[Karolinum Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Czech by Mark Corner
Without warning, an intrepid servant named Saturnin decides to move himself and his new master out of the latter’s “small, peaceful flat” in Prague and onto a houseboat on the River Vltava. His master, the novel’s narrator, receives the news quietly: He downs a few cognacs and takes a wistful look at his old apartment. Soon, he is literally swept away from his comfortable life by Saturnin’s machinations. In one of the narrator’s frequent, mysterious asides, he reflects after the move that “If you live peacefully like an ordinary and sober member of the community, you do not exactly inspire your friends and acquaintances with a wish to find out how you would behave if attacked by a raging buffalo.” We never get to see how the narrator would behave in such a situation—there are no raging buffalo in Saturnin. There’s an escaped lion, but before the narrator even encounters it, the lion falls asleep. As in so much of this novel, seemingly wild situations never completely manage to escape the ordinary and sober.
Perhaps precisely because of its tepid adventurousness, Saturnin is recognized as a classic of Czech literature. Among radio plays, television scripts, short stories, and other novels, it is the one enduring work by Zdeněk Jirotka (1911–2003), the work his popularity is based on. Re-released this year in a new edition translated by Mark Corner (who has previously translated several works of twentieth-century Czech fiction), the novel was so successful on its publication in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia that it freed Jirotka from his bureaucratic job to write mostly comic prose full-time. The breezy, episodic novel is narrated by a young, upper-middle-class man in Prague, who hires the titular Saturnin to be his servant or, as the book puts it, a “gentleman’s gentleman.” Saturnin wants his master to be an adventurer, but he doesn’t merely plan or dream: He acts on his fantasies, creating situations that force his master out of his banal existence and into the unexpected. Besides the unnamed narrator and Saturnin, there’s a money-hungry aunt who speaks only in proverbs, an annoying cousin with a bad mustache, an opinionated doctor, a grandfather drawn to jujitsu, and a smart and daring modern woman.
This slew of eccentric characters are given to long-winded asides about modern life that give the novel a conversational appeal, as if their chatter was the kind you’d hear among a real group of relatives or at any café in Prague. The situations they find themselves in are mildly exciting—just novel enough to seem like adventures but not so wild as to be truly dangerous. They move onto the boat, get stranded without electricity at Grandpa’s house, tell outrageous stories, trek through the wilderness, and generally find ways to wreak havoc and pass the time in and around interwar Prague. The outcomes of their actions don’t seem to matter. After an arduous, days-long hike through the wilderness, for instance, the characters arrive back at civilization only to find that, with a comical twist of fate, the flooded bridge that stranded them at Grandpa’s house is already being rebuilt—there was no reason to venture outside in the first place! The novel maintains a happy-go-lucky atmosphere, absurd but not quite nihilistic. Obstacles are games at best and, at worst, mere annoyances. The lightness of the characters’ adventures surely explains part of the novel’s initial appeal during wartime. But this lack of consequence also means that it can be difficult to care about anything that happens.
Thin on details of its urban environment, the novel is set in and around interwar Prague—capital of the newly independent Czechoslovakia, formed after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the city feels more like a vague, airy stage for the characters’ antics, unburdened by history or politics, than a specific place in time. If anything, Jirotka is more interested in the pastoral than in the city. The narrator sometimes provides lyrical descriptions of the bucolic landscape surrounding Prague. Rivers sparkle, brooks babble, silence is ravishing. The description is pleasant but lacks specificity. As the narrator admits at one point, everything around him appears “flat and unreal,” like “stage scenery,” predictably beautiful. Since nothing really sticks in the reader’s mind as a detail of any particular place, real or imagined, the novel attains a lightness without entirely working as escapism: There is no world in the novel to escape to.
Corner’s translation also contributes to the novel’s unmoored feeling—the sense that it isn’t grounded in time or place. While readers outside the Czech Republic often compare Saturnin to P. G. Wodehouse’s fictional servant Jeeves, Czech readers are quick to defend the character and novel against charges of plagiarism or mimicry, claiming the novel as “typically Czech.” Curiously, Corner has made the connection to a British tradition even more explicit by changing all the names to English ones—Catherine, Bertie, Witherspoon, Barbara—so that, while the plot unfolds in and around Prague, the novel almost seems to take place in the UK. Corner wonders in the afterword whether he would retain the names if he translated the novel again; it does seem that this choice would have made the novel feel less weird. In addition to anglicizing the character names, the translation’s Britishness comes through in turns of phrase like “old chap” and “hasn’t the foggiest idea.” Occasionally, scattered relics of Eastern Europe, a samovar for instance, break through. When Grandpa tells a nostalgic story about serving in the army, he leaves the narrator with “the impression that the room quietly reverberated to the sound of the Radetzky march.” The novel exists in a strange universe between the canon of literature set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire or its successor states (novels like Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk or Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March) and a British comedic tradition of writers like Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. But this world feels more piecemeal than absurd, never quite satisfying either reality or the imagination.
Saturnin avoids profundity or deep psychological analysis of the novel’s largely two-dimensional characters. Saturnin himself is a spectral presence in the novel that bears his name: His exploits usually happen out of the narrator’s sight. None of the characters have a distinct voice: Jirotka presents most of what they say as reported speech, rather than as dialogue. When someone raids Grandpa’s larder, for example, the characters debate whether Saturnin is the culprit: “Grandpa told us that he would ask Mr. Saturnin as soon as he got back. Aunt Catherine suggested that it would be better if we didn’t involve the servants in such unsavory matters. . . . My aunt said that no one suspected Saturnin and the whole affair was a storm in a teacup.” The exchange continues like this, with the narrator summarizing each character’s position. As large as their personalities are claimed to be, the characters still seem to exist off stage. And while there are amusing moments in Saturnin, the narrator often buries the humor too deeply in conversation for the situation to really be funny. It’s possible that a lot is lost in translation: The novel is probably funnier in Czech. This is the sense I get from Corner’s afterword, where he alludes to Jirotka’s frequent use of puns, cultural references, and proverbs in the original.
Unlike Jirotka’s clear but banal prose, however, the book’s illustrations by Czech artist Adolf Born have their own distinctive style. Cartoonishly elongated figures wearing bright, whimsical clothing play across the cover and interior pages, giving readers a sense of a romping story inside. A frowning Saturnin in a bowtie and a striped vest lifts a young woman in a polka-dot dress into a fountain. With her mouth agape in a long oval, she looks down at the water, which ripples out from her shoes in light blue watercolor. A grinning cupid statue splashes water across her dress. These illustrations furthered my sense that there must have been some joy in the original Czech that wasn’t coming through in English.
Like the illustrations, Saturnin at its best is lighthearted. The novel diligently avoids taking on the issues of its time—there is no hint of the Nazis or World War II. Instead, Saturnin offers readers a pleasant romp through a familiar nowhere; consequenceless adventures that verge on danger but never meet it face to face; a vague, imagined past before the war. While this near-escapism may have been what Czech readers wanted then (and what Jirotka could get through the censors), the novel ultimately feels empty today. It left me somewhat amused by a series of forgettable surprises. There are funnier comedies, and works of escapism with more richly imagined characters and settings. Maybe this is a novel lost in translation. Or maybe it’s just difficult, heading into 2025, to get behind a novel where anything can happen, and nothing seems to matter.
Noah Slaughter writes fiction and essays, translates from German, and works in scholarly publishing. He lives in St. Louis.
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