The train to Brno is almost empty, even though the Pope is delivering mass there tomorrow (I guess most of the congregation will travel early in the morning). Opposite me sits a girl of about twenty. She’s pretty, with long hair and no make-up. She has no handbag, just a backpack. She may be going to the mass. I’ll try to catch her eye when she looks up from her book, then I’ll ask her.

For the time being, she and I are reading.

Both the books we’re holding have only just come out, and both make unpleasant reading for the Czechs.

The girl is reading a widely publicized book by a nineteen-year-old Czech girl who was born in the south of the country and got nothing but A grades for Czech grammar at school, but is still regarded as Vietnamese. It’s the first proper book to be written in Czech by a representative of the Vietnamese minority, it’s called White Horse, Golden Dragon, and the author’s name is Lan Pham Thi. This autobiographical story is set in Písek, where the heroine graduated from high school and where she was beaten up by skinheads. After years of toil, her father sets up the restaurant of his dreams, which is ceremonially opened by the Lord Mayor (‘because we’re in favour of tolerance and cooperation’), who has a skinhead as his chauffeur (he beat up the author too). The Lord Mayor is a jolly Czech, whose favourite joke goes like this: A Czech comes along to a Vietnamese market stall and asks: ‘Have you got AIDS?’ ‘No,’ says the Vietnamese stallholder, ‘but I can get it by tomorrow.’ The Vietnamese dad in the book has a Czech friend in whose name he has bought a house. It has never been hard to reach agreement. The Czech friend’s philosophy is this: ‘Since the day they invented money, nobody has had to say thank you.’ The dad’s philosophy is this: ‘The main thing is to be careful not to piss anybody off.’ The reviewers were unanimous: ‘We are racists, but it makes for a good read.’

The girl with long hair reads so fast that in half an hour she’s got through half the book without looking up once.

White Horse, Golden Dragon, the book the girl was reading on the train to Brno, won the 2009 Book Club competition for unpublished work. The book that wins this annual award gets published, and achieves impressive sales figures.

The journalists rushed to interview the nineteen-year-old winner, Lan Pham Thi, but she could only answer their questions by e-mail, because in the meantime she’d gone to Kuala Lumpur to study IT.

In her response to the media she said that she was still trying to resolve the dilemma of whether she is Czech or Vietnamese, but had come to the conclusion that she is a Czech with Vietnamese parents. Asked why not a single positive Czech appears in her book, she replied that she hadn’t been aware of it while she was writing.

Despite a patently negative attitude towards the Roma in the Czech Republic, there has been an upsurge of literature by them, and the number of Roma students in higher education is probably at a record level for Europe. As a result, lots of people were quietly hoping that Lan Pham Thi was the portent of another positive development, especially as one of the government ministers for home affairs had recently suggested that the state should give money to any Vietnamese person who was willing to leave the country. The fact that thanks to the Vietnamese, almost every urban district in the Czech Republic has two well-stocked grocery stores, open every day of the year, made no impression on him.

The author sent her signed book contract to the publisher from Kuala Lumpur. With a Vietnamese friend representing her at the prize-giving, she made her acceptance speech and apologized for her absence via a video recording.

A couple of weeks after White Horse, Golden Dragon was published, the critic Zdenko Pavelka wrote that he was concerned about some of the details. For example, one of the verbs used to describe the scene where the heroine’s father opens his dream restaurant in the town of Písek, with the participation of the Lord Mayor. The local television is there, and Lan Pham Thi writes that the camera is ‘whirring.’ But cameras haven’t whirred for a few decades now. The skinheads who attack the heroine use sharpened razor blades. The critic checked, and found that nowadays they use very sharp knives – they stopped using razor blades in the 1990s. On top of that, the story is set in Písek, where the Lord Mayor couldn’t have come to the opening, because Písek has an ordinary town mayor, and not the equivalent of a Lord Mayor.

