Czech translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

Marta Mlejnková, 1998

In my essay, I'm going to comment on two of the many translations of Harriet Beecher-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin that were published in the former Czechoslovakia. One is the translation by Máňa Voříšková, the other by Emanuela Tilschová and Emanuel Tilsch. The title of both of them is "Chaloupka strýčka Toma".

I will begin with the older of the texts. Voříšková's text is not so much a translation as rather just an adaptation. The date of the publication is not given in the book/!/ but it comes probably from the turn of the twenties and thirties of this century. The book was published by Nakladatelské družstvo Máje in Prague and it has eighty pages. For the comparison, the original contains 446 pages. This adaptation was definitely meant for children, judging so from the introduction written by Voříšková where she herself is adressing the readers "dear children" and also from the big coloured illustrations.

In the introduction she explains where and when was written the original and what influence it had on the American nation. She wants this adaptation to become both amusement and advice for the children.She stresses love and justice. The text itself is divided into fourteen chapters . The titles of the chapters are not taken from the original, they are just adaptations as well.

Each chapter contains several chapters of the original. The text is written in an archaic language. Voříšková uses the Czech equivalents for the English names, e.g. Jiří for George or Eliška for Eliza. The whole book could be branded as a short summary of the original text. For her translantion,Voříšková chose only the actions that move the story forward. The book therefore lacks long descriptions of characters and enviroment and also contem- plations of the main characters as found in the Beeecher-Stowe's original. Voříšková in her adaptation did not avoid the theme of religion. Although she did not adapt the long deliberations and descriptions of the states of religious ecstasies, this theme can be traced in her adaptation /e.g. talking about the Bible etc./ . According to the time in which her adaptation was written, she did not have any need to conceal this theme or take up a negative attitude.

It is also important to mention her description of African Americans. Her term for denoting African Americans is "černoši". This term cannot be seen as a racistic because of the time when the adaptation was written and moreover such a term is adequate to the terms used by Beecher-Stowe.

But it is strange that she uses the words "černoch,černý" both in the negative and positive sense. The "good owners" speak about their slaves in such a way and so do even the "cruel "ones and the overseers. For the speech of the latter ones, Voříšková did not chose the Czech equivalent for the English word "nigger" as used by Beecher- Stowe, to distinguish the two types of characters.

She does not even distinguish the speech of African -Americans that is strongly distinguished in the original. Their speech is the same as the speech of the white people, for the speech of the slaves it is too standard and refined.

Voříšková does not deal with any political problems, the book ends with Tom's death and the last chapter with the letter containing George's attitude towards slavery is omitted.

It can be said that Voříšková's adaptation is the combination of two main stories- Tom's and that of the two refugees-George and Eliza.

In her introduction, Voříšková says that nowadays Uncle Tom's Cabin reads as a fairy tale from cruel but real times. In her presentation of the text, the original really became a simple fairy tale.It is just a narration of an adventurous story without any deeper reflect- ions or deeper insight into the minds and behaviour of the characters. Her simple language made of Uncle Tom's Cabin a pulp literature with the "black and white" understanding of characters.

The other translation is a different point in case. The translation by Emanuela Tilschová and Emanuel Tilsch is the latest Czech edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Int was published in 1977 in Prague in Albatros. It has almost the exact number of pages as the original-450.

This translation was again meant to be read by children, especially by the older ones as stated in the imprint- for the chidren from the age of twelve. For children is also the end of the book- a letter written by Emanuel Tilsch to his son Míša. In it, he describes his journey to the United States and his experience with the situation of the African Americans. By reading this letter we can tell that the translation was very negatively influenced by the time in which it was written. The final letter stands up not so much to the cruelty of slavery as it speaks about the evil of the American society that exploits people. Another sign of the influence of the communist ideology is the effort to suppress the theme of religion. Some of the parts cocerning this theme were simply left out , the rest was changed according to the ideology. The translators do not use the words Jesus Christ, redemption and the like, they rather speak about some higher powers and supernatural things. The deep experience of the religious people was thus distorted a lot. The translation is divided into 44 chapters that stick to the original, even the titles are the same as in the original. it does not have the last chapter of the original, containing the author's contemplations on slavery.

The language of the translation is more or less contemporary. The translators use different kinds of language for distinguishing the characters. The language of positive characters is standard and refined, that one of negative characters is non- standard and coarse . They do not use any special language for African Americans, they do so just in the case of female servants , known as "mammies". By this , they stressed the stereotype of the image of these women- good natured and devoted ones. For the English word "nigger" they use the usual Czech equivalent "negr". For the description of the African Americans they use the usual expressions as well: "černý", "mulat".

Some of the English proper names are translated by the Czech expressions : Jiří, Nový Orleans, Nová Anglie etc. At the end of this translation we can find also an alphabetical record of the explanatory notes and a small dictionary of pronunciation. Also this translation is not at all perfect. Because it is a product of its time, it can never bring the greatness of Beecher-Stowe's work nearer to a Czech reader. With the omission of the religious parts that in her work are very important, it can never become anything more than just a very simplified story.

Moreover, also the language of the translation is not perfect, sometimes it is clumsy and contains amount of errors.

Thus for the introduction of the two translations that I am going to compare.

Now, what has been said, I would like to document on a chosen chapter- Chapter 32- Dark Places. This chapter was chosen because it shows all the problems of translation mentioned before- speech of African Americans and speech of white people, the theme of religion, designation for African American and it will also serve us good as the proof of the style of the translators.

