by Patrick Seguin

Oh that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there. And then it’s over.
Pulp “This is Hardcore”

In the three years that I’ve been translating from Czech to English, MP Media, purveyors of such fine glossies as Sextase and Sextrem, have been one of my best clients. They’ve been kind with deadlines, usually pay on time, and have offered me free mags and DVD’s on a number of occasions. I always decline as the photocopies of the magazines I translate are about as much of a visible stash that my girlfriend Jitka can handle.

Whenever I tell people I translate pornography they usually react by chuckling and saying, “Well, it can’t be too difficult to translate grunts and moans and shrieks.”

In fact, it can be rather demanding work. For instance, there are only so many words for “penis” that you can use when writing porn. You’re pretty much limited to the rock-solid standbys of “cock”, “dick”, “prick”, “rod” and “shaft”. “Wang”, “schlong” and “weiner” are silly and limp, while “johnson” is too North American for Europeans (I can’t throw too much slang at the Dane who translates my work into his mother tongue), and “one-eyed trouser snake”, “meat and veg”, “tallywhacker” and “tackle” are either too unwieldy or too British.

The Czech porn writers I translate get pretty creative with “vagina”. Alongside the tasty favourites that can withstand multiple usage – “pussy” and “cunt” – “snatch” is sweet, “pink clam” is pretty, and “quim” and “cooze” are cool. The most imaginative sentence to date remains one from my test translation: “I slammed my rod into her toothless hippopotamus mouth.”

The short stories are by far the most challenging, and most interesting, parts of the magazines to translate. While some of them can be terribly disturbing – the rape fantasy stories in particular – many are very well-written, verging on Henry Miller at his seediest. The how-to articles (How to Train Your Slave-girl, Proper Bondage Techniques, The S&M Corner, etc.) take the art of “sextreme” practices very seriously, in the same way car and computer mags dispense advice and give the lowdown on the latest trends to gearheads and computer geeks.

There’s nothing like translating porn to bring a couple even closer. As I was getting to know the vocabulary, Jitka helped me out by dictating the articles and stories and quotation bubbles while I typed them into the PC. Here’s the soiled laundry list: bondage techniques, slave and slave-girl training, enemas, rape fantasies, Ilsa – She-Wolf of the SS stuff, electrostimulation, grannies, incest, lolitas, pony-girls, plumpers, pissers and soiled laundry.

While I find my work for MP Media inspirational at times, I find that it has made pornography itself somewhat boring. Also, it is a bit odd to go from translating, say, the details of a slave auction (Olga is a fine young specimen with a firm bosom and a tight elastic anus. She is good for pissing, bondage, electro-stimulation, caviar, and vaginal and anal penetration. She is also a very experienced pony-girl) to editing an interview with the CEO of a Czech Top 100 company, as I recently found myself doing.

But neither odd nor disturbing adds up to shocking. Narrow-minded moral majorities striving to dictate what others should do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, basements, or torture chambers, let alone read whatever they want wherever they damn well please, are shocking. The Czechs don’t seem to be afflicted with such a problem, which is good for my business – and pleasure.

Patrick Seguin is a translator and writer living in Prague. You can read
more of his work at www.prague-spot.com/blog

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