“There have been many attempts to read Bajza’s novel to the end, but even the most eager enthusiasts often struggled with its drowsiness. There were two of us, so we could take turns.”
That is how the beloved comedy duo Milan Lasica and Július Satinský once joked about the first Slovak novel, written by Jozef Ignác Bajza and published in 1784–85, in a play inspired by the book.
The novel — René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences — is daunting from the outset, with a title that feels unwieldy and a language that Bajza invented for himself, somewhere between Slovak and Czech. Add to that a gulf of 250 years, and it is no wonder many readers put it aside. Yet despite these hurdles, Bajza’s novel has found a small but firm place in European literature, and some of his sharpest observations still feel startlingly relevant today.
Bohemist David Short not only managed to read the book, he also translated it. His English edition marks the very first translation of Bajza’s work into a foreign language.
“I actually had a lot of fun”
“It all happened over the last five or six years. Since then I’ve translated a few more books, so Bajza has slipped a little into the recesses of memory. But what I remember most while working on it was the liveliness of his thought. It reminded me of the whimsy you find in Karel Čapek or Jane Austen — which already says a lot about Bajza. What caught my attention was not so much his style as the structure. He wove poems and epigrams into the text, often unexpectedly. Translating it was, to my surprise, great fun. I hope I did it justice,” recalls Short.
The 82-year-old translator, who once taught Czech and Slovak at the University of London before turning to literary translation, now has around forty works of Slovak and Czech literature to his name — with Slovak titles increasingly taking center stage.
Taking on Bajza was no small challenge, even for him. Many Slovaks today would struggle to understand the book in its original form. Short worked from several different versions: a faithful transcription of Bajza’s original, a full modern Slovak edition, and an abridged and updated version.
“My text follows the modernised edition most closely, because it is both reliable and accessible,” he explains.
The English version appeared through Liverpool University Press as part of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series.
The project itself was brought together by literary scholar Dobrota Pucherová of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, along with Erika Brtáňová of the Institute of Slovak Literature. Their edition combines Short’s translation with extensive studies, an introduction, illustrations, and detailed notes.
“I began searching for a translator sometime in 2018,” Pucherová recalls. “The first person I approached gave up after half a year. The text is demanding. Then Júlia Sherwood recommended David Short — and she was right. His background as a Bohemist made Bajza’s Slovak, full of Czechisms, less alien to him. And I think he genuinely enjoyed it. He even added explanatory footnotes as he worked, approaching it with real scholarly passion.”
His bite is poisonous
The novel follows René, the son of a Venetian merchant, and his guide Van Shiphout. Together they set out into the wide world.
René recounts his adventures in Egypt, where he encounters a crocodile whose “bite is poisonous,” tumbles into a pit that turns out to be a trap, and rides a hippopotamus until locals rescue him. He describes the beast as tall and massive as an ox, with teeth like a wild boar.
These are only the beginnings of his misadventures. René is shipwrecked, sold into slavery, and wanders the Orient in search of his sister Fatima. Along the way, he falls in love with Hadixa, a Muslim princess, with whom he exchanges long, sentimental letters.
Lasica and Satinský’s quip about the book’s oddness and verbosity is not unfair. Even in modern Slovak, the novel can feel heavy going: the plot meanders, strange digressions appear out of nowhere, and the sentences sometimes teeter on the edge of intelligibility.
