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Orwell fan a man of many words

Paul Wilson viewed former Czechoslovakia up close with insider/outsider lenses

February 13th, 2008 issue

By Kimberly Hiss

Staff Writer

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Wilson has shaped history by translating Václav Havel's work and making music with The Plastic People of the Universe band. enlarge

The Wilson file

Born: 1941, Ontario, Canada
Hobby: Sailing his Herreshoff H-28 on Georgia Bay
Music he listens to in the car: Steve Earl, Bruce Cockburn, Oscar Peterson
Favorite George Orwell quote: "The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity."

In a way, it all started with Orwell.

Back in the 1960s, Paul Wilson — translator, writer, radio producer, and former member of The Plastic People of the Universe — was an English lit grad student, lugging his volumes of interwar fiction around the University of London campus. He had done undergraduate work at the University of Toronto, and by this point had decided to focus his studies on George Orwell.

A fan of Animal Farm and 1984, Wilson found it interesting that the author had never himself been to a socialist nation. He wondered what such countries were like, and started toying with the idea of experiencing one first-hand.

Around the same time, a Czech New Wave film festival came to London, exhibiting work that Wilson found fascinating. He also became friends with a few visiting Czech engineers. If he wanted to see a socialist country, fate seemed to be telling him which one to head for.

In August 1967, Wilson started hitching and busing his way toward Czechoslovakia, where he planned to teach English for one year. He eventually arrived at the Znojmo station too late at night to get a connection to Prague and had to stay in a hostel over the train tracks. After being shown to a room with 16 beds (and arguing his way out of paying for all of them), Wilson was left alone with his first impression of the country.

“It was bleak, dark, and there was nothing to eat,” he remembers. “And I’d committed to stay for a year.”

Wilson was kept company that night by a droning radio that couldn’t be turned off, only adjusted in volume. Of course, the significance wasn’t lost on him.

“It was like the TV screens that couldn’t be turned off in 1984,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Here I am, in the land of Orwell.’ ”

Finding the path

The direction of Wilson’s career got an important nudge on his first night in Prague. While hanging out and playing guitar at a friend’s flat, an acquaintance handed Wilson a Ladislav Klíma anthology and made a suggestion.

“He said, ‘You have to learn Czech and translate this into English,’ ” Wilson remembers, adding the friend was “the one who set that goal in my mind.”

Good thing he did. Wilson is quick to admit that translation isn’t a career path many people seek out on their own.

“No child has ever wanted to be a translator when they grow up,” he says. “Kids want to be firemen and police officers and sports stars. Translation is something everyone slides into by accident.”

Long story short, what started as a one-year plan to teach English turned into a 10-year stay that also included freelance translating jobs, a marriage and involvement in the underground music scene as a member of the dissident band The Plastic People of the Universe.

But Wilson points out that, in that time, he didn’t consider himself an expat.

“I never would have left Canada forever,” he says, adding, “That expression means something different now than it did then. There wasn’t much of a community. Some ‘expats’ were British women who’d married Czech soldiers during World War II and came back with them. As a Canadian English speaker, working and learning Czech, I was an unusual figure.”

Such unusualness didn’t go unnoticed, and it was Wilson’s connection with the underground music scene in particular that would attract some unwanted attention.

In the early 1970s, the Plastic People of the Universe artistic director Ivan Jirous asked Wilson to join the group. He quickly started translating lyrics and singing lead vocals. But the government was keeping an eye on the band.

“They first flagged The Plastic People for playing without proper documentation from the Culture Ministry,” Wilson says. “They targeted Jirous, thinking if they lopped off the head of the band, it would collapse. But after Jirous was in jail, there were so many supporters that the band dug its heals in.”

Such support included Charter 77, a movement based on a document signed by more than 1,000 advocates, criticizing the government for its failure to establish human rights provisions. Although friends advised Wilson not to sign, it was clear he was already on the government’s radar. At one point, he started noticing the same Ford Taunus showing up in front of restaurants where he had arranged meetings by phone. He subsequently believed that, not only was he being followed, but that his phone was tapped.

