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Authors: John Banville
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with cream and griotce.' Serve me
right for asking for an English-language menu. Griotce, by the way, is a cherry liqueur; I have never, so far as I know, tasted
it.
5 Another question not to be asked: does it strike the Czech ear oddly that one of their great national composers should be
called Smetana, which means cream? But then, think of the Russians: i pasternak\ I am told, in English is 'parsnip'.
6 But which looks to me more like a cheerful if not over-bright dog, like the dog of St Wenceslas which the short-story writer
Jan Neruda says is depicted in a painting behind the cathedral's main altar, although I could not find it. And anyway, according
to the history books, Wenceslas wasn't murdered in St Vitus's, or even in Prague, but in a town outside the city, Stara Boleslav.
7 This is the phrase as translated in Ripellino/Marinelli's Magic Prague; Gustav Meyrink's The Golem is available in a somewhat capricious English translation by Mike Mitchell (London, 1995).
8 Tangible indeed is the cubist lamppost in Jungmannovoa fascinating but frankly hideous object designed by Vratislav Hofman in 1913.
9 Milan Kundera, in his novel Ignorance, is awed by these repeating loops:
'The history of the Czechs in the twentieth century is graced with a remarkable mathematical beauty due to the triple repetition
of the number twenty. In 1918, after several centuries, they achieved their independence and in 1938 they lost it.
'In 1948 the Communist revolution, imported from Moscow, inaugurated the country's second twenty-year span; that one ended
in 1968 when, enraged by the country's insolent self-emancipation, the Russians invaded with half a million soldiers.
'The occupier took over in full force in the autumn of 1969 and then, to everyone's surprise, took off in autumn 1989 - quietly,
politely, as did all the Communist regimes in Europe at that time: And that was the third twenty-year span.'
10 The lines by Viktor Dyk are from the poem 'Zerae mluvV (The Land Speaks), translated by Justin Quinn:
- li mne, nezahynu.
-li mne, zahynes!
(If you leave me, I will not die.
If you leave me, you will die!)
11 In a conversation in Paris recently with Henri Cartier-Bresson and his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, I was told
they found Sudek's work 'not human enough'.
2
THRESHOLD
My brief history of the Czech Lands, downloaded from the Internet, opens by observing that the first inhabitants of the region
were prehistoric fish. The anonymous author of this disconcertingly skittish document - why do I think it was written by a
woman? - goes on to note that when the prehistoric oceans dried up, the fish were followed by dinosaurs, mammoths, and, in
due course, Celts. The Celts, that mysterious but ubiquitous people, which some specialists claim never existed, arrived in
the fourth century BC; the Roman name for the area, Boiohaemum, our Bohemia, is said to have derived from the Boii, one of
the Celtic tribes. Presently this race of redheads was displaced by Germanic tribes from the west, and by Romans from the
south, although the latter did not progress much beyond the Danube. Some centuries of apparent inactivity followed, for historians
are largely silent on the period until the sixth century of our era, when the Slavs arrived, and occupied the left bank of
the Vltava, above what is nowHere, by the end of the ninth century, a citadel was established by the first of the, one; this was the original seat of the Pfemysl dynasty and not, so the sometimes censorious Blue Guide scoffingly asserts, the fortress at Vysehrad, 'as legend would have us believe'. In the meantime, Italian, French, German
and Jewish merchants had been setting themselves up on the opposite bank, in the area that is now Noveor New Town; it was connected to the Slavic quarter by a wooden bridge, and must have been a lively spot. In the later 960s
the city was visited by Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, a Spanish Jew dispatched from
right for asking for an English-language menu. Griotce, by the way, is a cherry liqueur; I have never, so far as I know, tasted
it.
5 Another question not to be asked: does it strike the Czech ear oddly that one of their great national composers should be
called Smetana, which means cream? But then, think of the Russians: i pasternak\ I am told, in English is 'parsnip'.
6 But which looks to me more like a cheerful if not over-bright dog, like the dog of St Wenceslas which the short-story writer
Jan Neruda says is depicted in a painting behind the cathedral's main altar, although I could not find it. And anyway, according
to the history books, Wenceslas wasn't murdered in St Vitus's, or even in Prague, but in a town outside the city, Stara Boleslav.
7 This is the phrase as translated in Ripellino/Marinelli's Magic Prague; Gustav Meyrink's The Golem is available in a somewhat capricious English translation by Mike Mitchell (London, 1995).
8 Tangible indeed is the cubist lamppost in Jungmannovoa fascinating but frankly hideous object designed by Vratislav Hofman in 1913.
9 Milan Kundera, in his novel Ignorance, is awed by these repeating loops:
'The history of the Czechs in the twentieth century is graced with a remarkable mathematical beauty due to the triple repetition
of the number twenty. In 1918, after several centuries, they achieved their independence and in 1938 they lost it.
'In 1948 the Communist revolution, imported from Moscow, inaugurated the country's second twenty-year span; that one ended
in 1968 when, enraged by the country's insolent self-emancipation, the Russians invaded with half a million soldiers.
'The occupier took over in full force in the autumn of 1969 and then, to everyone's surprise, took off in autumn 1989 - quietly,
politely, as did all the Communist regimes in Europe at that time: And that was the third twenty-year span.'
10 The lines by Viktor Dyk are from the poem 'Zerae mluvV (The Land Speaks), translated by Justin Quinn:
- li mne, nezahynu.
-li mne, zahynes!
(If you leave me, I will not die.
If you leave me, you will die!)
11 In a conversation in Paris recently with Henri Cartier-Bresson and his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, I was told
they found Sudek's work 'not human enough'.
2
THRESHOLD
My brief history of the Czech Lands, downloaded from the Internet, opens by observing that the first inhabitants of the region
were prehistoric fish. The anonymous author of this disconcertingly skittish document - why do I think it was written by a
woman? - goes on to note that when the prehistoric oceans dried up, the fish were followed by dinosaurs, mammoths, and, in
due course, Celts. The Celts, that mysterious but ubiquitous people, which some specialists claim never existed, arrived in
the fourth century BC; the Roman name for the area, Boiohaemum, our Bohemia, is said to have derived from the Boii, one of
the Celtic tribes. Presently this race of redheads was displaced by Germanic tribes from the west, and by Romans from the
south, although the latter did not progress much beyond the Danube. Some centuries of apparent inactivity followed, for historians
are largely silent on the period until the sixth century of our era, when the Slavs arrived, and occupied the left bank of
the Vltava, above what is nowHere, by the end of the ninth century, a citadel was established by the first of the, one; this was the original seat of the Pfemysl dynasty and not, so the sometimes censorious Blue Guide scoffingly asserts, the fortress at Vysehrad, 'as legend would have us believe'. In the meantime, Italian, French, German
and Jewish merchants had been setting themselves up on the opposite bank, in the area that is now Noveor New Town; it was connected to the Slavic quarter by a wooden bridge, and must have been a lively spot. In the later 960s
the city was visited by Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, a Spanish Jew dispatched from
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