The Prague Post Online: Tempo: The Gospel according to Czechs

July 7th, 2008

Endowment Fund Book of Lists ONLINE Reservations Classifieds Subscriptions

The Gospel according to Czechs

With Bible translation, Alexandr Flek seeks to restore 'cultural literacy'

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 15th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Using critical editions of original texts, Flek compares his work line by line with the Kralice Bible. enlarge

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Flek is now translating Josiah from its fragmented Hebrew source. enlarge

WELL-VERSED

Favorite Bible passages Flek cites in talking about his life and work:
On the guiding spirit for his translation: "The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)
On naming his congregation "Water of Life": "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." (Revelation 22:17)

Source: King James Bible

Sixteen years ago, Alexandr Flek lay upon the floor of the church where he worshipped, and he was in agony.

It had been four years since he converted to Christianity and became a preacher, and two years since the Velvet Revolution. And still, there was no project under way to translate the Bible into Czech. In the past 400 years, there had been only two Czech translations—one archaic if revered, and the other denuded of its figurative force by the taint of communism.

“On the carpet, this groaning and travailing overwhelmed me,” says Flek of that day. “I was desperate. The years were passing. There was no Bible.”

There lay Flek’s passion, harkening back to the Protestant Reformation, hundreds of years earlier: That people read the Bible firsthand, in language current and powerful.

But there was no new translation. The country’s scholars — perhaps removed from the glowing evangelism that enfolds Flek’s late arrival to religion — were mired in translating apocrypha.

So Flek travailed and longed and prayed on the carpet, asking, When will a translation come?

With hesitation, he reveals the cathartic moment that has driven his labors since then: “As I was lying there, praying, it was as if God’s finger pinned me down to that carpet. And it was as if he said, ‘Why do you think, Saša, that you’ve been praying this prayer for years? Why do you have this burden on your heart? You ask me to send someone, to call someone. What do you think I’ve been doing?’ ”

From that day, Flek has devoted his life to translating the Bible into Czech, drawing on original sources and inspired by the Kralice Bible, a 400-year-old translation that presides over the Czech language in much the way the King James Bible does over English.

Flek and his collaborators are now nearing the finish line of this grassroots project, funded by individual donations and without a mandate from any of the country’s large denominations. (Both Catholics and mainline Protestants have since started their own translations.)

The New Testament and most of the Old Testament are complete, with only the Prophets remaining. By Easter 2009, Flek expects the full translation to be published.

Janitorial dialogues

Sitting over a beer at a pub in Prague 6 or coffee at the small basement office provided for his work by an American couple, Flek, 34, is thoughtful and articulate, his language infused with the metaphor and sweep of the Bible and the story-telling of a former preacher.

The translation is not a matter of proselytizing, he says. It’s a matter of national education. Because of a series of “historical catastrophes”— the suppression of the Hussites, reactionary Catholicization under the Habsburgs, the decimation of the Czech language, communism — the country has been cut off from its Judeo-Christian tradition, he says.

Now, Flek sees a funeral scene in an American movie quoting Psalm 23 —“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”—and the Czech subtitles mangle the passage, blind to its context.

Flek was similarly blind, growing up in an intellectual home, his father a sociologist and his mother a historian. Before 1968, his parents were true believers in Marxism, but they were suppressed by government officials for participating in Prague Spring. After that, Flek’s mother could no longer teach and instead worked as a translator.

The atheism Flek felt in his home and country left him cold; it was in his nature to search for meaning, an overarching story. He dismissed communism — “The air we breathed was lies,” he says — and he would tramp into the outdoors, searching for transcendence. “It,” he called the feeling, in the Jack Kerouac–tinged vocabulary he used.

He would explore the Christianity of his friends, trading beers at the pub, asking about faith. They’d tell him, “Well, Saša, faith is a gift. And it doesn’t seem you have it.”

Flek became an atheist on Christmas 1986, after one dreary midnight service.

“Those people seemed to me as yellow grass under a heavy stone — the stone of their religion,” he says of that service. He might be lost, he thought, “but at least I’m wild grass out there.”

At the time, Flek was taking classes and working as a janitor at Charles University when an old school acquaintance joined him on the job. He’d heard his colleague had attempted suicide several times — a real mess. But the man he met did not match the hearsay. He was cleaned up, certain with clear eyes, born again.

The two would debate religion over mopping; Flek was taken by his friend’s rendering of the Bible story in plain language. Flek had tried to read the Kralice Bible before, but he fell off it quickly, lost, not knowing who was who.

One day, sitting as a model for his girlfriend and future wife, Katka, who was a painting student, Flek poured forth on his janitorial dialogues. He was taken aback by his eagerness, and withdrew from whatever ferment was bubbling inside him. Katka did not, and when he left that day, she had a conversion experience.

