that are still unmistakably Czech (a combination that speaks to my own experience growing up between cultures). Fascinated by his surreal free verse and his rhythmic iambic sonnets, I began translating his poetry to stretch my creative muscles. I wanted to learn more about the legacy of this writer who I was encountering without the lens of my primary poetic language, English.

Václav Hrabě’s poems embody the Czech sixties literary scene, during which the Beat Generation’s literature permeated Czechoslovakia. Hrabě was born in Příbram and spent his early adulthood in Prague. He taught himself to play the clarinet and saxophone and then began performing regularly at the city’s music venues from 1957 to 1961, including Reduta Jazz Club, Olympik, and Pygmalion. Hrabě graduated in 1961 from the faculty of pedagogy (or what might be referred to in the United States as the college of pedagogy) with a degree in Czech language and history and was shortly conscripted into the army—a period when he wrote prodigiously and published some of his first poems in a military magazine. After finishing his service in 1963, he continued writing as he worked in various professions: as a construction worker, librarian, and magazine writer, until he became a teacher in 1964. Before his premature death, he was able to interview one of his role models, Allen Ginsberg, when the American poet came to Prague. But shortly thereafter, in 1965, Hrabě passed away in his sleep at the age of twenty-four from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. His writing only gained a cultural foothold after his death, thanks to the work of his contemporaries and his only son, Jan Miškovský.

In translating Czech, I’ve often found myself in this intersection of language and meaning. How does the handsome moon throw up in “Romance”? Does he barf, vomit, retch, or heave? Anne Carson describes a key facet of translation and poetry in her discussion of the Greek poet Stesichoros’s renowned use of adjectives: 

The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top,” “added,” “appended,” “imported,” “foreign.” Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Do I prioritize meaning or musicality—and am I being forced to choose? In particular, native speakers will have different ears for what sounds beautiful. Languages that easily gravitate toward rhyme—like Czech or Spanish—may sound trite when translated into English and a rhyme is forced. While I haven’t struggled with this in Hrabě’s free verse, I’ve had to consider what “Autumn” might lose when the final lines, “Holý jak věta/Zavřete okna!/Je konec léta” no longer close on such a definitive triple rhyme. In the final draft, I compensated with assonance, emphasizing the O sounds in “Close the windows! Summer has gone,” but the interpretation will always feel slightly off to me with that sonic loss. 

At times, I had to insert descriptive words that Czech has no grammatical need for. My favorite puzzle in “A Short Poem About Prague” was describing how “Baroque legionaries lounge tedious on Charles Bridge” for the reflexive verb “se nudí.” In Czech, they don’t lounge on the bridge, they bore on it—as a verb, a state of being. It is a verb to which I attached the “latch of being” for English readers. Other times, translation has felt like an easy miracle, when the alliteration acts the same in both languages: “smutek špiritus a saze z řas” slipping sonorously into “sorrow spiritus and soot in lashes.”