From these and similar details Pavelka concluded that the book could not have been written by a Vietnamese girl at all, but must have been the work of a man, a Czech, aged at least fifty. What the critic found most annoying was that the book had been widely promoted as being by a young Vietnamese woman, as if that in itself were a literary merit.

His article set off a major media campaign of general suspicion that Lan Pham Thi didn’t really exist.

Two months later the campaign reached its goal, with the help of the writer who had come second in the Book Club competition, who said he knew it was a hoax (his own book hadn’t been published).

But the competition jury announced that even if they’d been aware that the book wasn’t written by a Vietnamese woman, the man who came second still wouldn’t have won. And besides, he hadn’t come second at all – that was just his imagination.

The author of the Vietnamese eye-opener turned out to be thirty-nine-year-old journalist and travel writer Jan Cempírek (the critic had got his age wrong).

He publicly admitted that he had committed literary fraud in order to draw attention to the problems affecting the Vietnamese in the Czech Republic. He also wanted to find out what sort of reception a book that contained nothing but clichés and a black-and-white view of the world would get. And he wanted to show ‘what the ordinary Czech thinks a Vietnamese thinks in the Czech Republic.’

He announced that he was donating the prize money from the Book Club competition to the publication of a Vietnamese-Czech dictionary.

How the Vietnamese really feel and what their lives are like remain a mystery.

This is an extract from Do-It-Yourself Paradise by Polish author Mariusz Szczygieł, one of two books of reportage about the Czechs as a people. The other, Gottland – Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia, has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and has just been published by Melville House Books. The true stories told in Szczygieł’s reports often concern strange hoaxes and cover-ups, implying that in a Czech context, for various political and personal reasons, the truth is often subjected to manipulation.

Do-It-Yourself-Paradise is published in Polish by Czarne.

Gottland by Mariusz Szczygieł is published by Melville House.

You can purchase Gottland via our partner Foyles.

The post Playing Vietnamese appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

I am an omnivorous scavenger, I sniff every object, I trust my intuition more than my eyes, and my most highly developed instinct is to run away. And if I have to be somewhere quickly, I run. At a rate of one breath to four paces, I can run ad infinitum, for hours on end. I can eat and drink without stopping. Absolutely nothing will induce me to get into a lift if I’m not going higher than five floors. I never take the lift down. And I never get lost. My brain has its own in-built navigation system.

I even know how to talk to dogs, though I don’t wish to chat with every dog I meet, because like all the creatures in my house I have my racial prejudices. We can’t stand pit bulls, for instance – nasty muscle-bound dogs, four-footed yobbos with brains the size of a pea. And the scavenging – it’s just a reporter’s metaphor. When I go into the field (as the old reporters say), in other words on a work trip, within Poland or abroad, to gather material for a new article, I stop to inspect every speck of dust, every detail, every scrap of information and every little story – every bit of carrion, rubbish or shit. I might not use it later on, I might not devour it, but I’m sure to pick it up and take it away with me.

The limping dog, or ‘being on the road’ versus ‘travelling’

All this makes me naturally equipped for travelling. Anyway, I love to travel, though I hardly ever say that. What I say is that I love ‘being on the road’, which is hardly surprising, considering that in a former life I was a stray dog.

Please note, I didn’t say a dog ‘with no master’, but a stray dog. For what sort of pleasure is there in being a dog ‘with a master’? In having a master? So I wasn’t a dog with no master, I was just free, independent, a drifter… All right, I was eternally hungry, crawling with lice and fleas, and covered in eczema, on top of which I had cancer of the testicles – by the end of my short life they were virtually trailing along on the ground behind me, but for all that, I was a cheerful, actually a very happy dog. A disgusting mongrel with festering eyes and ears, exuding a stink like a latrine, but proud of all the vigorous, dynamic spermatozoa I’d sent out around the entire world then known to me.

I was lame in a back paw, so it’s probably from my dog’s life that I remember the coarse rhyme I’ve never heard in my present life. My mother says that in her childhood the lowlifes in Sochaczew (the town we’re from) used to bellow something like this at the homeless dogs to chase them away, after tying empty cans to their tails. The rhyme goes like this:

A limping dog ran on the grass
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)
Some bastard kicked him up the arse
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)
Oh you fucker, booted up the bum
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)
I’m grassing on you to your mum
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker).

