Kristína Royová, Sunshine Country (V slnečnej krajine, 1909) and Three Comrades (Traja kamaráti, 1922).
With Gaudeamus I reached the astounding milestone of having unearthed twenty-five Slovak novels in English, with only slight fudging on the definition of the term. But since then, things have gotten… complicated. Let me tell you why.
The first problem is a simple one of access. Time will remedy that in a couple of cases; two Slovak novels in English are due to be published in the summer, assuming the pandemic doesn’t put the plans on hold.
I could read a portion of a novel that has been only partially translated, Tatarka’s The Demon of Conformism, but I have to admit I’m just not excited about reading a mere excerpt when my self-imposed mandate is for complete novels or, in a pinch, novellas.
Finally, in a couple of cases, the print book is so exceedingly rare that I just can’t find a copy to lay my hands on. So please, if you happen to have Seller of Talismans by Jozef Cíger-Hronský or Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing by Rudolf Jašík lying around the house, be a pal and mail it to me, OK?
So I figured the well was going to run dry pretty soon.
But then, a funny thing happened.
I was perusing the lists of all genres of Slovak literature (including poetry, children’s books, and nonfiction) that I’ve used for reference, including translator Julia Sherwood’s list, recently deceased professor of Slovak at the University of Pittsburgh Martin Vortruba’s list, and Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages’ list of Czech and Slovak Resources (which, you won’t be surprised to learn, is so heavily weighted toward the Czech that the rare Slovak exceptions are denoted with a [SL] out front of the title).
In one of these I came across a hithero unknown item, Seven Slovak Stories by Martin Kukučin, which as the title suggests is not exactly a novel. But as the pickings were getting increasingly slim, I looked it up and found that a copy was in the holdings of the Immigration History Research Center Archives of the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota. Accordingly, I wrote to ask if I they could scan it for me.
As it turns out, that’s not quite kosher, but I was assured that I could certainly come to the library in person and have a look—a plan that is now indefinitely on hold as I continue to wait out the travel and business restrictions of the pandemic (me and everyone else on the planet).
By the way, added the kindly librarian who answered my email, we have another Slovak novel in English for you, if you’re interested: Kept by a Mighty Hand by Kristína Royová.
Well, yes! I was certainly interested. Moreover, I was puzzled. I went back to the three aforementioned lists to check; not one of them includes Miss Royová. So I did a little searching and discovered…
…that she is the most-translated Slovak author of all time!!
Pardon the hysterical italics and exclamation marks, but really. This is an extraordinary—and extraordinarily late—find.
So here’s her story. Kristína was born in 1860 to a Lutheran pastor and his wife (and yes, this Lutheran pastor’s daughter was not a little delighted to discover another member of the sisterhood. Nor was I surprised—until communism, pretty much all prominent Slovak women were either the daughter or the wife of a Lutheran pastor, and sometimes both). Kristína and her sister Mária were very bright, got more education than was generally allotted to girls or, frankly, to Slovaks at all, had a religious conversion experience, and dedicated their lives to spiritual and educational uplift. They started the first Sunday School in Slovakia and founded the Blue Cross Society whose tenets included daily Bible reading, evangelization, and abstinence from alcohol. (NB: Temperance movements get a bad rap nowadays because of the disaster that was Prohibition, but in Royová’s time alcoholism was the major social ill destroying families, leading to domestic violence, and keeping peasants in abject poverty.)
Such entrepreneurial endeavors earned the sisters the scorn of everyone, from learned pastors to mob rioters, resulting in the occasional stoning and attempted murder, but their impact was immense. They started orphanages, a hospital, and one of the first old folks’ homes, all of which survived on donations until the coup in 1948 put them first under ecclesiastical and then under state control. According to the Slovak Wikipedia page, between 1882 and 1935 (the year before she died) Kristína published sixty-two books, and there are five more unpublished handwritten manuscripts in the archive. Her books were banned and frequently confiscated by the secret police during the socialist regime on account of their religious content. Even since, her work has been neglected or denigrated as too pious or too naïve. Nevertheless, an article on Zlatý Fond (an archive of public domain works of Slovak literature) calls her “the most translated and probably the most prolific Slovak spiritual author.” Another admiring fan calls her the “Slovak Kierkegaard.” She has been translated into 38 languages in all. A museum in their hometown of Stará Tura honors Kristína and Mária together.
I can only make wild guesses as to why the accomplished Miss Royová has completely escaped the notice of other collectors of Slovak literature in English until now. Perhaps the communist denigration and elimination of her works has mostly erased her memory in Slovakia proper. But, by God, it’s time to set the record straight!
The two novels covered in this post are the only ones I’ve been able to get my hands on so far, one purchased as a hard copy by mail and the other on the redoubtable Project Gutenberg. But the books’ translation history remains as mysterious as their neglect.
