Authors
Patrik OUŘEDNÍK
The writer, translator and essayist Patrik Ouředník was born in Prague on 23 April 1957. After finishing his basic education he worked as an assistant in a bookshop, an assistant archivist, warehouseman, postman, labourer and ambulance man. From 1974 to 1976 he studied acting and directing at a People’s Art School in Prague. In 1985 he emigrated to France. He translates from French into Czech (Rabelais, Jarry, Queneau, Beckett, Vian and others) and from Czech into French (including Vančura, Hrabal, Holan, Skácel and Holub).
Patrik Ouředník combines academic interests (linguistics, literary theory, the practice of translation) with his own original literary output. In his academic pursuits he rejects the almost traditional Czech university disdain for everyday linguistic usage, while his translations show not just solid literary erudition but also deep multidisciplinary knowledge (sympathy for experimental approaches such as grafting together historical, sociological and psychological interests). These unusual tendencies have resulted in texts in which Ouředník embarks on fresh cliché-free interpretations of material that is usually confined to the rigidly academic domain. In his first book, the lexicological Šmírbuch jazyka českého (Keeping an Eye on Czech Slang and Cant), he explored slang, but not by the conventional method of keeping to strict rules of exposition and a fixed framework of dictionary entries. In his choice of material he relied on his own feeling for language and in some cases on the needs of his work as a translator, and in his interpretations of examples from literature he did not follow a pre-established formal structure, but a subconscious, associative flow. In Aniž jest co nového pod sluncem (And There is No New Thing under the Sun) Ouředník turned to biblical themes and offered the reader ‘A Dictionary of Biblicisms and Para-Biblicisms’, in which he explains phrases still commonly used today in their original biblical context. As the literary historian Alexandr Stich wrote in the preface, however, the point of the dictionary was ‘not just to explain etymology, the history of the words and their connections, but also to offer something like a springboard for further reflection on the role of language in human life and human society. (…) Ouředník’s dictionary can do more than works of this kind usually do, that is, to provide information on the meaning and origin of various phrases, and can contribute to the revival of our forgotten linguistic and cultural experiences’. In addition to producing two linguistically creative collections of verse Anebo (Or) and Neřkuli (Not to Mention), Ouředník has enriched Czech fiction with two experimental works. In the first of these, Rok čtyřiadvacet (Year Twenty Four) he takes up and develops the ‘memory games’ of Joe Brainard and Georges Perec. The basis of these expeditions into the author’s memory are fragmentary recollections conjured up by the formula ‘I recall’. They are snatches of memory from 1965 to 1989, in which the author recalls both moments from his private life and from what are known as ‘major’ historical events. They are sequenced in a way that mimics the patchiness of human ability to store memories, with one of the originally twenty-four records gradually dropped from the twenty-four successive chapters. ‘The filter of memory limits itself to sorting observations which the author links up on the basis of mechanisms other than those that would be required by the political logic or sociological record of the time. Situational cliché, concrete detail, fragments of speech, truisms and tics are viewed through the prism of the authorial subject and the ‘lived experiences’, even if interchangeable in most cases with those of others of his generation, do not represent the whole collective or life under Communism as such’, as Vlastimil Hárl wrote in the afterword. Ouředník’s view thus remains individualized, always intensely distinct, without his expressing a single judgement on the events around him. The period is unmasked here by its own language, suddenly torn out of the communicational context of the times and illuminated under the author’s microscope. Ouředník’s second work of fiction, Europeana offers ‘a concise history of the twentieth century’, as the subtitle puts it, viewed not through any objective lens, but ‘from below’. The book does not respect chronological linearity, does not arrange events in a hierarchy, does not seek a chain of causes and effects, and does not depersonalize history. Instead it is a summary of banalities, putting genuinely ordinary occurrences on the same level as events that brought death to millions of people. It explores the degradation of humanity, swallowed up by the absurd mechanisms of various ideological establishments and betraying its spiritual dimension to godless materialisms. ‘What is the truth? The historical truth of history? The literary truth of the text? The truth of Utopia? The truth of memory?’ – these questions are printed on the jacket of Ouředník’s book, yet they are questions to which the author offers no clear answers, since his mound of facts and texts speak for themselves.
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Deutsch 
Patrik OUŘEDNÍK, Deutsch.doc
En français Patrik OUŘEDNÍK, En français.doc
