Chasing Blue
(an excerpt)
At the time he said to himself that he would do it to humiliate Josephine. If she loved him it would make her suffer, and if she did not love him it would not matter to him where he was.
“And perhaps she is right,” he said to himself with a smile. “Perhaps I am the missing link, and the Zoo is the best place for me.”
He took his pen and a sheet of paper and sat down to write a letter, though he knew that if he achieved his object he would be bound to suffer. For some little while he thought over all the agonies of being in a cage and held up to the derision of the gaping populace.
And then he reflected that it was harder for some of the animals than it would be for himself. The tigers were prouder than he was, they loved their liberty more than he did his, they had no amusements or resources, and the climate did not suit them.
In his case there were no such added difficulties. He told himself that he was humble of heart, and that he resigned his liberty of his own free will. Even if books were not allowed him, he could at all events watch the spectators with as much interest as that with which they watched him.
David Garnett, A Man In The Zoo
I have observed him in our street as well as elsewhere in our area. Even when I’m at the zoo I sometimes wonder if I might catch sight of him. It did happen once: D. had already been born and Molnár was sitting in the monkey pavillion above the orangutans and two hours later, when we came back after walking around the upper parts of the zoo, we stopped there on purpose. He was still there. Wearing the same rapturous expression as five-year-olds who, unlike Molnár, can’t stick with monkeys for this long.
I wondered if he might start making monkey noises.
He didn’t recognize me, or else pretended not to see me. A neighbour who doesn’t say hello. I’m a neighbour who is see-through, perhaps completely invisible, not aware of being perfectly camouflaged.
I’m phyllium. I’m a uroplatus. I’m a pallic scops owl.
Otherwise, he was quite chatty, happy to approach people, he would answer questions children asked their parents, join in their conversations and explain that he used to work here in the old days, before the revolution, before the internet, before the proliferation of social media, before artificial intelligence, before this new pavilion had been built with the lovely area for the animals to roam outside.
Molnár had worked at the zoo before there were any reality shows in which people volunteer to participate, before social media where people make a display of themselves. Then there were only cities in which they lived crammed as if in cages, in modern housing estates that Havel, after the revolution, dubbed rabbit hutches.
When I’m at the zoo, apart from looking for Molnár and watching the animals, I observe human couples with their young. A mother with a leopard tattooed on her shoulder who moves like a stork. A cub of a human wanting to borrow a ball from a chimpanzee in the cage. A grandma with her grandchildren, surprised to discover that chimpanzees can drink out of a bottle.
In our larger prison, a bigger-sized cage, we are like raccoons. In captivity they seem to be forever cleaning their food, repeatedly throwing bits of food into a vessel containing water and taking them out again, although in fact they are bored and are simulating hunting in a stream. It is a sign of frustration and understimulation and has little to do with hygiene.
When I was young, in the 1990s, military service was still compulsory in my country and a young poet, who never became an old poet, took some LSD at the barracks. I forget what it was he did under the influence, all I know is that he ended up in a mental hospital. After being discharged he told me that it didn’t make much difference either way, as he felt he was more in prison when he was out.
I don’t know where he is now although sometimes I imagine him as Ivan Blatný, voluntarily imprisoned in a British institution in a cosy town with brick façades. At the end of his life, he will leave behind a vast body of poetry. As years go by, more and more English words will creep into his Czech. And suddenly, out of the blue, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he will write a letter to Václav Havel, thanking him for freedom in his country.
KATARÍNA KUCBELOVÁ, one of the most acclaimed contemporary Slovak poets, has published several collections that have been translated into numerous languages. In 2006, she founded Slovakia’s most prestigious literary award, the Anasoft Litera and was its director until 2012. She lives in Bratislava. The Bonnet, her first book of prose, was voted Book of the Year by the daily Pravda in 2019, and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera and also received the Panta Rhei Literary Academy Award and translated into six languages including English (Seagull Books, 2024). In 2023, she received the Golden Wave Prize and the Václav Burian Award for her poetry collection Whitewards (2022, due out from Seagull Books in 2025). Her most recent book Modrosleposť (Chasing Blue), published in 2023, was shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera Prize.
About the translators:
JULIA AND PETER SHERWOOD are based in London and work as freelance translators from and into a number of Central and East European languages. Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and spent more than twenty years in the NGO sector in London before turning to freelance translation some ten years ago. She currently administers the group Slovak Literature in English Translation, co-curates the website SlovakLiterature.com and curates the Slovak List for Seagull Books. In 2019 she was awarded the Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav prize for translating and promoting Slovak literature in the English-speaking world, and in 2023 she received Slovakia’s Minister of Culture’s award for her long-term work in translating and promoting Slovak literature. Peter Sherwood’s first translations from the Hungarian appeared fifty years ago, but he was an academic for over forty years before retiring and devoting himself more or less full-time to translating. Their joint book-length translations into English include works by Balla, Daniela Kapitáňová, Uršuľa Kovalyk, Leopold Lahola (from the Slovak), Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki (Polish), and Petra Procházková (Czech). Peter’s translations from the Hungarian include works by Béla Hamvas, Noémi Szécsi, Antal Szerb, and Miklós Vámos.