Cesta na konec noci

After 85 years, a new Czech translation of the famous and groundbreaking prose of modern world literature Voyage au bout de la nuit. The novel from 1932 is the first novel by French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline. It was immediately translated around the world. The 1933 Czech translation by Jaroslav Zaorálek (along with Richard Weiner and Jindřich Hořejší) was the first ever published translation of the novel into a foreign language and became an inspiration and literary sensation of Czech literature.
When Jaroslav Zaorálek translated Céline's novel in 1933, he was enchanted by it as a book by an unknown writer that enthralled him, and this is how he approached the translation: inspired by the source, he developed it and enhanced its immediate expressiveness. And with all this, thanks to that inspiration and his imagery, he created (including the title Journey into the Depths of Night) a unique Czech book that is and will remain a historical comet of our literary memory.
The new Czech translation was made 86 years after the book's first publication and with a knowledge of how Céline's work has evolved and what is characteristic of it. With this awareness of the context, Anna Karenina translates into English this most human of Céline's books as the first enthralling novel, but one that already incorporates the others. In this sense, we find in the new translation of The Road practices typical and unique to Céline's next work. One of them is discipline. And it led the translator to a different Czech title: Journey to the End of the Night. It corresponds to the French original as Louis Ferdinand Céline insisted on it in his correspondence: he literally follows such a path "to the end of the night" himself in the book.
The revolutionary quality of Céline's prose at the time lay in the music of the language he created, in the composition of the motifs and melodies of his chosen language, the language of the urban periphery (not the countryside) and, of course, the language of the angry intellectual. From Journey to the End of the Night onwards, Céline's subsequent novels would become increasingly loose in structure, and book by book they would increasingly resemble a sequence of unfinished sentences, the emotion of individual parables and episodes of life, rather than a 'properly' conducted story. All the more masterful will be their style, that music of his, "ma musique" as he said, in which he uses the possibilities of language as a modern composer uses the possibilities of instruments. Journey to the End of the Night stands at the beginning: it is that groundbreaking and "immense demolition enterprise" (according to Richard Weiner) that opened new paths for the work of its author and for world writing.

Czech edition