Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As the reader will certainly know by now, I owe a large debt to Angelo Maria Ripellino's Magic Prague, translated by David Newton Marinelli and edited by Michael Henry Heim (Macmillan, London, 1994), which itself, I am glad to note, relies heavily on the writings of others.

  All Seifert quotations are from The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, translated by Ewald Osers, edited and with additional translations by George Gibian (New York, 1986).

  The quotations on pages 36-7 are from Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996).

  The Kafka quotations on pages 40-41 are from The Trial, translated by Idris Parry (London, 1994). There is an eccentric but charming little book, Franz Kafka and Prague, by Harald Salfellner (third edition, Prague, 2002), which contains many curious and fascinating details of the writer's life and his feelings for and against Prague, as well as numerous apt quotations from the diaries and letters. The quotations on pages 10,24 and 25 are taken from Salfellner's book. For biographical details of the photographer Josef Sudek, and other valuable information and artistic assessment of his work, I am grateful to Dr Zdenek Kirschner, whose Josef Sudek (New York, 1993) contains a fine collection of the artist's pictures, with an illuminating introduction, personal remembrances, and notes. I must also mention Sudek by Sonja Bullaty and Angelo Lomeo, with an introduction by Anna Farova (New York, 1986), one of the finest studies devoted to Sudek's art, with superb reproductions. A number of Sudek's remarks quoted in my text are taken from her preface.

  For the meditation on bridges on pages 76-7, see Poetry, Language, Thought, by Martin Heideg­ger, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971).

  For the passages devoted to the Emperor Rudolf, I am indebted to R.J.W. Evans, whose Rudolf II and His World (Oxford, 1973) is a comprehensive, subtle, and sympathetic portrait of this fascinating man and the city on which he stamped his character indelibly.

  Frances Yates has written extensively on John Dee, especially in Theatre of the World (London, 1969).For more on the brief reign of Ferdinand and Elizabeth, the unfortunate Winter King and his queen, see Yates's The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972), and Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London, 1975).

  The standard modern life of Tycho Brahe is The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe, by Victor E. Thoren (Cambridge, 1990). In her informative and entertaining study of Brahe and his turbulent collaboration with Johannes Ke­pler, The Nobleman and His Housedog - Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler: The Strange Partnership that Revolutionised Science (London, 2002), Kitty Ferguson seems to have leaned not un-lightly, as have I, on Thoren's authoritative monograph.

  Milan Kundera's Ignorance is translated from the French by Linda Asher (London, 2002). Jan Ner-uda's Prague Tales is translated by Michael Henry Heim (London, 1993).

  There are dozens of available guidebooks to Prague, but for much practical information, and memory-jogs, I turned frequently to Blue Guide: Prague, by Michael Jacobs et alii (London, 1999), and Eyewitness Travel Guides: Prague, by Vladimir Soukup et alii (London, 1994).

  For further copyright details please see page iv. My thanks to Deirdre Bourke, Liz Calder, H.E. Joseph Hayes, Tereza Limanova, Justin Quinn, Anthony Sheil. I wish also to thank Beatrice Monti Rezzori, director of the Santa Maddalena Foundation at Donnini, in Tuscany, and her assistant, Alessandra Gnecchi Ruscone. It was in the very beautiful and tranquil surroundings of Santa Mad­dalena that I completed my Prague journey. Grazie per tutti.

  In special memory of J.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen novels, including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, and Kepler, which won the Guardian Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Shroud, is out in paperback this year. He lives in Dublin.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical form for mechanical hot metal composition and hand composition using foundry type. Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a fount engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a fount by Gran j on. It was first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.