Bohumil
Hrabal
Rambling On:
An Apprentice’s
Guide to the Gift
of the Gab
Translated by David Short
K A R O L I N U M P R E S S
Bohumil Hrabal R
ambling On
Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal’s Kersko.
Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet-led
invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they
were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s.
This edition features the original, uncensored versions
of those stories—we have sought to preserve the author’s
original intention. Hrabal’s narrative technique and deeply
elaborate imagination is unique. His short stories seem
to be like fragments of everyday life and have a deep core
of general humanity and as such they call for no further
comment and can be read for the sheer pleasure of it.
These tales are humorous and surreal.
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Rambling on: An Apprentice’s Guide
to the Gift of the Gab
Short Stories
Bohumil Hrabal
Cover illustration by Jiří Grus
Designed by Zdeněk Ziegler
Set by Karolinum Press
Text © 2016 by Bohumil Hrabal – heirs, c/o DILIA
and Bohumil Hrabal Estate, Zürich, Switzerland
Translation © 2016 by David Short
Epilogue © 2016 by Václav Kadlec
ISBN 978-80-246-3286-5
ISBN 978-80-246-3874-4 (online : pdf)
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Charles University
Karolinum Press 2018
www.karolinum.cz
ebooks@karolinum.cz
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A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) is one of the most striking
of modern Czech prose-writers; alongside Milan Kundera
and Jaroslav Hašek he is also one of the most widely trans-
lated Czech authors (a large proportion of his works has
appeared in English, and the most renowned have been
translated in up to 30 other languages).
University educated Hrabal took up a range of jobs
(copyist, warehouseman, railway linesman and many oth-
ers) which equipped him with a wide fund of experience on
which to draw in his way of writing.
Hrabal’s oeuvre is conspicuous for its heterogeneity,
from his early verse in the 1930s to various prose forms in
which he ‘experimented’ with language. He made a name
for himself with collections of stories A Pearl at the Bottom
(1963) and Palaverers (1964). Genuine renown followed with
the novella Closely Watched Trains (1964; the screenplay de-
rived from it won the 1967 Oscar for best foreign film); the
story of a small railway station during the German occupa-
tion. In the early 1970s Hrabal found himself on the list of
proscribed authors, though the period did give rise to such
works as Cutting it Short (1974) and The Little Town Where
Time Stood Still (1974), which drew heavily on his personal
past, especially his childhood and the places where he grew
up. Like these two works, others could also appear only in
the underground Petlice or Expedice series; they included
I Served the King of England (1971) and Too Loud a Solitude
(1977) and carried no information that might have identified
him as author. After 1975 some works could be published
‘officially’, if on condition of a measure of (self-)censorship.
In works that continued in the previous general vein there
is an intensification of autobiographical reflection, as in the
trilogy In-house Weddings, Vita nuova and Gaps, from the late
1980s onwards Hrabal focused chiefly on shorter genres –
feuilletons, commentaries and brief essays.
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I dedicate this translation first and foremost to the memory
of my good friend and fellow-translator of B. Hrabal
James Naughton, who sadly died just weeks before this
volume saw the light of day, and also to the memory
another of our colleagues, Michael Henry Heim.
ds
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In a lightweight play one may find
some most serious truth.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
philosopher of the Late Baroque
Essential to playing is freedom.
Immanuel Kant,
philosopher of the Enlightenment
When you’re pissed, Kilimanjaro
might even be in Kersko.
Josef Procházka,
roadmender and my friend
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1 T H E S T B E R N A R D I N N
WHENEVER I PASS
Keeper’s Lodge, a restaurant in the
forest, I always see, lying there on the apron, the patio out-
side the entrance, where in summertime patrons sit at red
tables and on red chairs, a huge, wise St Bernard dog, and
the patrons either stepping over it, or, if they’ve ever been
bitten by a dog, preferring to look away and walk round it,
their peace of mind restored only after they’ve sat down
inside the restaurant, but if the St Bernard were to be lying
inside the restaurant, these timorous patrons would rather
sit outside on the red chairs, even on a cold day. No St Ber-
nard ever did lie here, and probably never will, but my
St Bernard will lie there for as long as I live, and so the
St Bernard and I, outside the Keeper’s Lodge restaurant in
the forest, we two are coupled wheelsets… It was way back
when my brother got married and had a haulage business,
driving his truck and taking things wherever anyone need-
ed, but the time came when a private individual wasn’t
allowed to drive on his own account any more, and so my
brother, his private company having been shut down, was
out of a job. And because he was jealous, so madly jealous
that his wife wasn’t allowed to have a job lest anyone else
look at her, he suddenly got this weird idea that my sister-
in-law’s gorgeous figure couldn’t be exploited anywhere
better than in catering. And if catering, then it had to be
the Keeper’s Lodge forest restaurant. And if the Keeper’s
Lodge, then the place should be made into a real pub for
lorry-drivers and foresters, locals and summer visitors.
