Czech translation lost a legend today. Jan Kantůrek, who brilliantly translated the whole Terry Patchett Discworld series, which is very popular here - thanks to his translation mostly, passed away today.
I met him three years ago, in March, on a con that was mostly Red Dwarf, but also a lot of Discworld. There was a pannel discussion with him. It was also two days after Pratchett died. Kantůrek and Pratchett were very good friends. When he started to talk about Pratchett he started to cry, he couldn’t stop it, we all did cry. Someone gave him a shot of rum, he laughed, drank it and continued to talk. It was so early for him to be talking about Pratchett (after all, he spent years translating him - he did the whole Discworld series!) but he didn’t cancel the meeting with his fans and in the end we all kinda had a therapy, where we processed Pratchett’s death.
One of the interesting things about Kantůrek was, that he couldn’t activelly speak English, but he could translate. Pratechett, of course, was absolutely shocked by that. But when he attended a reading of Kantůrek’s translation and saw that people were howling with laughter in the right places, he knew it is going to be great. They became friends, who couldn’t talk together, but a couple of beers always helped.
Kantůrek had an incredible passive knowledge of English. He was fantastically innovative with neologisms in general, with nouns, adjectives and verbs. If you’ve read Discworld, you know most of the names of places and characters and objects are funny and have a meaning - this is incredibly difficult to translate so it remains the same effect as in the original language. And that was what Kantůrek was fantastic in. His knowledge of Czech was so exquisite that his Discworld translation became a cult thanks to these names.
When I read his translation now, they are not perfect, there are some issues with syntax, etc. and in some cases I can “see” English in the sentence structure. That is also caused by a not very good editor who is suppoed to catch up these things after translation. But the lexical level of the translation is amazing.
Since 1992, Jan Kantůrek translated more than 100 books.
I love how humans have literally not changed throughout history like the graffiti from Pompeii has people from hundreds of years ago writing stuff like “Marcus is gay” “I fucked a girl here” “Julius your mum wishes she was with me” and leonardo da vinci’s assistants drew dicks in their notebooks just for the banter and mozart created a piece called “kiss my ass” so when people wish for ‘today’s generation’ to be like ‘how people used to’ then we’re already there buddy we’ve always been
The Hagia Sophia has inscriptions that were considered sacred for centuries until they were deciphered in the 70s to be Nordic runes saying “Halfdan wrote this”
my old english prof told us that theres a cave in Scandinavia where a viking gratified some runes like 14 feet up on the wall and when they finally reached it all it translated into was “this is very high”
Ancient Shitposting
Now on the History Channel
‘People have literally just always been people’ is genuinely my favorite fact about the world
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BC - 43 BC
“Kate McCormick, Seduced and pregnant by her father’s friend, Unwed she died from abortion, her only choice, Abandoned in life and death by family, With but a single rose from her mother, Buried only through the kindness of an unknown benefactor, Died February 1875, age 21, Victim of an unforgiving society, Have mercy on us.”
