The two expressions in the title of this paper illustrate the extremities of the range of problems translators struggle with on their journey to a final text. ‘Ginger whiskers’ represent for me all the unpleasant yet unavoidable losses of meaning, the moments when one has to give up and admit defeat; ‘Glad-eyes’, on the other hand, is one of those elements that yield easily and let themselves be translated in a creative way while keeping the meaning and beauty of the original text. In between, there are instances of further or closer approximations between two languages which not only differ on a grammatical level, but also carry in them many varied cultural, social and historical contexts.

In this essay I shall discuss the various translational difficulties I encountered as the first translator of Katherine Mansfield's stories into Slovak. Due to the specificities of Slovak history and its long and still flourishing connections with Czech culture in general and translation in particular, I will use Aloys Skoumal's long-standing translations of Mansfield into Czech as a means of showing the similarities and differences between the two languages. In addition, some other Mansfield translations that have appeared in journal form will also be touched on in my discussion. As Slovak and Czech are not languages spoken and understood by many people, I will explain and illustrate shorter passages rather than give longer examples of the translated text, starting with a brief introduction outlining the most important differences that lie between these two very similar languages and English.

Both Slovak and Czech are synthetic, highly inflected languages, and as a result, their words are longer than most of those in English; therefore, some aspects of Mansfield's style (such as keeping gendered identity imprecise) are impossible to reproduce. Both languages have only three tenses (past, present and future) and so the translator has to express the many different English tenses using adverbs of time or the inflections of verbal aspect; this was the category Virginia Woolf found particularly complex when translating from Russian with S. S. Koteliansky.

In addition, keeping the specific rhythms of Mansfield's prose is not an easy task, since, as a result of the length of words in translation, the rhythm inevitably changes.