First, I would like to briefly comment on this chapter how does it look in the original text- on its form and content. the chapter is written on eight pages and a half. Under the title there is a short quatation :

"The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty."

We can find similar quotations /e.g. quotations from Bible, parts of songs and poems/ written under the titles of many other chapters as well.

The chapter belongs to the second part of the book when Tom's "better times" are over and he is sold to a new , cruel master, Simon Legree. The chapter begins with the description of a procession of slaves that Legree takes to his estates. There we meets two new characters- Sambo an Quimbo,the overseers. We learn about the cabins in which the slaves live. The whole chapter ends with Tom's contemplations above the Bible and his vision of Little Eva who quotes to him from Bible.

Now I will look at how did the translators cope witth the chapter Dark Places. I will again begin with the older of the two translations, Voříšková's "Chaloupka strýčka Toma".

The plot of the original chapter is resumed on two pages within the chapter 13, called "Plantáž na červené řece". In the very beginning of the chapter we can learn what happened even before and then the arrival of the slaves to Legree's estates, the cruelty of Sambo /Quimbo is not mentioned/, tough work and Tom' s retirement to Bible is very quickly described. The quote at the beginning is omitted.

The language ot the translation is archaic- the proof for it can be a great amount of transgressive forms /e. g. "Tom, obdržev svou dávku kukuřice", "odešel, ponechav Toma...." etc./, infinitives ending with "-ti" , obsolete sentence structures, such as "Zde alespoň vidíte, jak by se vám asi vedlo, kdyby některému z vás napadlo utéci".What also helps to make the archaic impression is the amount of obsolete and literary words and expressions- e.g."opáčila", "zde", exclamation expressions as "'ó" or older forms of the verb "muset"- "musit". In one instance, Voříšková translates the word "slaves" as "dělníci" which sounds strange, even funny. Voříšková does not use any especially pejorative expression for African Americans . Where Beecher-Stowe uses " coloured man " , Voříšková uses the expression "černoch" but she uses the same expression even in the instances where Beecher-Stowe uses the racist expression "negro", the racist attitude ot Legree is therefore not distinguished. As it has been said, Voříšková does not distinguish speech of the white people from speech of African Americans, she did not even either choose any adequate substitution for Legree's Southern dialect or expressed it by any special grammatical forms.As an example can be shown part of Legree's speech and part of speech of one of the female slaves. Legree's speech:"Zde alespoň vidíte, jak by se vám asi vedlo, kdyby některému z vás napadlo utéci." The woman's speech: "Tys ještě nikdy neslyšela o bibli? Ó , to je krásná kniha ! V Kentucky nám z ní slečna někdy předčítala. Tady však syšíme jen práskání bičem a nadávky!" Although this two speeches are very similar also in the original because of the similarity between Black English and Southern dialect /expressed by the special forms indicating the phonetic form of these speeches-e.g."Mas'r","ye", "crackin'' or by usage of Black English tenses, e.g. "a-readin' "/ thera are distinguished from the speech of "good white" people" as could be found in other chapters in speech e.g. of St. Claire"

"Well, well , that's very well got up, Adolph. See that the baggage is well bestowed. I'll come to the people in a minute." For the comparison, the original of the woman's speech: "Do tell! you never hearn on't ? I used to har Missis a-readin' on't, sometimes, in Kentuck, but, laws o' me! we don't har nothin' here but crackin' and swarin'." Because Voříšková in her translation does not do anything like this with the speech of the characters, all the characters seem to be the same, their speech does not say anything about them and literary and refined speech of the slaves, cruel masters and overseers seems to be funny and artificial . Now I would proceed to the theme of religion. Tom's contemplations, his vision of Little Eva and her quotation from Bible are here resumed into one paragraph with the image of Tom sitting with his Bible and the talk of the two women what it is Bible at all. No quotations, no vision of Little Eva. Because it was not the time in which Voříšková lived that forced her to omitt these parts, it could probably the fact that she wrote just a short adaptation for children and she did not want to burden the children with the long and difficult passages from Bible. We can apologize this with the fact that she by her short adaptation maybe only wanted to show the chidren the injustice that was commited on African Americans and thus bring the children to a deeper interest. But this never should happen with the connection of underrating children's abilities. I would now proceed to the second translation, Tilschs's "Chaloupka strýčka Toma". Here the chapter "Dark Places " is the chapter 32 and it is called "Temní koutové". It is written on almost eight pages. It follows quite faithfully the original plot except for the final part that I will talk later about. But this is not the only part that was left out. As in other chapters, the preliminary quotation

was omitted. In the original text we can find two songs, one Methodist and one funny ditty. As Voříšková left them out completely, they were not mentioned before. Instead of the Methodist hymn , Tilschs used just one sentence: "Tom zanotoval jednu kostelní kostelní píseň o Novém Jeruzalému." Here we again we can see the influence of the outside pressure not to dissect the religious theme too much. The other song can be found in the translation, I think Tilschs translated it successfully, their ditty has the easiness of songs of such kinds:

"Utekla mi kočka,
heja , heja, hej,
mrkala jí očka,
že prý na mě počká,
heja, heja, hej,
joho, juhu, hehehej."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beecher Stowe, Harriet: Uncle Tom's Cabin /Bantam Books,1981/
Czech translations:
Voříšková, Máňa: Chaloupka strýčka Toma /Nakladatelské družstvo Máje,Praha/
Tilschovi,Emanuela a Emanuel: Chaloupka strýčka Toma /Albatros, Praha 1977/