A Prague English theater looks back on years of introducing international audiences to the famously untranslatable plays of Czech pseudo-legend Jara Cimrman.
“If you want to understand anything about Czech culture, you should get to know Jara Cimrman,” Emilia Machalova told Brian Stewart over a decade ago.
Despite not speaking or understanding Czech as a British expat, Stewart took his then-girlfriend’s advice – and found himself laughing throughout an old video of Zaskok (The Stand-In) aired on Czech television.
Stewart found the play about a traveling theater company that hires an incompetent retired actor hilarious for its absurdity.
“This famous actor can’t remember which play he’s playing in, can’t remember which character he is playing, and is always getting confused about the situation,” Stewart explains about the character, Prachensky.
This positive introduction to a pillar of Czech humor – just one of many Cimrman plays regularly performed at Prague’s Divadlo Jary Cimrmana (the Jara Cimrman Theatre) for decades – gave Stewart and Machalova the idea of recreating the popular comedies for English audiences.
“Our first goal was that we just wanted to see how an English translation would work with people who understood English, really,” Stewart recalls. “We thought it had great potential.”
Twelve years of performing and six translated plays later, it is safe to say that they succeeded in their goal. The joint effort, which has evolved to include many others interested in pulling off the cultural exchange, resulted in the creation of yet another mainstay in the Prague comedy scene – the Cimrman English Theatre.
The ‘Greatest’
While the English Cimrman troupe of around a dozen actors has 12 years of performances behind it, the fictional Jara Cimrman has been a prominent figure in Czech comedy for decades. Cimrman’s name was first mentioned in October 1966 on the Czechoslovak radio comedy show Nealkoholicka vinarna u Pavouka (The Non-Alcoholic Wine Bar at the Spider), devised by young writers Jiri Sebanek and Zdenek Sverak together with Josef Skvorecky, at the outset of his career as one of the finest Czech novelists of the 20th century.
The group saw greater potential in the character, and came up with the idea of centering a theater around him. The next year, they launched the company with Sverak’s play, Akt (which could be translated as The Act or The Nude). Altogether, Sverak and his regular writing and acting partner Ladislav Smoljak wrote 15 plays about the exploits of Cimrman, who lived a complex life as a brilliant inventor, scientist, playwright, and all-round genius who consistently falls just short. Despite being the first to invent the light bulb, telephone, dynamite, yogurt, and the Panama Canal, he is always late to the patent office and never receives credit.
Typically performed by six male actors – a tradition continued by the Cimrman English Theatre – the plays gained immense popularity among Czechs. Requiring a level of historical knowledge and unseriousness from audiences, Cimrman quickly cemented himself as an icon of modern Czech culture and the embodiment of the famously hard to define “Czech humor.”
Cimrman is today hailed as one of the best Czech playwrights, poets, composers, teachers, travelers, philosophers, inventors, detectives, mathematicians, and sportsmen of the late Austro-Hungarian empire. His feats inspired the 1983 biopic Jara Cimrman Lezici, Spici (Jara Cimrman Lying, Sleeping) and a museum in the northern Czech village of Prichovice that showcases his inventions. And perhaps most impressively, the invented genius received enough write-in votes in a 2005 poll to name the “Greatest Czech” to compete for top spot (he was not listed in the official results).
Sverak, who went on to gain international fame as screenwriter and actor in the Oscar-winning Kolya, has credited Cimrman’s popularity to the small Czech nation’s desire to be more globally impactful. “He advised them [everyone in the world] and advised them well. But he himself never achieved success,” Sverak said during the good-spirited uproar around the character’s eligibility for the “Greatest Czech” honor.
“And that probably encapsulates a complex that we [Czechs] have, in that we’d like to be greater than we actually are.”
Sverak celebrated his 90th birthday on 28 March at the Jara Cimrman Theatre. The celebration was organized by Czech Radio, which aired the very first Cimrman show, and the party was broadcast to more than 180 movie screens across the country, proof of his fellow citizens’ unbounded admiration for the soft-spoken man who has starred in or written dozens of popular movies.
A Matter of Respect
This popular affection for Jara Cimrman helped fuel Stewart’s drive to understand Czechs more deeply. Czechs bring their non-Czech friends to the English-language versions of the plays “to learn about Czech humor,” Peter Hosking, a Cimrman English Theatre cast member, said during a recent roundtable discussion at the Vaclav Havel Library in Prague.
