Olomouc, Czech Republic

August 9, 2006

Meeting of Me and Zen

I first encountered Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) in the introduction to Semantics and Cognition by Ray Jackendoff. As I read the author acknowledged certain influence of ZMM on his thoughts concerning conceptualization, I wondered: what does such a popular (understand: shallow) book have in common with this volume of hard-core linguistics? The bracketed expression signals that I had not read ZMM at that time.

While I vented my feelings to a friend who is thoroughly versed in philosophy, he promptly undeceived me: “Well, forget about all those books called Zen and the Art of Stock Market Management or whatsoever. This one’s set off the avalanche. The others are just copycats.” A beer or two later, he was giving me an ardent account of how he himself had come across the book – one of his teachers had put it on a reading list for the philosophy of science class. I told myself: Well, if they use at the university, that gives the book some importance – but later completely forgot about it.

In a year, I was browsing a bookstore in College Station, Texas, where I spent a year studying English and teaching Czech to elderly Czecho-Americans. The bleakness of the weather outside and the overall flat quality of Texan landscape made me somewhat despondent and I sat down on a carpeted floor between two Eastern Philosophy stacks. Randomly trailing the shelves, my gaze stopped on two books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. I remembered my friend’s words, felt homesick for a moment and bought both books right away. I devoured the first one and has kept it as my favorite book ever since.

You can imagine my surprise four years later back home when I learned that the publishing house of Volvox Globator for which I was working as a translator at the time was going to publish ZMM in a new translation.

“And who’s going to translate it?” I asked eagerly.

“We don’t know yet,” the editor said.

“I want it.”

And I got it, eventually. I offered fluency of expression in English and Czech, drafted my university colleague and philosophy graduate Markéta Janebová to be the proof editor, and also persuaded my other friends – motorcycle enthusiasts – Pavel Res and René Vašíček to go over the technical parts to catch all the possible blunders.

It took me more than ten months to finish the translation to the point of my satisfaction. I spent many furious evenings cursing the author for his difficult wording and myself for submitting to such work. I tried hard to avoid all the gumption traps that came across on the way, especially the one of impatience (which is very hard with the Damocles’ deadline sword hanging above your neck). I also discovered some errors, misconceptions and logical incongruities in Mr. Pirsig’s thoughts, but nonetheless, the book still remains to be a stimulating and inspiring serving of food for thought, even after all those years. I cannot be but grateful for the intellectual journey it took me to.

Will the journey continue? There are some whispers in the publishing house about Lila and its translation.

Martin Svoboda