Tongue-Tied Eloquence: Notes on Language, Exile, and Writing

Among many hilarious, outrageous, sublime, crazy, profound, or otherwise memorable scenes that fill the pages of Josef Skvorecky's unparalleled The Engineer of Human Souls, one brief episode seems to me particularly pregnant with meaning. One of the novel's minor characters, Milan, a recent Czech defector granted asylum in Canada, is throwing a housewarming party. Except for his Canadian girlfriend, all the guests are, not unexpectedly, Czech émigrés. On the list of things that are the hardest to translate into another language, jokes come a dose second after rhymed poetry (whereas love entreaties, as Barbara pretends not to realize, are among the easiest, if they require any translation at all). This is particularly true when the jokes are Eastern European, and told anywhere west of the Iron Curtain. Though no intellectual giant, Skvorecky's Milan understands that instinctively and immediately.