“A Theory of Strangeness” author Pavla Horáková ****************************************************************************************** * ****************************************************************************************** Former CU graduate and acclaimed translator on successful new release By Jan Velinger December 21, 2018 Pavla Horáková is well-known in literary circles as a respected translator, reporter for C author. Her new novel called Teorie podivnosti (A Theory of Strangeness) received very positive re become a much sought-after title this holiday season. The adventures of the main character and narrator Ada, a young researcher at the fictional Interdisciplinary Human Studies, are a blast to follow and you’ll never look at the area o the same way again. 14min.57sec. I met with the author recently to ask about how the book came together, beginning with her both a translator and journalist. “As a translator you spend much more time with a given book than any other reader because intimately with it for many months, you get to see the works, you see how the author works characters and the plot and so on. Somehow, I guess, you learn a bit by osmosis – it gets somehow. After having translated some 20+ books, I think I learned a lot subconsciously - trade. “Likewise, being a reporter later also had a crucial impact on me because all of a sudden, prior writing experience, I was thrown in the deep end. I had to put together a story, oft something I initially knew little about in a very limited period of time – three hours – a story to an audience that knew very little about the Czech Republic in a language that was taught me to express myself very concisely, to drop all mannerisms, to get straight to the of good punch lines and headlines, etc. “So these two put together were the best ever – or toughest – school of creative writing I You get in a groove: it’s like when you begin going to the gym and after a while you get b at it and it becomes second nature. “That’s it. And there was one more thing which was important for me: after six years at th service of Czech Radio, I left and began working as a reporter in Czech. And having switch felt like I was flying because all the weight of the foreign language disappeared and I wa myself freely in my own language. From then I onwards, I began writing for Czech magazines and it went surprisingly easy. Everything I had done before that had been much more diffic Before we continue with writing, I wanted to ask you about the authors you translated: wer your temperament or your heart? And also, did you ever take a job, maybe a well-known writ clashed – and what did you do then? “I would say that was even most of the time. I never chose my translations and I was alway and usually took it without any emotional preferences. I took it professionally and I woul fact that I never really felt close to the book I translated may have been for the better been too emotionally involved or aesthetically pleased by the book, I would have maybe bee intimidated by it. Maybe I wouldn’t have done as good a job, I dunno, just a guess. “Of course the authors I translated were all respected, distinguished and great and award- their value: Saul Bellow is incredibly intelligent, incredibly smart, Kurt Vonnegut the sa Banks and his famous pun-per-page rate… they all posed different challenges for me but I n to any of the books, I guess. Maybe it is a pity that I couldn’t enjoy the translating as my colleagues who were really in love with ‘their’ authors, but in my case it might have b a healthy distance.” Speaking of Czech Radio, you said you were thrown into the deep end and that often you wou topics. Sometimes you would find your own stories and other times you were given something I know from reading your book that that served as a good breeding ground for ideas later o “It was. The radio station provided a great opportunity to learn new things and gather mat new people, learn about different subjects, all kinds of human enterprise, and it seemed l to use that elsewhere in my own work. That is how my young adult trilogy (about a gang of themselves the Burying Beetles) came together: I had been inspired by real interviews I ha Prague with people who worked at Prague’s Olšany Cemetery. “Similarly, in this novel the institute where the main character works also really exists, some of the research described. There are, in short, a lot of things I found useful from m journalist.” I initially thought that the institute might be a little bit of a one-to-one parody of Cze I learned that it had really existed, in terms of elements like bureaucratic processes and Radio, it turn out, has its own place in the book). So I wanted to ask you what kind of a where these studies were done? And what were some of the studies? “The fictional institute is called The Institute of Interdisciplinary Human Studies and th on which it is based on an actual site in Prague which was part of the Faculty of the Huma carried out a number of really interesting projects: they studied talking parrots or they perceived attractiveness of women at different stages of the menstrual cycle. And when I s character, Ada, I immediately saw her working there. A lot of the research done at the fic was made up in the book, but these examples were real.” What is one example that was made-up? “A study of how mothers and daughters dress alike, whether they pick similar clothes and g haircuts. Or one scientist studies people’s preferences in food. And another studies what Russian as the law of buttered bread [Ed. Note: In English, it is a Murphy’s law] – whethe bread always falls face down when dropped – on the buttered side. He studies these phenome determine whether it is only out perception or whether there is such a thing as a buttered Your book has been described, at least in part, as magical realism. Tied to that are your Ada’s thought processes: the way she goes down the street, what crosses her mind, the way always turning and she constantly formulates different eccentric theories. She is always t this kind of frame whether something would be the interesting subject for research or not. is the town of Šumperk in the Olomouc region which crops up routinely in the news througho that deserves a mention all its own. What is it with that area? It seems like a kind of Ar Triangle or Twilight Zone of the Czech Republic. “I don’t have objective data but even before I began working at Radio Prague, maybe around noticed that strange things were often happening in or around that town! I talked to my da suggested it might just be the local reporter’s slant, or that the person embellished the “But when I began working at the station, I had the wire services open all day in front of it was not one but three regional reporters and the strange stories continued. Not always but natural or unusual phenomena – like a bolt of lightning struck and killed a whole herd icicle fell and killed a person. So I began gathering stories from there and by the time I more than 70 pages worth of reports which became my ‘Šumperk file’. I used many of the new book and chose specific items to kind of reflect what was happening in the plot.” That is interesting – it is too often to be a coincidence – and that was kind of a point w question the reliability of Ada as the narrator… “My view is that none of us are reliable narrators, really. As we know the observer change the effect or result of the experiment. Maybe Ada, or myself, by putting so much emphasis it what it is.” I wanted to ask about the fuzzy area in science. Or what seems akin to magic to us because unrelated and so counterintuitive to our everyday experience. Talk to any string physicist particle behaviour or entanglement and it might as well be 'magic' for most of us. “It is and it isn’t. Each of us, at least once, experiences something that defies logic, t natural laws, but we tend to dismiss these experiences. This couldn’t have happened, this this is in total opposition to the Newtonian or Cartesian model of the universe – it can’t Ada realises is that she has to leave this comfy Newtonian world because there is so much her that defies common sense and she opens herself up to these phenomena. “She tries, in her own way, in her own mind, to merge quantum mechanics with spiritual ide finds out that the what the new sciences says - and what old gurus or spiritual masters sa contradiction, it does not clash. The two can be merged and offer a more fulfilling, free, to look around the world around us.” I first learned you had written the book when I saw a poster for it in the metro, complete photograph and I thought ‘Wow, Pavla, my former colleague from Radio Prague!’ It has becom hits this Christmas. So congratulations! Bceuase of this I wanted to ask about the graphic it is a bold pink and of course you are on the cover. “You are the first to ask about my being on the cover because maybe it is not that usual. originally wanted the cover to be bold and even considered kitsch to offset or be in contr which in English is A Theory of Strangeness (and originally it was supposed to be A Struct Strangeness). We commissioned a graphic designer but didn’t really like the result; then, one of my profile pictures online, sent it to another designer, and overnight she put it t “This was something we would never think of – she put my picture upside down to underline ‘strangeness’ – and we would never have come up with that. Right away we really liked it a with the way it looked and how it had turned out.”