Considering how deeply the Czechs care about Cimrman, Stewart emphasized at the discussion that they had to approach the English adaptations with great care and respect.
He and Machalova first contacted Sverak and fellow founder Smoljak to obtain the rights and permission to begin translation. Once they completed the translation of the first play, Sverak’s daughter, Hanka Jelinkova, weighed in to ensure they remained as faithful to the original as possible.
“Dad was very skeptical, he thought this humor was so tied to Czech culture and language that there was no way of communicating it in another language. But he gave it a chance and asked me to check the script first,” explains Jelinkova.
Translation was only the first step. Finding a producer, venue, costumes, actors, and ultimately an audience followed. After many rejections, Machalova reached out directly to the Jara Cimrman Theatre. The original group agreed to provide both the performance space – the same venue where the original Czech comedies are still performed – and the costumes. The latter, Stewart, says, “magically” fit the English group’s actors perfectly.
A reading in the UK during which “the audience laughed at all the right moments” confirmed that they were on the right track. This positive reaction led to Sverak giving the green light and confirmation that the Jara Cimrman Theatre would produce its first show, 2014’s The Stand-In.
Czechness vs. Cimrmanness
For Stewart, preserving the “Czechness” of the plays is key. As the company’s main translator, he aims to keep the English versions as close to the original as possible, avoiding unnecessary changes. He keeps Czech names and Czech settings, emphasizing that there is no reason to alter them. “There were previous other translations, but they sort of had a different approach,” Stewart says. “They didn’t keep the Czechness thing, and we did, because the Czech aspect is important for the Czech audience.”
In contrast, for Jelinkova – who, after years of working as the theater’s script editor is now collaborating in the translation process together with Stewart – is on what she calls “Cimrmanness.”
This means ensuring that the spirit of Cimrman is preserved in the English versions of the plays; for example, by keeping the close rapport with the audience. “I think that the Cimrman Theatre makes the audience more involved than other comedy forms, as the kind of humor here requires a lot of intellectual interaction. You are part of it, and you enjoy the process,” Jelinkova says.
The result is an English translation that works for an international audience. “I think this actual dual approach works very well. I usually say or explain the lines to Brian in English, he types them out, and we pause whenever a deeper inspection is needed – which is very often,” Jelinkova adds. “We watch the videos from the plays and search the internet for context. Together we try to invent the best-fitting equivalent. Brian decides what sounds the most natural in English.”
As the daughter of one of Cimrman’s creators, Jelinkova is deeply familiar with all the layers of the group’s unique approach to comedy. Her role is to preserve her father’s legacy by checking whether everything aligns with “Cimrmanness.” “I always attend at least one of the rehearsals too, to see how it all works. That’s perhaps why they sometimes call me the ‘Cimrman police.’ ”
Thanks to their direct connection to Sverak, the team is able to consult him whenever the translation requires more significant departures from the original.
Works of Literature
To complicate things, members of the English audience are not necessarily native English speakers. But this does not mean translations are watered down to accommodate them. “Some of the criticisms I think we had was that our English is too complex. And my argument is: it’s a piece of literature,” says Stewart. “I think Sverak and Smoljak wrote it as a piece of Czech literature. So we try to maintain this idea,” he adds. “We’re not writing something at a simple level. It is an intellectual text, and we write it accordingly.”
Jelinkova stresses that while they do “choose an easier or more international word” whenever possible, this is “never at the expense of the humor or quality of the text.”
The team faced a huge challenge. Stewart explains that to pull it off requires knowledge of the Czech language, wordplay, literature, and history. For an international audience unfamiliar with these elements, it is therefore necessary to gradually introduce these references, which eventually lead to the joke.
“In English, we call this seeding. So what you do is you have to plant a little idea here, then you plant it here and you plant it here. And then eventually, when you get to the joke, everybody knows what the joke is about,” Stewart explains.
At other times, when a punchline relies on wordplay, it is necessary to find an equivalent that works in English in a similar way to the original Czech – adapting the linguistic form while keeping the core of the joke intact.
A particular example is in the translation of Dobyti severniho polu (The Conquest of the North Pole), in which a character in the expedition complains about having a “houser,” a Czech word that conveys lower back pain. At least that’s the meaning assumed by the audience and other characters. But it literally means “gander.” Later, the character reveals he has had a real goose hidden under his coat the whole time, as the group starved in the harsh cold.