About that time, the manager’s job at the Keeper’s Lodge
fell vacant and my brother did his utmost to make the
restaurant his. And in the evening, he and Marta would sit
for hours, and later on even lie in bed, weaving an image of
an actual Keeper’s Lodge, a fantasy restaurant whose décor
they carried on planning even in their dreams or when half-
asleep. When my cousin Heinrich Kocian heard about it,
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he’s the one who’d risen highest in our family because he
thought he was the illegitimate scion of Count Lánský von
der Rose, wore a huntsman’s buckskin jacket and a Tyrole-
an hat with a chamois brush and green ribbon, he turned
up at once, drew a plan of the Keeper’s Lodge restaurant
and made a start on the décor with some rustic tables of
lime wood, tables that he would scrub with sand once a
week and with glass-paper once a year, around the tables
he drew what the heavy rustic chairs would be like, and on
the walls, which were decked with the antlers of roebuck
and sika deer shot long before by Prince Hohenlohe, the
feudal lord of the line that had owned these forests for
several centuries, he added a couple of wild boar trophies.
And cousin Heinrich decided there and then that speciali-
ties of Czech cuisine would be served, classy dishes that
would bring the punters in because out on the main road
there’d be signboards with the legend: Three hundred me-
tres from the junction, at the Keeper’s Lodge, you can enjoy
a mushroom and potato soup fit for a king, Oumyslovice
goulash or pot-roast beef with stout gravy. My brother and
sister-in-law were over the moon and the Keeper’s Lodge
was like a padlock hanging from the sky on a golden chain.
But even that was not enough for cousin Heinrich. He in-
sisted that any decent restaurant should have a corner in
the kitchen set aside specially for regulars and any other
patrons worthy of the distinction. So he consented to pur-
chase six baroque or rococo chairs and an art nouveau
table, which would always have a clean cloth, and that was
where the regulars and any guests of honour would sit. This
rococo corner so excited my brother and sister-in-law that
thereafter they wore blissful smiles and they would drive
out every day to check on the painters’ progress in the
kitchen and dining area of the Keeper’s Lodge, the painting
jobs seeming to them to be taking an unconscionably long
time and they wanted the painting completed overnight, as
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fast as their own dream of the Keeper’s Lodge had been.
And when they saw all the outdoor seats lined up in the
garden of the Keeper’s Lodge under the band-stand, nothing
could stop them having all those night-time visions and
dreams of the garden restaurant by night, all the tables
painted red, all the red chairs in place round the tables on
the lawn, with wires strung between the oak trees and
Chinese lanterns hanging from them, and a quartet playing
discreetly and people dancing on the dance-floor, my broth-
er pulling pints and the trainee waiter hired for Sundays
serving the drinks in full French evening dress, and my
sister-in-law would be making the Oumyslovice goulash and
the pot-roast beef with stout gravy, and the patrons would
be enjoying not just tripe soup but also the regal mushroom
and potato soup. One day, cousin Heinrich Kocian turned
up, joyfully waving the bill for the six chairs which he’d
bought for a song, and when he and my brother went to
have a look how the painting of the walls and ceilings of
the Keeper’s Lodge was progressing and when my brother
confided that he’d further enhanced the woodland restau-
rant with a garden and dance floor, our cousin said that in
this corner here there’d also be a barbecue smoker, where
spiral salamis and sausages would be heated up and uncurl
over hot coals and he himself would take charge of it at the
weekends, despite being the illegitimate son of Count
Lánský von der Rose. And my brother and sister-in-law were
happy, spending the happiest years of their marriage forev-
er moving chairs around and manically seeking ways to
make the restaurant even more beautiful and agreeable.
