Revisiting Anthony Burgess’s novel ‘A Clockwork Orange‘ after nearly 30 years, I found it equally disturbing, if not more so, as when I was 15. The dark vision of a totalitarian government hell-bent on eradicating crime and criminals, even at the cost of suppressing the free will of its citizens, makes for a real horrorshow story. But apart from the profound ethical questions the book raises, it was the language of the novel that appealed to me more this time.
In the 1990s, I had read the Orange in a Czech translation (Mechanický pomeranč, translated by Ladislav Šenkyřík in 1992), this time I enjoyed the English original, and it felt like home. The mood and the disheartening atmosphere I remember from my first reading of the story are all there.
Back then I lacked the capacity to appreciate the enormous amount of work and talent that Mr Šenkyřík had to put into recreating the Nadsat language in Czech. Now, as a seasoned translator (though with no literary ambitions whatsoever), I consider this to be one of the masterpieces of translation; all the strange words Burgess had invented, the rhythm and flow of his juvenile argot felt familiar, even though I was seeing them for the first time. This is something every good piece of translated literature should aspire to.
In 2005, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ appeared on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. I believe the Czech translation similarly deserves to be included in a list of the best translations of English-language novels, if such a thing exists.
„Co teda jako bude, he?“
