Getting Untangled

Welcome to this week’s edition of Sound Czech, Radio Prague’s Czech language series in which you can learn interesting phrases through song lyrics. Today’s phrase is “Než se odtud vymotáme” and comes from a song contained in the 1980s children’s story Hurvínek a Lupiči - or Hurvínek and the Burglars – part of the famous Špejbl and Hurvínek series.

Špejbl and Hurvínek

In this somewhat scary story, the characters find themselves accidentally locked in a castle basement. They decide to look around carefully – “důkladně si to tu prohlédnout.” Not knowing what to do, one of the characters hopelessly sings “doleva, ne doprava.”“Left, no…right.” Then, a frustrated Špejbl notes “než se odtud vymotáme…sklátí nás všechny únava.”

What Špejbl is saying is that, before they manage to find their way out, they will all collapse of fatigue. Vymotat, literally means untangle and is used in Czech in a slightly different way than you might use the word in English. To vymotat se is to untangle your way out of something or somewhere– be it a forest, maze, traffic jam or castle basement.”

The second part of the sentence is “sklátí nás všechny únava.”– we will all collapse from fatigue. Sklátí literally means to be knocked down - so a direct translation here would be – we will all be knocked down by fatigue. Often, direct English-Czech translations don’t work, and need a little interpretation and modification to find the precise meaning. I’ll leave you with the final sentence of this song - which is pretty ominous. “Co když na mne někdo tady číhá a praští mě do hlavy!!?”“What is someone is watching me and will thump me on the head!!?” You can check out this and any of the previous lessons on our website, that is www.radio.cz. Thank you for listening and nashledanou!