Memorandum (Vyrozumění, 1966)

Přidal: Přemek |

Duben 22, 2010

Václav Havel. Satirická komedie. Překlad Vera Blackwell. Rozhlasová úprava Martin Esslin.

Osoby a obsazení: Josef Gross (Hugh Burden), Jan Ballas (Donald Pleasance). Dále účinkují Geoffrey Matthews, Beth Boyd, John Moffat, Anthony Hill a Michael Deacon.

Natočeno 1966. Premiéra 9. 12. 1966 (BBC Radio 3).

Pozn.: The Memorandum (Vyrozumění) written 1966, is one of the best known and most popular plays by
Czechoslovakia’s (later the Czech Republic’s) best known playwright, Vaclav Havel.

Inspired by the absurdities of life in Eastern Europe under Communism, like much of Havel’s writing,
The Memorandum is political, at least implicitly. The play concerns the tribulations of Josef Gross,
the managing director of an organization encumbered by a bureaucracy that is out of control.
The introduction of an artificial language, Ptydepe, is supposed to streamline office communications,
but only makes it worse.

Havel’s satire is full of irony about the kind of jobs created by communism as well as the constant
surveillance by office spies. Though Havel’s vision was informed by his observations many critics
have noted that the office politics depicted can be found around the world. The importance of conformity
to keep one’s job is seen as relatively common.

As Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote, ‘‘The play may have grown out of experience of Czech
communism; its application, however, is universal.’’

The Memorandum opens in the office of Josef Gross, the managing director of an office. He is
reading his mail when he comes across an important memorandum written in what seems like an
incomprehensible language. His secretary, Hana, informs him that it is written in Ptydepe,
a new language that is supposed to be more efficient for communication. Gross learns that
his deputy director, Jan Ballas, has ordered its introduction without his knowledge. Gross
asks him to cancel its introduction, and while Ballas agrees at first, he later convinces
Gross that the use of Ptydepe would be best for everyone. This is endemic of the growing
power struggle between Gross and Ballas. While Gross wants to work on a humanist principle,
Ballas is ready for a conflict and believes he has everyone in the organization on his side.
What follows is ludicrously comic……….

Thanks to Wikipaedia for the following Analysis of Ptydepe:

Scientific principles of Ptydepe

Ptydepe was constructed along strictly scientific lines, with none of the messiness and ambiguity
of natural languages.

In order to be able to express precisely all the subtle and easily-misunderstood nuances of
natural language, Ptydepe has an extraordinary large vocabulary. Another problem of natural
language that Ptydepe was intended to eliminate is the frequent similarity of unrelated
words, or homonyms. To entirely avoid the possibilities for confusion that arise with
homonyms and similar unrelated words, Ptydepe was created according to the postulate that
all words must be formed from the least probable combinations of letters. Specifically, it
makes use of the so-called „sixty percent dissimilarity“ rule; which states that any
Ptydepe word must differ by at least sixty percent of its letters from any other word
consisting of the same number of letters.

This led to the necessity of creating some very long words. The inevitable problem of
pronounceability is solved by breaking very long words up into smaller clusters of letters called
„subwords“, which nonetheless have no meaning outside of the word they belong to and are not
interchangeable. Length of words, like everything else in Ptydepe, is determined scientifically.

The vocabulary of Ptydepe uses entropy encoding: shorter words have more common meanings. Therefore,
the shortest word in Ptydepe, gh, corresponds to what is so far known to be the most general term
in natural language, „whatever“. (The longest word in Ptydepe, which contains 319 letters, is the
word for „wombat“.) Theoretically an even shorter word than gh exists in Ptydepe, namely f, but
it has no meaning assigned and is held in reserve in case a more general term than „whatever“ is
discovered.

Example of the language:

From the memorandum discovered in the office in Scene 1:

Ra ko hutu d dekotu ely trebomu emusohe, vdegar yd, stro reny er gryk kendy, alyv zvyde dezu
kvyndal fer teknu sely. Degto yl tre entvester kyleg gh: orka epyl y bodur depty-depe emete.
Grojto af xedob yd, kyzem ner osonfterte ylem kho dent de det detrym gynfer bro enomuz
fechtal agni laj kys defyj rokuroch bazuk suhelen…

Translation: not available, as it was impossible to ever get the memorandum fully translated
within the rules of the official Ptydepe Translation Center of the office. It was translated
in part in the second-to-last scene of the play, but considering the trouble its translation
caused, it would be better for all concerned if the partial translation is not reproduced here.