And so it came to pass that when I heard about it and when
I saw the Keeper’s Lodge forest restaurant for myself, I said,
or rather casually let drop, that what the kind of beautiful
restaurant that my brother and his wife wanted to create
out of this lonely building in the forest needed was a nice,
big, well-behaved dog, a St Bernard, lying outside the en-
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trance. And at that moment nobody spoke because cousin
Heinrich was coming to the end of his story of how the
Prince von Thurn und Taxis had taken him in his carriage,
which had been waiting to collect him off the evening ex-
press, to his palace at Loučeň, and when the coachman
jumped down from his box to open the door, the prince
exclaimed: ‘Johan, you’re barefoot! You’ve drunk your boots
away!’ And the coachman explained tearfully that he’d had
to wait so long for the later express that while he had in-
deed drunk away his boots at the pub by the station, he had
salvaged the Prince’s reputation by blackening his feet with
boot polish… and as our cousin finished this story about
his friend, the Prince von Thurn und Taxis, and having made
it plain that when such important personages as the Prince
von Thurn und Taxis are spoken of a respectful silence is
called for, he asked, though he’d heard full well, what I’d
said. And I repeated that such a beautiful restaurant in the
woods should have a well-behaved St Bernard lying outside
the door. And my brother watched our cousin, as did my
sister-in-law, almost fearful, but quite soon our cousin’s face
broadened into the smile he would smile as he envisioned
the future, looking far ahead, and at the end of this vision
lay St Bernard’s very own St Bernard with its kindly fur-
rowed brow, which thus became the final full-stop, indeed
keystone of the entire conception of what the Keeper’s
Lodge restaurant in the woods was going to be like. At the
admin headquarters of the Co-op, which the restaurant in
the woods nominally belonged to, they had nothing against
the young couple’s interest in the place, saying they were
even pleased because managers as well-versed in book-keep-
ing as Marta were far to seek. And so our cousin fetched
the six rococo chairs, my brother cleared a corner in their
existing flat, cupboards pushed together, settee out into the
corridor, and there and then, under the watchful gaze of
cousin Heinrich Kocian, they set the chairs out as they were
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going to be in the Keeper’s Lodge forest restaurant. And
they put a cloth on the table and my brother opened a bot-
tle of wine, and the glasses clinked in toasts to such a fine
beginning, since there was no putting it off. And as Heinrich
sat there in his Tyrolean hat, one leg across the knee of the
other, sprawled out, he started on about the time when,
following Prince Hohenlohe, Baron Hiross became the own-
er of the forest range within which the Keeper’s Lodge lay,
and how one day he’d been staying with him and had per-
sonally bagged a moufflon at the upper end of Kersko, at a
spot called Deer’s Ears. “But that gamekeeper Klohna!”
cousin Heinrich started to shout, “the tricks he played on
the baron! I’m sure you know that aristocrats, when their
gun dog gets too old, they just do away with it! And so the
baron gave the word for his setter to be disposed of and
Klohna duly shot it. But the dog was a handsome beast
and the gamekeeper fancied it and duly skinned it. And
after he’d cut off its head and buried it along with the skin,
the landlord of the restaurant on the Eichelburg estate,
close to where there’s that sawmill, near where the Kersko
range ends, where there used to be that spa where Mozart
once took a bathe, the landlord asks, ‘What’s that hanging
there?’ And the gamekeeper said it was a moufflon. So
having given him two thousand for it – it was early on
during the Protectorate – the landlord marinated the mouf-
flon and because I was visiting Baron Hiross along with a
number of aristocrats, he, the Baron, booked a sumptuous
dinner at that restaurant on his estate, which specialised
in game dishes, and sumptuous it was; for starters: sal-
picón, turtle soup, and I’ve never ever tasted such fantastic
sirloin as on that occasion,” cousin Heinrich said, sipping
his wine and smoothing the tablecloth... and my brother
and sister-in-law envisaged this corner in the Keeper’s
Lodge and looked forward to having cousin Heinrich there
to hold forth and divert the regulars and the better class of
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patrons... “…but when the Baron came to pay, and he paid