It must be because of my former identity that I get such unspeakable pleasure out of reporting on the homeless – people, not dogs, because a dog can indeed be homeless too, but once he has a home he ceases to be a dog. (That’s what I thought in my previous life, but I shouldn’t be saying it now, because when my own dogs read this, I’ll be the one in the doghouse.)

The three reports I wrote about the homeless were examples of immersion journalism. Two were researched in Warsaw, and one in Moscow. I got myself up in rags and went to live on the streets. It felt wonderful – I hadn’t the slightest doubt it was, or used to be my way of life. I was in no doubt at all that I hadn’t changed, I’d just gone back to my old identity, my old life, my old ways of getting food and drink and a bed for the night.

Like changing the railway points, with a change of dress you get rid of your identity as a journalist, husband, father, owner, or citizen – in short, you stop being a normal person, a Muggle, and you become a tramp, who’s not ashamed to beg, piss in the park, or sleep on the grass below the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. To my excellent fellow reporter Wojciech Jagielski, who doesn’t rate this genre of reportage (or rather this method of gathering material) and says it’s just done for a lark, I reply that he is quite mistaken. The world of the homeless can only be described from the position of a piece of trash lying in the street (or of a stray dog too). You’ll never find out how people (the normal ones) regard a piece of trash that’s knocking about in the street, unless you are one.

So, in a former life, I was a stray dog. I’m doubly fond of the Polish word wałęsać, meaning ‘to stray’ or ‘to wander’, out of respect for Lech Wałęsa. I realised this in the days of the so-called first Solidarity (from August 1980 to December 1981), when folks used to say as a joke that the government (meaning the communists) was wandering – wałęsa się – while Wałęsa was governing.

So why do I prefer ‘being on the road’ to ‘travelling’? Because for me the most important thing is the time before I reach my destination, the before, the going, the slow transfer. When I meet my readers, I often tell them, or write in book dedications, that the most important thing about travelling is being on the road, not reaching your destination.

The Sherpa with a grand piano, or ‘traveller’ versus ‘tourist’

They say travelling is very simple and easy now, accessible and affordable to everyone. I have friends who go to the most far-flung corners of the world, including New Zealand, Swaziland and Patagonia. But are they travelling, even if they ride across the pampas on horseback?

I doubt it. When I’m preparing for each trip, I read innumerable accounts of such exploits on the internet. The level of ignorance about the place the person has gone to is staggering. But does he need to know more? Of course not. People are free to do as they like. But they can’t say they’re travelling. What they’re indulging in is tourism!

A PE teacher from Świdnik rides his motorbike solo all the way across Siberia to Magadan in Kolyma – an extraordinary exploit, but the question is, what for? For nothing. For pleasure, because he likes riding his motorbike, and here on the Eurasian continent that’s the furthest you can go.

But he too is a tourist, as are the clients of all those adventure travel agencies called things like ‘Tingling Spine Trips’ or ‘Cupful of Adrenaline’. For these companies nothing is impossible. After all, tourists are taken up Mount Everest, or sent off to the North or South Pole. A good Sherpa can carry a grand piano up Everest. There is no limitation – not even disability disqualifies you. Sightless or legless tourists have conquered the world’s highest peak. You can sail down the Amazon on a raft, ski across Greenland, cycle over the Gobi Desert (I have this particular exploit to my credit), kitesurf across the Red Sea or swim the Bering Strait, and you’ll still just be a tourist. Because if you ask these people why they go to the Poles, they’ll reply: to conquer them.

What for? They’ve already been conquered. So what’s the difference between a traveller and a tourist? The objective. The traveller is a geographer, geologist, cartographer, missionary, reporter, film-maker, naturalist, or glaciologist who has been commissioned to research the rate at which the glaciers are melting in the Pamir range. The traveller goes abroad for a reason. The tourist goes because he likes going, out of curiosity. And thus for no reason.

