Atenção ao hipnotismo dos checos, rapazes…

Nunca se sabe quando poderá resultar. Por via das dúvidas, mantenham os olhos bem fechados durante todo o encontro, ok?

 

My grandfather again, not to fall short of the standard set by Great-grandfather Luke, was a hypnotist who did is act in small circuses, and the whole town saw in his hypnotism nothing more nor less than an ambitious bid to stroll his way through life as idly as possible. But when the Germans crossed our frontier in March to occupy the whole country, and were advancing in the direction of Prague, our grandfather was the only one who went out to meet them, nobody else but our grandfather, and he set out to defy those Germans by means of his hypnotic powers, to hold back the advancing tanks by the force of suggestion. He went striding along highroad with his eyes fixes on the leading tank, the spearhead of that entire motorized army. In this tank, waist-deep in the cabin, stood an officer of the Reich, with a black beret with the death’s-head badge and the crossed bones on his head, and my grandfather kept on going steadily forward, straight towards this tank, with his hands stretched out, and his eyes spraying towards the Germans the thought: ‘Turn round and go back!’

And really, the first tank halted. The whole army stood still. Grandfather touched the leading tank with his outstretched fingers, and kept pouring out towards it the same suggestion: ‘Turn round and go back, turn round and…’ And the lieutenant gave a signal with his pennant, and the tank changed his mind and moved forward, but Grandfather never budged, and the tank ran over him and crushed his head, and after that there was nothing standing in the way of the German army.

Afterwards Dad went out looking for Grandfather’s head. That leading tank was standing motionless outside Prague, waiting for a crane to come and release it, because Grandfather’s head was stuck between the tracks. And the tracks being turned just the way they were, Dad begged to be allowed to free Grandfather’s head and bury it with his body, as was only right for a Christian.

After that there were arguments raging about it all round our district. Some were shouting that Grandfather was a fool, but others retorted that he wasn’t quite such a fool, for if everybody’d taken a stand against the Germans like Grandfather, they said, only with weapons in their hands, who could say how it would have turned out for the Germans?

Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains.

(Da edição inglesa da Abacus, com tradução de Edith Pargeter.)

 

P.S.1: Desculpem estar em inglês mas é a única edição que possuo (o livro foi editado em Portugal mas encontra-se esgotado há muito) e não disponho de tempo nem de competência suficientes para me aventurar a traduzir. De qualquer modo, seria pior em checo, não?

 

P.S.2: Para quem tende a preferir versões cinematográficas, há um filme dos anos sessenta baseado neste livro de Hrabal que, para variar, é quase tão bom como o livro. Mas acho que não se encontra disponível cá e a versão existente na Amazon também só tem legendas em inglês.