sixty thousand, because afterwards we drank only cham-
pagne and cognac, we all asked what kind of sirloin it had
been, and the landlord said it was moufflon. And then they
conveyed us to our various homes near-dead, because in
aristocratic circles it is the done thing to render oneself
unconscious with the aid of champagne and cognac, and
Baron Hiross at once leapt into his britschka and careered
off back to his gamekeeper’s cottage, where he started
bellowing at the gamekeeper, the latter in his long johns,
having already gone to bed: ‘Klohna, you’ve got poachers,
d’you know what we’ve just feasted on? Moufflon! I’ll see
you sacked!’ Baron Hiross ranted… and so Klohna had to
get down on his knees, swearing that he was a faithful
guardian of the forest, and that what they’d just feasted on
wasn’t moufflon, but his lately shot gun dog… And Baron
Hiross, just as the Prince von Thurn and Taxis had forgiven
his coachman after the coachman had drunk away his
working boots, the baron said: ‘So I’ve actually gorged my-
self on my own dog mas querading as moufflon and paid for
it twice over...’” Then my cousin turned to the newspaper
and my brother and sister-in-law buffed the arms of the
chairs with polish to bring them up to such a fine shine that
their image of the corner for regulars in the Keeper’s Lodge
became one with reality. And suddenly cousin Heinrich
whooped: “Right, mes enfants, here it is: For sale: a St Ber-
nard dog, to a good home only. Price negotiable. Gel.” He stood
up, pulled on his buckskin gloves with a small shot-hole in
the top side and said: “I’m off to get that St Bernard. If the
corner with its baroque chairs is ready and waiting, let’s
have the St Bernard ready and waiting as well.” Next day,
my brother and sister-in-law not having slept that night,
cousin Heinrich Kocian arrived, and that he was a very
small cousin we knew – whenever he was about to eat a
frankfurter, it would hang down to his knees before he’d
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taken the first bite – and so from a distance it looked as if
he was leading a small cow. When he reached the house,
my brother thought he was leading a big calf, a young bull-
ock. But it was the St Bernard. “Six hundred crowns he cost,
the owner’s a writer!” he shouted excitedly, “and he’s called
Nels! The author’s name’s Gel!” Nels was a handsome beast
with a washing-line round his neck, secured with the writ-
er’s dressing-gown cord, and the dog instantly made himself
at home, lying down on the cement floor to cool off, and the
way he lay there was exactly as if he were practising for
how he was going to lie outside the entrance to the Keeper’s
Lodge restaurant. And cousin Heinrich sat down on a roco-
co chair, legs crossed, in his Tyrolean hat, and with one
sleeve rolled slightly back he reported how the writer had
made him welcome and explained that the main reason he
was selling the dog was because he loved him, but Nels
loved his young wife much more, so whenever he laid a
hand on her, the dog would bowl him over and growl into
his face, so he had grown into a disturber of conjugal bliss,
and that was why he was selling him. And he had immedi-
ately handed over the dog’s pedigree and here it all was:
Nels was famous, a descendant of the short-haired St Ber-
nards of the St Gothard Pass and his father was thrice best
of breed at the Swiss national dog show, and his mother
had come from the St Gothard hospice itself... And cousin
Heinrich added the dressing-gown cord to the bill, because
Nels had grown up indoors and so in lieu of a lead Mr Gel
the writer had let him have the dressing-gown cord for the
journey. And then Heinrich left and Nels remained in
the house. And so the day came when my brother and sister-
in-law went to the Co-op offices to pick up their deed of
appointment to the Keeper’s Lodge inn in the forest range
of Kersko. But the manager told them that, regrettably, the
licensee who had been at the inn before had had second
thoughts and decided to stay on, but that there was a pub
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Document Outline - Cover
- About the author
- 1 The St Bernard Inn
- 2 A Moonlit Night
- 3 Mr Methie
- 4 A Feral Cow
- 5 A Grand Piano Rabbit Hutch
- 6 Jumbo
- 7 Mazánek’s Wonder
- 8 The Snowdrop Festival
- 9 Friends
- 10 Fining Salami
- 11 Leli
- 12 Beatrice
- 13 Lucy and Polly
- 14 The Feas
- 15 Ionic Man
- 16 Hair Like Pivarník’s
- 17 The Maid of Honour
- 18 Adagio Lamentoso
- 19 An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab
- Afterword
- Translator’s Notes
- Content
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