All the travel festivals, of which we have at least a dozen in Poland, and I’ve even been to some, should be called tourist fairs, because all their participants’ incredible expeditions and exploits are frankly quite pointless.

The bike and the estate car, or give luck a chance

Your form of transport – that is one of the most important decisions an itinerant reporter has to make. The subject you’re working on determines the way you’re going to have to move about in the field. And vice versa – your form of transport will have an effect on the sort of material you gather.

The rules are quite simple. The more outlandish your idea, the more likely it is to happen. Sometimes my dear colleagues at Gazeta Wyborcza’s foreign correspondence section raise an uproar, crying: ‘It’s just not possible!’ And that makes my blood boil, because I wouldn’t be going to the other end of the world if my idea were impossible; so I come up with a bicycle, hitchhiking, a canoe, or else I buy an old jeep to make the possible happen – in an ordinary way, any old way, by making something out of nothing. I do all this purely to give luck a chance, to get it to start working.

Małgorzata Szejnert, who for many years was my boss and mentor at the newspaper’s reportage section, used to say a reporter who has no luck shouldn’t really be in this profession. So I do everything I can to improve my luck.

And I must admit you get the most luck (or at least some) on a bike. It’s the best form of transport for a reporter. It only has one drawback, which is that it’s slow. In a country as big as China, for instance, it didn’t work for me, because I had too little time to do my job, to gather material. I was always behind.

But apart from that, the bike has nothing but advantages. Best of all, you don’t miss anything, not a single apricot – in Uzbekistan they dry them on the asphalt. You can’t miss anything because you’re going so slowly. With full saddlebags, a tent, and some supplies of food and water your speed is at best 20 kilometres per hour. You only have to stop pedalling and put a foot on the ground, and people spring up around you. It’s always like that. Then they start asking questions, you patiently answer them, and when they ask what now, you say you have to find a place for the night. In Central Asia there has never been an occasion when somebody hasn’t shouted: “Come and stay at my place!” Can anything better happen to a reporter? Before bed, we have supper together, then we chat away half the night, if not the whole night, and by morning I’m a local. I know all about this town, village or district.

On the other hand a car is wonderful, because it gives you an incredible sense of freedom. You can move about the entire country at the speed of light and nobody can stop you, and you also have a roof over your head. I love to sleep in my old Volvo. Of course, a reporter should have a big estate car, big enough to unroll a mattress and stretch out comfortably even though you’ve got a bike next to you in summer and a pair of skis in winter. I once wrote a long article about the Suwałki region of north-eastern Poland, but there was such a big dump of snow that I could only get about the place on cross-country skis.

I love this dog’s life. When I’ve got a topic I can cover at home, meaning in Warsaw or somewhere in Poland, I always choose the smaller places – Łomża, Krasnystaw, Czarnków, Dzierżoniów… I love the dog’s life, hotels, roadside bars, and inns. I love being on the move, on the road.

• You can download an alternative and larger version of the piece here.
• Jacek Hugo-Bader will be talking to Susan Hitch at Oxford Literary Festival about Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland on Friday 28 March, 4-5pm, Christ Church: Festival Room 2. Tickets are £11. Book online and b
  uy the book. 
• This event will be in Polish with translation into English provided by the translator of Kolyma Diaries, Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

The post Once I Was a Dog appeared first on English PEN.

In fact, we ended up going to a meeting with the deputy mayor and the publicity people from his publisher, because the deputy mayor had read the book. She loved it, and was planning to host a book launch and a special edition. So that was a relief. However, forgetting that the beginning of the book had just been published in the Polish edition of Newsweek, Zygmunt then rang the man who runs the archive – central to the plot of the book and housed in the former synagogue – to ask if he could bring me there to show me around. “You might not remember me,” he said politely. “How could I forget you?”came the answer. “I’ve had calls from colleagues all over the country asking how I could let anyone spend all night in the archive!” Something that only happens in the novel, of course. We were told to be there in the next five minutes. It really is a small place, where you keep bumping into the same people, so we were there in no time.

