English / Sample translations /

/Translated by Andrew Oakland/

Anna's face became a picture of her unsound mind; everyone, including her husband, began to go in fear of her. With candle and knife she went to the henhouse, out of which she pulled her favourite white hen, the one she called "Beauty". Then she went into the garden and yelled out in a voice totally unlike her own: "You black monster! You'll not get my little Marie! You're not having her! Take this!" And she drove the knife through the hen's side and into its heart. She flung the dying bird against the trunk of the biggest apple tree and, once it was dead, dug out its grave with a hoe. She returned to the house to fetch a bottle of paraffin from the closet. She poured a little of this into the lamp and then gave the rest of it to little Marie to drink. Little Marie, for all her fatigue, resisted this drink with all the power she possessed. The child began to vomit convulsively and this gave way to a fearful fit of coughing; among the vomit and thrown-up paraffin in the little annex was a litter of large pieces of white membrane, which the child had succeeded in tearing from her innards and coughing up. Towards daybreak the two of them fell asleep from exhaustion. When in the late morning Vodrážka's wife went out into the garden and found a deep hole at the place of yesterday's sacrifice (during the night Vaněk the butcher's great black dog had burrowed underneath the fence and devoured the hen), she knew from what she saw that little Marie was not going to die. It may have been so that she was ignorant of the price and consequences of the pressure of progress, but at that moment such thoughts would have been of little significance to her.
As things were it took little Marie several weeks to recover; in their small town more than twenty children died at that time. Little white coffins and a cortege at whose head a child mourner in white carried a lighted candle, while a second child in a black veil went behind with a broken candle: this became a part of the town's routine.