The Magnificent Mandarin - Ruritania's engagement with China

Ruritania's engagement with "The Orient" stretches back to before the "Marauding Mongols" who may have become Magyars in Hungary as early as the eleventh century. The Slavs preceded them with their consonant clusters in earlier "migrations". Marco Polo's travels were transcribed with varying degrees of accuracy into the Ruritanian vernacular languages in the later middle ages and in the nineteenth century, the Oriental Institute was established in Prague.

Many of the region's twentieth century avant garde had more than a passing acquaintance with notions of the Orient. Egon Bondy studied Chinese philosophy from Tao to Mao and wrote extensively on the topic. However, it was his poem "Podivuhodný mandarin" which associated notion of the orient more closely with "underground" or avant garde thinking in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s and 1980s when The Plastic People of The Universe set the poem to music. "Podivuhodný mandarin" is usually translated as "Wonderous Madarin" in English, though the adjective "podivuhodný" can be rendered as "miraculous", "magnificent" or even "admirable".

Bondy's "Podivuhodný mandarin" bears a striking resemblance to the Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin [Marvellous Mandarin]" (1916) which, in turn, was turned into a "one act pantomime ballet" composed by Béla Bartók which premiered in November 1926 in Cologne, Germany. There, it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned on moral grounds.

Béla Bartók's new music fared much better at its launch in Prague however, but the mandarin character remains uncomfortable and his representation says more about those engaging with him than the mandarin himself.

Lengyel's mandarin is a wealthy and exotically-dressed user of prostitutes who ends up murdered by the gang of beggar-pimps. It is an uncomfortable representation describing exploitation in many voices. Bondy's poem is shorter and his mandarin more ambiguous; representing lust and greed, the poem describes the destruction of those seeking to profit from the mandarin. It ends with

...impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin.

Quotes from Bondy's poem and its precursor, Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin", were strangely absent from public forums on the western border of Ruritania two weeks ago when President Xi of China visited Prague.

Those more interested in the Ruritanian Gothic end of world culture than post-colonial criticism could do worse than engaging for a few minutes with those Plastic People from Bohemia and Moravia who turned Bondy's poem into a song in the early 1970s translated by a certain blogger into the English rhyming couplets show below:

Wondrous Mandarin                                                                        
 
Just spread your legs out, open wide                                                     
and swallow that wondrous mandarin inside

Dress yourself in vanity-guilt satin                                          
to feel close to the wondrous mandarin

With your head, dark eyes and blood pounding,                
craving the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Many times you’ll just want to give in                                    
because he wasn’t the wondrous mandarin
           
Then at forty, impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Subversion and Laugher: Growing up under Socialism in the 1970s and 1980s

 

Next week, the marvelous urban anthropologist Pavla Jonssonová will be joined by the author Jiří Pehe, academic Martin Machovec and poet Tomáš Míka to celebrate childhood and growing up in "socialist" Czechoslovakia in the1970s and 1980s.

Expect subversive insight and laughter!

Kytice fan Helen Oyeyemi speaks about Prague

The Ruritanian was distracted on 2 March when the Lenny Letter arrived however, no worry, we received a reminder that Helen Oyeyemi had been interviewed about traveling away from and then finding a home in Prague and even making an effort with the Czech language. Read all here

Helen revealed her love of Susan Reynold's translation of Erben's Kytice in 2014 in the New York Times. When asked what was the best book she had read lately, the answer was "I don’t really know how to describe these stories, except that most of them are profoundly strange, with outcomes that you shrink from rather than anticipate, and so you simply pause from time to time to make peace with your goose bumps. The very particular rhythm of the verse contributes to its effect, which makes the translation all the more impressive."

Ever since, the Jantar team have held a soft spot for Helen Oyeyemi and eagerly look forward to her new collection of short stories, "What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours". Who knows what surprises are in store there...

A Kingdom of Souls - Book Review

  A Kingdom of Souls - Book Review

A Kingdom of Souls by Daniela Hodrová, translated by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol. Jantar Publishing, 2015, 200 pages.

Literary fiction from the Ruritanian lands has many literate and generous reviewers. Among the most famous, literate and widely read online is Michael Orthofer who recently published his own thoughts on Daniela's first novel, A Kingdom of Souls. His review is so compelling that it is very difficult to improve upon his opening paragraphs. I use purple on purpose:

A Kingdom of Souls is the first in a Prague-trilogy, the novel itself dated: "December 1977-October1978, June 1984" but only published after the fall of the Communist regime. Its prime locale and vista is the Olšany cemetery -- or at least a building opposite it, specifically a fifth floor apartment -- but even as much of the action is focused here it is a sweeping novel of Prague, and the modern Czech experience, since the Nazi occupation. It begins with one character dead(-but-not-entirely-departed), a presence in the pantry of that fifth floor apartment -- and he is soon joined by others, the small chamber eventually getting quite crowded. In a A Kingdom of Souls death isn't a complete release, and the dead figure just as much as the living.
       There are several prominent characters in this novel of criss-crossing stories, but the central one is young Alice Davidović, longing and waiting for her beloved, Pavel Santner. But as the novel opens Pavel Santner had left with a transport two weeks earlier, and the possibility of their reunion seems slight; Alice never entirely gives up hope -- and yet also does so almost immediately, in shocking fashion. It is the time of the Second World War; Alice's family is Jewish; they too "were to join a transport" .....
       Hodrová's novel is one of history, and characters whose stories are not fixed and definitive, not absolute (so also in the dead continuing to be very real presences, even if on an entirely different plane). As she writes at one point in the narrative:

That's how it happened, but perhaps it happened somewhat differently.

Alice is a character of Greek epic proportions both tragic and comic. She "leaves" in the opening paragraph but remains observing and participating, not only in this novel and the remaining two in the trilogy, but Daniela's entire literary output of ten novels to date. Her voice is given particular resonance when read aloud by one of her translators, Véronique Firkusny as she did on Radio Prague last year. In fact, the whole interview is fabulously interesting and possibly even more compelling that Orthofer's languid prose.

The novel was also reviewed very positively by the Times Literary Supplement and its gradual but positive beautiful impact on the English literary perception of Prague is noted with great happiness by the author and publisher. I began quoting Michael Orthofer and will now end with his his summary:

A Kingdom of Souls is a dark and elusive novel, but it is also seductive. Hodrová's precise expression (in this fine translation) and unexpected perspectives make for an impressively disturbing, compelling text.