We were met at the door by the archivist, a gaunt man with white hair and a drooping white moustache. As I looked around, I understood why the author wanted me to see this building – it is an extraordinary place, a library housed inside a fine old hexagonal prayer hall. Many of the original features are still there, including an incredible Zodiac painted on the ceiling (with a crocodile for Scorpio and a crayfish for Cancer), gryphons and Hebrew writing on the walls. But the entire space is bizarrely filled with metal shelving on several levels, a sort of scaffolding, crammed with fat parish record books which miraculously survived the war. At the top level of the scaffolding, special gantries, like miniature drawbridges on pulleys, can be lowered to reach the high-up windows, set deep into the building’s thick walls.

As I took photos, the man said to Zygmunt, “So what does a big-city goodbye look like, then?” Zygmunt was puzzled. “There’s an extract from the book on your publisher’s website where it says, ‘The waiter tossed him a small-town goodbye’. People are sensitive about that sort of thing, you know.” “Er, er,” said Zygmunt, “that’s just on the website, not actually in the book.” “And our cleaning lady is very upset,” said the man.

At the start of the book, which was in Newsweek, there is a crucial scene that sets off the whole intrigue and draws the reader inexorably into the plot. The genealogist doing his research in the small hours becomes unnerved by the creepy atmosphere of the archive, and the tension is compounded when he hears a loud crash; it’s just that one of the window gantries has fallen. As he tries to raise it again, he thinks he sees something outside, and approaches the window for a better look; it’s dirty, he can’t see properly, so he opens the window to look out, and sees a ghastly, bloodless corpse shining in the moonlight.

“The window has to be dirty in the book for the purposes of the plot, so the character opens it and looks out,” said Zygmunt. “You’ll have to explain that to Mrs Janeczka!” We were duly marched to a cubby hole under the stairs. The tall man knocked at it importantly. “Mrs Janeczka, it’s the writer fellow from Warsaw!” Out came a small woman in a blue pinny and plum-coloured hair. Without a word, she defiantly pointed her chin at Zygmunt, her stare so stony that he visibly aged down from thirty-five to five. Stammering like a school boy, he tried to explain. “It’s just fiction, I never meant to imply… to cast aspersionson your no doubt impeccable cleaning skills…” “But it’s gone out into the world,” she said.

“Book launch at the Town Hall, reception at the bar, author’s public execution in the Marketplace!” I said as we ran off. Later we learned that a local primary school teacher, who just happened to have the same (not unusual) name as one of the characters in the book, had insisted that the publisher must withdraw and pulp the entire first edition – the pupils had cottoned on to the book character’s nickname: “piczkazasadniczka” – “the principled pussy”. Before the book launch could happen, it was abruptly cancelled; allegedly the bishop had been offended by the book’s criticism of the Catholic church, and the mayor was offended by its suggestion of scams run by the city administration. “But no one was offended because I dragged up the city’s anti-Semitic past,” says Zygmunt. “Perhaps, because I did my best in the novel to point out the path of common sense, to show that both anti-Semitism and mad political correctness are built upon the same hatred.”

Needless to say, it was a bestseller at the local independent bookshop (which features in the book), and eventually Miłoszewski got a reprieve. His author’s event in Sandomierz happened and was very well attended, a huge success and a happy occasion – with no need for the discreet bodyguard offered by his publisher.

About the Author

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her translations of non-fiction include reportage, literary biographies and essays. She also translates poetry and books for children, including illustrated books, novels and verse. She occasionally takes part in translation conferences, reads her work at public events, and interprets for the writers whom she translates at literary festivals. Last year she participated in Translation Nation, a project to teach primary school children the value of knowing languages. She recently mentored a younger translator within a project run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and initiated by the UK Translators Association, of which she is currently a committee member.

A Grain of Truth, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones is published by Bitter Lemon Press.

Entanglement, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones, was published in 2010.

The post No offence meant appeared first on English PEN.