Kathryn Dettmer on translating František Halas

Kathryn Dettmer


on translating František Halas


The poems here were chosen from the book Krásné neštěstí (Beautiful Bad Luck – or Unhappiness, depending on how you read it), which was first published in 2006 by one of Halas’s sons, a well-known radio presenter in the Czech Republic. The poems were published for the first time alongside the letters that Halas sent them in, to his wife, between the years 1928 and 1939. None of her correspondence is included in the volume.

I chose both poems because they delighted and challenged me. The first thing I discovered is that making things rhyme in Czech is much easier than in English. I was only able to preserve the rhyme in “Whispered,” but since Halas was often accused of not being poetic enough, I figured he would not mind.

about the author

František Halas was born in Moravia in 1901 (when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died in 1949. He was an active member of the communist Czech resistance to the Nazis and wrote for the illegal communist newspaper, Rudé Pravo. When he died, he was a celebrated poet, an editor at Orbis Publishing House, and the head of the writers‘ union of the Ministry of Information. His poetry, however, was lyrical in nature, eventually leading to a falling out with the communist regime. He was not dialectic enough for communist tastes. During the Prague Spring of 1968, one of his sons, Ludvig Kundera (father of writer Milan Kundera), and others published a book that revived interest in Halas’s early lyric poetry.

Milan Kundera puts Halas’s poems in the hands of the main character of the novel The Joke (Žert), which is how I was introduced to Halas. The protagonist wallows in the poems because he has been exiled for a bad joke. He uses them to seduce a girl, who is happier to hear them than she is with his physical advances. Halas’s poems are melodramatic and strange — my favorite kind of love poem.

about the translator

Kathryn A. Dettmer is an adjunct lecturer and instructor of French at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Widener University. As a Peace Corps volunteer, she had the luck to learn Czech in a castle located in the spa town of Poděbrady before teaching English in an academic high school in Valašské Klobouky. She is currently translating a YA novel by Véronique Tadjo from French.

photos by Kathryn Dettmer