His contemporary, the Jewish-Czech comic novelist Karel Poláček, was forced into silence by the Nazi's racist laws and could only find work within the Jewish community. He was shipped to Terezín and then on to Auschwitz's gas chambers.

In the midst of this horror, writer Zdeněk Jirotka was creating his greatest fictional character, Saturnin, a veritable Czech Jeeves, to help take the captive country's mind off of its difficulties, if only briefly.

Corner, however, is seeing to it that these overlooked Czech greats — Vančura, Poláček and Jirotka — are finally gaining a readership among Anglophones. His translation of Jirotka's Saturnin quickly sold out its first print run of 3,000 copies, and has inspired its publisher, Charles University's Karolinum Press, to launch translations in German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.

Corner's recent translation of Vančura's comic idyll, Rozmarné léto (Summer of Caprice), is selling at a slower pace than Saturnin, but has certainly gained a foothold in shops selling English titles. His latest project, Poláček's Bylo nás pět (There Were Five of Us), has just been completed and will make its debut in May at the Prague Book Fair.

Obviously, interwar Czech writing appeals to Corner. "I do like the time," he admits. "I like the whimsical, often black, humor of the writing, which often strikes me as very English. The more I think about it, the more I want to live in this period as a translator."

Corner never planned to become a translator. The job really fell into his lap. Born and raised in Plymouth, England, Corner went to Cambridge for university, where he earned degrees in history and theology. From there he went on to become a professor of theology in Newcastle upon Tyne.

"I was the boring one in the religions department," he laughs. "Christianity. The one religion that most of the students knew a bit about."

In 1991, Corner's first book, an investigation of miracles titled Does God Exist?, was published by Macmillan and became a popular theology book. "It wasn't an original idea, obviously," Corner says with comic dismissal. "On that subject I like the wonderful skepticism of the great rabbis."

Corner's next published work was a dramatic departure from exegetics: Berlitz's Discover Prague. Corner came to Prague to work on the book and stayed. He married a Czech and began teaching at Charles University for 14 years. He now refers to himself as a "trail male," as his wife has a job with the European Commission and the Corners now have Brussels as their base.

"I don't think of anywhere as home, really," Corner confesses. "I don't really care to go back to the UK at all. People are always rude about Brussels, though linguistically it's a very interesting place."

A career of language

Language is, of course, one of Corner's great passions, and he refers to translating as "an exquisite torture."

"I think the most important thing a translator needs is a richness in his own language," he says, a salient point. Certainly, Vladislav Vančura's language is a test for any translator's mettle.

Corner's career as a translator began when Charles University's press offered him the opportunity to render Jirotka's Saturnin into English. It was the press's first foray into the world of fiction.

"The university's press is very much an academic enterprise," Corner says. "It's where you would go for books on the spleen and its functions, not fiction." But Corner was intrigued by the offer and accepted.

The popular, Wodehouse-like Saturnin was a balm to Czech readers during the Nazi occupation. Its manorial setting, complete with a crafty manservant, Saturnin, was the perfect antidote to the terrors outside. Jirotka's opening chapter, hypothesizing on the hurling of doughnuts in a plush restaurant, inspired the Hotel Imperial's grand kavárna to offer throwable doughnuts to its patrons for a price (one hopes the custom survives the hotel's current refurbishment).

"It's a jolly tale to take your mind off things," Corner says of Jirotka's book. "But tossing doughnuts about is very anarchic. Political commentary is there in Saturnin, but it's subtle. It had to be."

Asked about the Anglicizing of the characters names (such as turning the indolent cousin, Milouš, into the more Wodehousian "Bertie"), Corner admits, "I'm unsure about having done that. I didn't want to offer a page to delineate Jirotka's names, as it seemed too textbookish. Still, I struggled with that more than anything else."

Yet Vančura was the real struggle. The famed novelist, playwright and film director is often hailed by the Czechs as untranslatable. His singular use of language is half Hussite takes on Scripture and half 20th-century Praguers' street patois (Vančura's novel Criminal Dispute or The Proverbs was both a detective novel and treatise on the intentional act of consciousness).

"I read a lot in preparation for Summer of Caprice," Corner says, "especially Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, where I got a lot of the language."

Vančura's tale follows four people — a colonel, a priest, a bathhouse owner and his wife — and how their lives are altered by the arrival of a magician-acrobat and his assistant (the classic kouzelník of Czech fiction and film).

"Vančura is difficult," Corner admits. "But Caprice is a lovely, bittersweet book. It's about dreaming dreams."

Corner successfully captures the essence of this, particularly in the last lines of the daydreaming wife, who imagines the life of a traveling performer: "How wonderful to be thinking no more than three days ahead, to be peregrinating from one town to another. How marvelous to plan a performance from beginning to end and then to repeat it day after day before people not one of whom, besides ourselves, knows what's going to happen next."

The first edition of Vančura's Rozmarné léto included illustrations by that other great tragic Czech artist, Josef Čapek. The Karolinum Press has also insisted on illustrating Corner's translations, with the renowned Adolf Born supplying illustrations for Saturnin, while Summer of Caprice is filled with the work of artist Jiří Grus, making for very attractive packaging.

Next challenge: Czech plays

Other than awaiting the launch of his newest translation of Poláček, Corner has been working on some of his own writing. He was a fixture among the English-speaking theater companies that once mushroomed in Prague, and has long worked as a playwright. Indeed, a play of his just premiered in a small theater in Dresden last month.

This other side of his writing may very well influence his next translating assignment for the university press.

"There are a lot of Czech plays from the Čapek years that haven't been translated," Corner says.

Other than Karel Čapek, with The Insect Play (which he wrote with his brother, Josef) and the play that gave the world the word "robot," R.U.R., little of Czech drama from the period is known to English speakers, and there's much to discover, including the plays of Vančura.