“The only thing I wasn’t completely sure of was which of us was being watched — me, or the person I was meeting with?” he says.

On a May morning in 1977, authorities brought Wilson in for questioning. The next day, he was summoned to the passport department.

“They had an order for me to leave in 24 hours,” he remembers. “But I said I had a life there with a job, a wife and obligations.” As a compromise, the department agreed that Wilson would leave by July 15.

Before getting on a train to depart the country, Wilson was thoroughly inspected by secret police.

“Every single bit of my baggage was searched and sealed,” he says, adding that he had a few cassette tapes that authorities listened to and returned. “I had the really important stuff — documents and notebooks — smuggled out later,” he says.

Once onboard the train bound for Nuremberg, Germany, Wilson realized he was being escorted out of the country by plain-clothes foreigners’ police, who never announced themselves but stayed at either end of the car.

A real wordsmith

Back in Canada, Wilson’s career in translation started to get serious. It was his work translating Josef Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls that he feels allowed him to “make the leap from workaday translator to an actual professional.”

While Wilson would also spend a great deal of time putting out records for the Plastic People, the next 10 years were mostly spent translating from Czech to English — a craft that he says is “nothing but hurdles.”

When he started out, for example, there weren’t many Czech/English dictionaries, so much of his work depended on personal consultation. Another hurdle goes a little deeper.

“Most of the writers I was translating were trying to describe the experience of living in a repressive, totalitarian state,” he says. “It’s very hard to get that across to an English reader. It’s not just a simple translation question; it’s a question of a huge gap in experience.”

Clearly, such hurdles were not insurmountable, as Wilson has translated a list of Czech writers such as Ivan Klíma and Bohumil Hrabal and — perhaps famously — Václav Havel.

Wilson’s relationship with the former president began when he translated one of Havel’s essays, “Power over the Powerless.” Impressed by that work, Havel’s New York agent asked him to work on a book of Havel’s letters from prison.

“One thing led to another,” Wilson says, “and, in a sense, I’m his official translator now.”

Aside from translating, and a stint as a radio journalist (writing and producing various series for CBS radio), Wilson’s career has also included writing and working for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Idler and The Walrus, editing books such as Prague: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, and writing volumes such as 57 Hours, A Survivor’s Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama.

Considering this variety of pursuits, one might be at a loss to describe the translator/writer/musician/radio producer, but Wilson himself suffers from no such confusion.

Asked how he views himself, he simply says, “I’m someone who works with words.”

Full circle

These days, Wilson is eyeing up two big stacks of personal notebooks from his time in Prague and wrestling with the idea of writing his own memoir.

“The problem is, I know too much,” he says. “That’s why I’m interested in memoirs now, like Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. It’s very concise. I want to boil down 10 years in Prague and 20 years after into something short and readable.”

Wilson now lives in Heathcote, Ontario with his wife and editorial assistant Patricia. His three children, Miranda, Jake and Gavin are pursuing careers from acting to law in both Canada and the U.S. About once a year, Wilson returns to Prague, most recently last October for an event at the Canadian Embassy.

“I used to live in Old Town and, to me, that place has since been tourist-ified to the point where it’s not that interesting,” he says. “Now I’m drawn to Žižkov,” he adds, mentioning a particular affinity for the cellar bar Plato’s Cave.

His visits have allowed him to watch the post-communist growth of a country that he feels is still coming out of its transition period.

“What happens when you remove the regime is that you have this Wild West period,” he says. “To a certain extent, Czechs are still going through it.”

Forty-one years after Wilson first came to Prague, he remains a fan of the author who could be said to have started it all by sparking his interest in totalitarian states. Having come to know a socialist country, Wilson is impressed by how well Orwell’s fiction held up against reality — except for one detail.

“He underestimated the power of people to resist attempts to take over their minds,” Wilson says. “Having lived there, and seen what these regimes can do and how they operate, that resistance is stronger than one would have thought.”

Kimberly Hiss can be reached at khiss@praguepost.com

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