Word: hasek
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...GREAT TIMES call for great men," begins Jaroslav Hasek's account of life in the Czech division of the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. The good soldier Svejk, who made a peacetime living by selling stolen dogs after getting himself discharged from the army as a certified imbecile, wasn't meant to be a conventional great man. But Hasek didn't think much of conventional great times either. He thought World War I was a pretty fair sample--an enormous sacrifice of common people's lives on the altar of such gods as emperors' glory and capitalists' profits...
Under the circumstances, just as Catch-22 of the next war would be that the way to act sane was to act crazy, Hasek maintained that the way to act intelligent was to act idiotic. So the good soldier, Svejk, goes through the war doing everything he's told, but managing to get it just wrong enough to stay far from the front lines where he might have to do some fighting. It's hard for the army to shoot someone who turns up miles behind his regiment, beaming, innocent, full of patriotic fervor, and consumed by contrition because somehow...
Paul Selver translated The Good Soldier Schweik into English in 1930, and it won a lot of admirers in that form--the New York Times, for instance, used to periodically announce that the Czech national character as portrayed by Hasek made the victory of the Czech revolution over its bureaucratic opponents inevitable. Since the Soviet invasion, Svejk's appearances in the American press have been less frequent, so maybe it's time for a new translation on those grounds alone. Moreover, the old translation took out all the obscenity and most of the blasphemy in the novel, which left more...
...such moments Hasek's good soldier seems like the martyr in his drunken chaplain's painting...
...CHARLES HASEK...