Soon enough, a group of bohemians and artists was meeting at Katka’s studio, rapidly converting to a Christianity that lacked denomination or doctrine — an ecumenical hodgepodge flecked with subversiveness in the waning days of communism.

Flek was one of the last to convert; he was incredulous at the others. Finally, on Feb. 6, 1987, he gave in, and “It was as if I was on a desert and there was a dam next to me. And the dam broke. And I was just flooded.”

This impromptu collection grew into a congregation, though not without interference. “I don’t know how many times we were interrogated by the StB,” Flek says. Then came Flek’s call in 1991, and soon after he was off to Uppsala, Sweden, studying the Biblical languages. On the way, Flek’s associates founded a nonprofit publishing house, Biblion, and, in 1998, Biblion published its first edition of the New Testament.

Biblical realism

To this day, with the translation nearly done, Flek seems stunned at the progress his small band has made from their origins “as a young group of Jesus freaks.”

But once the project began, all sorts of resources poured in, like books and scholarships.

“Foolishness it was, we knew that,” he says. “But these people [making donations] believed this was the foolishness of God.”

The grassroots nature of the project ties in well with its inspiration from the Kralice Bible, which was translated by a splinter group of the Hussites called the Brethren — another movement of people. It was the first Czech Bible translation to come from the original languages of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic; all previous versions came from Latin. The definitive Kralice comes from 1613 and has not been revised since.

After his conversion, Flek became taken with the Kralice and its powerful language, which starkly contrasts with an ecumenical translation of the Bible compiled by scholars in the 1970s. The Kralice speaks of redemption by way of Jesus’ “terrible offering of blood”; in the ecumenical Bible, this becomes Jesus’ “sacrifice.”

“This word in the text that’s specific and shocking is replaced by an abstract — ‘sacrifice,’ ” Flek says. “The meaning is the same. But the impact is very different. … The Bible is very realistic in showing how this world is terrible.”

That the ecumenical version is watered down should not be surprising, though, Flek says, since “every translation carries the atmosphere of the time.” Produced under communism, how could the translators not be scared to offend?

Flek wants his translation to hold true to the force of the Kralice Bible while being understandable to the casual reader; the English analogue would the New International Version. Flek works closely with the Kralice, comparing his translation line by line to it. Because of this affinity, the project is called Nová Bible Kralická, “the New Kralice Bible.”

More than anything, it’s the name of the project that has upset scholars, says Jan Talafant, director of the project, who has known Flek for 16 years.

“Ten years ago, scholars were quite skeptical and did not take the NBK seriously,” Talafant says. “Today, more respect the quality of the translation. If they have a problem, it’s with the name referring to the old Kralice Bible.”

That’s the complaint of Petr Pokorný, director of the Center for Biblical Studies at Charles University, who otherwise considers Flek’s translation to be “quite good.”

Who are the intended readers? Pokorný asks. “Those people who stick to using the Kralice Bible do not want to have it revised.”

Flek and Talafant have said they’re considering changing the NBK’s name, both because of this criticism and the possibility they’d be limiting their potential audience.

“We didn’t realize what a sacred cow we were touching,” Flek says.

Talafant has always known Flek to be a talented interpreter. But, over the past 13 years, Flek has fashioned himself into a genuine scholar. (Flek works with one other translator, going back and forth on language, but he has the final word.) His 2004 revision of the New Testament improves greatly on the 1998 translation, for example, Talafant says.

After working on the Old Testament — the Song of Solomon and Psalms, with their poetry, were his favorite books to translate — Flek realized how idiomatic the Greek of the New Testament is.

“It’s a very Semitic Greek,” he says. “The writers were Jewish and they wrote in the lingua franca of the time. It’s as if Czechs would write something in English today. You’d have your ‘Czechlish’ idioms that don’t make sense in English. The same thing happens in the New Testament.”

NBK has now distributed 90,000 copies of the New Testament in various editions, mostly passed on by laypeople. Pastors are beginning to use it in their pulpits.

Once the translation is complete, Flek sees his work as truly beginning. “We’d like to see 1 million Bibles going to Czechs,” he says.

Talafant believes the project “has the potential to change this country,” and he considers other Bible translations that are now also close to fruition partners in this effort. “Our competitors are atheism, Islam … and the indifference and immorality of our society,” he says.

While Flek is more tempered in his rhetoric, it’s clear he’s seeking restoration or redemption of a sort for his country.

“For most of us, the existence of God is bad news,” he says. “Because, if God is there, we’ll go to hell, because we’re sinners. So the good news is that there is no God and we will not be punished, so we can live as we want.

“That’s the Gospel according to Czechs.”

Paul Voosen can be reached at pvoosen@praguepost.com

Be the first to add a comment!

Most e-mailed articles
Czech entomologists arrested in India Brno companies hunt for tech workers A healthy break from mediocrity

Related articles
When classical met punk

Most visited in Book of Lists

The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.