Bohumil Hrabal - Mr. Kafka - And Other Tales From the Time of the Cult

This is the second book of Hrabal’s I have translated (the first was I Served the King of England ), but Mr. Kafka was by far the more challenging task, and I was fortunate to find people willing to help me understand the technical and linguistic obscurities in Hrabal’s text. Still, some passages baffled even the experts, leaving me to take my best guess at Hrabal’s meaning. Of course I accept full responsibility for any errors.

My thanks to Monika Horsáková and Josef Chrobák, both of whom teach at the Silesian University in Opava; and to Tomáš Voldráb, a curator at the Mayrau mining museum near Kladno, who helped me understand the processes involved in turning ore and scrap metal into steel. A special thanks to my old friend Zbýšek Sion, one of Hrabal’s greatest fans. Zbýšek introduced me to the person whose help and advice has been the most invaluable of all — Tomáš Mazal, a friend of Hrabal’s, and the author of several helpful books about him and his life and times.

At New Directions, my thanks to Declan Spring for the assignment, for his patience and his many helpful editing suggestions; and to Dan Stiles, the cover designer, for capturing the spirit of the book in a single vivid image.

And last, but certainly foremost, to my wife, Patricia, for her unfailing support and her eagle eye, from first draft to final proofs.

I’d like to dedicate this translation to the memory of Věra Sýkorová, with whom I taught English at the secondary school Na Zatlance in Prague in the early 1970s. Věra was the wife of the poet and musician Karel Maryška, a close friend of Hrabal’s, and as I knew her, she would have been one of the people Hrabal had in mind when, in his introduction to this book, he praised those heroes who did not succumb to the “semantic confusion” of their times.

PAUL WILSON, AUGUST 2015