Jelinkova described how they sought an English idiom that conveys an annoyance but can mean something edible: “After a long time I came up with the idea of a body part that would sound as something to eat: hair/hare. But what with it? Then Brian got it: The complaint will be, ‘My hare’s itching.’ The others will think he is complaining about his greasy hair. We just had to get a rabbit from a toy shop and that was it.”
Alongside that, differences in grammar further complicate the translation process. In Czech, with its flexible syntax, it is often easier to achieve a comedic effect by moving words around in a phrase, whereas this is far more difficult in English, which does not allow changes in word order as freely. “You have to find your ways in English though. Sometimes you need to split the sentence into two. You may change the first one into a question and make the punchline the answer,” explains Jelinkova.
A Cheap ‘McDonaldization’?
Stewart says that despite the English Cimrman troupe’s best efforts, some are hesitant to attend.
“ ‘Ah, it’s not Czech,’ ” he says, repeating a common response. “We had somebody else who said: ‘Oh, this is just’ – and I use it on the website – ‘the McDonaldization of Cimrman.’ ”
“But that’s fair enough, get that,” Stewart says, accepting that some would-be audiences fear the loss of Cimrman’s innate Czechness. To such cavilers, he issues an invitation: “Come tell us. We’ll listen to what you have to say.”
Outside the theater in Prague’s Zizkov neighborhood this past February, hoots and laughter erupted toward the end of an evening show of The Act. Some in the mixed audience of Czechs and non-Czechs were willing to comment.
One younger Czech woman, who had seen the original Czech version of the play but attended the English version because it was cheaper, saw untapped potential. “Maybe some jokes do get lost in transition, but you can also make new ones sometimes or, like, adjust the original ones a bit.”
One Czech couple, also lured by the comparatively cheaper tickets, were more skeptical. They agreed that the translation was effective, but believed it was because this play has fewer references exclusive to Czech culture and history. That made it easier to translate, in their opinion, but they nevertheless thought it was funny.
Among the non-Czechs at the after party was a pair of Greek men who have been fans of Cimrman plays for years thanks to the English Theatre. Both conclude that Cimrman is universal. “I think it’s light enough for anyone to enjoy, it’s not grotesque or rough, but it’s a sweet spot of humor – there are some jokes that are Czech that we don’t get, but most we do,” one of the men said.
One Czech man brought his Swiss friend to the play as a way of immersing him into Czech culture. “I think they actually did a pretty good job. I mean, I can’t say it’s word-for-word, but I think that the spirit was captured there,” he said. His Swiss friend agreed, saying he would be interested in seeing another show.
Laughter Is the Best Medicine
During the roundtable discussion at the Vaclav Havel Library, Stewart and fellow troupe members Adam Stewart and Peter Hosking, aside from the translation issue, discussed the beginnings of the theater and the comparisons between the “intellectual humor” of Cimrman’s plays and the legendary British comedy troupe Monty Python, which also delved heavily into history and literature.
Their dynamic was clearly visible during the discussion as they bounced off each other’s jokes, and recounted funny incidents from rehearsals and performances.
They jokingly say their success lies in staying connected with the audience – and going for beers afterward helps build a community. Stewart describes a recent encounter with a Czech audience member, who was raised on Cimrman, about his experience with the English versions. “He said it was refreshing, because he didn’t have to make any comparisons in his head, he could just watch the play and enjoy,” Stewart recalls.
The Cimrman plays touch on some trans-national comic foundation, Jelinkova muses: “Life is not easy and people are grateful for moments of laughter and good, clever humor.”
When the Cimrman English Theatre performed in the United States, Stewart recalls the audience having little to no knowledge of Cimrman. Yet, the humor and essence of Cimrman was evident in the positive audience response to their performance of The Stand-In.
“If you look at Prachensky in Zaskok, he is pompous, he is arrogant,” Stewart says, repeating the character’s oft-repeated declaration, “I am a very well-known actor.” “And, of course, he can’t remember his lines and he is just a bad actor really. It’s just funny because we all know people like that, and I think we all want to explode that bubble of their own arrogance. I think that’s universal.”
Bernarda Frankovic is an editorial intern at Transitions. She is studying toward a degree in communication, media, and journalism at University North in Croatia.
Sreya Nair just completed an editorial internship at Transitions. She is a student of media and communications at New York University.