According to this WorldCat entry, Sunshine Country made its debut in English in 1950 through Pickering & Inglis, a publisher based in London, by a translator known only as “W.M.S.” It seems to have been later picked up and reprinted by several Christian publishers; the copy I got was from Rod and Staff, an Anabaptist publisher based in Crockett, Kentucky, that has no website. The translator’s brief introduction indicates that the book had already appeared in German, French, and Spanish (other sources say it’s been translated into a total of 17 languages by now), and that this edition was not translated directly from Slovak but from a Spanish translation of the original Slovak! Zlatý Fond’s main page on Royová says that a Catholic priest had made the translation and a Catholic press published it. Remnants of the Spanish survive comically in a character’s name being “Pablo” instead of “Paul,” which would have been the proper translation of the original “Pavel,” and likewise making the Spanish diminutive “Palkito” out of the boy Palko’s name. Also, the publisher was very confused both by the feminine ending -ová and the genitive version of that name, thus listing the author as “Kristina Roy (Kristiny Royovej).”
By contrast, Sunshine Country’s sequel Three Comrades has (I think) an entirely different backstory. The translator was one Charles Lukesh, a native of Czechoslovakia who was sent to Chile as a missionary by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He eventually returned home, but his ministry was stopped dead in its tracks by the Nazi occupation. He appears to have translated Three Comrades directly into English—no information on how he became fluent in that language—which was published in English in 1941. He also translated Royová’s Only a Servant, of which more in a future post! And he further translated a book from German into English (which itself was originally in Russian) called, I kid you not, Greasy the Robber. Despite “W.M.S.” obviously not being the initials of Charles Lukesh, I retain a vague suspicion at the Spanish-language connection and wonder how much more is going on that I don’t know about.
But now, after all this build-up, what of the novels themselves?
They are certainly pious and naïve, but that doesn’t make them a bad read. I fancy myself worldly, a bit cynical, and definitely demanding a high level of complexity for a novel to satisfy me—but I gotta own up to the fact that I got a bit choked up at times at these sweet stories. They have the saving virtue of actually containing a plot (a constant beef I have with much contemporary literary writing), and despite their sweet piety, neither novel is in any way premised on the notion that people are naturally good. Quite the contrary.
Sunshine Country concerns the interconnected lives of lumberjacks who migrate to the mountains of Slovakia during the summer season for work and their interactions with both strangers and the local Catholic priest. Palko, the hero of the story, stumbles across a cave at the top of a gorgeous valley which mysteriously houses basic furniture and a New Testament. The instructions on the first page are to read it “line by line,” so he undertakes to do so. Conversations unfold throughout the book as Palko works his way through the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles, and finally Revelation, struggling with why God abandoned the wonderful and kindly Jesus on the cross, and hoping to find the path to “sunshine country”—heaven.
Two plot lines intersect. One is the reunion of Palko with his long-lost parents in a series of coincidences that were probably considerably more surprising in 1909 than they are 110 years later. The other is the conversion of the priest to the gospel. Those with ears to hear (like, say, another Lutheran pastor’s daughter) can detect the fairly obvious critique of absolution without assurance, and the impossibility of reading Scripture aright without proper insight into the gospel. The priest, again rather predictably, comes around to the right understanding while reading Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” Then he preaches like he’s never preached before! Interestingly, though, the priest does not “convert” to Lutheranism nor forsake the priesthood, and dies well beloved by his parish. This points to Royová’s Pietist ecumenism: as long as people truly experience the grace of God in their hearts, it doesn’t really matter what formal structure they belong to. A spiritual conversion is worth far more than a confessional one.
The sequel, Three Comrades, has its own long-lost-parent plot. But it has a little more bite to it. The characters in Sunshine Country were no angels, but the sins confessed in Three Comrades are notably worse. A woman throws her life away on a worthless but wealthy man who abuses her, loses custody of her child, and is reduced to a dishonorable living as a singer. A boy is so consumed with jealous hatred of his apparently perfect brother that he leaves him for dead in a swamp, though he survives; then, when they’re adults, he pressures his brother’s sweetheart into marrying him instead, in response to which the brother gives up and emigrates to America—only to die when the ship is sunk in transit. These people have real, not imagined, sins to repent of.
The background of American emigration is especially striking in the latter novel, and no surprise; something like 600,000 Slovaks left for the New World between 1870 and the First World War. That was a significant population loss. But some came back, as in this story. An English-language hymn ends up playing a pivotal role in the religious plot: none other than “My Faith Looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary.” Another striking detail is the context of the dying Austro-Hungarian empire: the snobs are Hungarian speakers, the honest and pious are Slovak-speakers, the betrayed lady falls somewhere in between as a Czech speaker, and of course English appears in the form of returned emigrants. But they all manage to communicate with each other.
Whatever sophisticated morés have to say about it, people continue to love this kind of uplifting literature (maybe we could nickname it “uplit”). That’s the reason why otherwise overlooked Kristína Royová is the most-translated Slovak author in the world. We’ll be seeing more of her in the months ahead.
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