Traveling on the black

Hello and welcome to SoundCzech – Radio Prague’s Czech language programme where you will hopefully be taught a useful phrase or two through music. Today’s song is one of my favourites, and indeed a former Czech learning-aid of my own – it’s called ‘Černej pasažér’ by the folk group Traband. Listen out for the Czech ‘dechovka’ or ‘brass band music’ being played in a strangely mariachi way, and also the song’s title: ‘Černej pasažér’.

‘Černej pasažér’ means literally ‘a black passenger’, but more loosely, someone who is traveling without a ticket - ‘a fare-dodger’, I suppose you could say. In Czech, the phrase ‘jízda na černo’ (literally ‘going’ or ‘traveling on the black’) refers to a journey undertaken without a ticket, most likely spent watching one’s back for a ticket inspector or ‘revizor’.

Incidentally, as someone who has recently been learning to drive in Czech, I have been trying to avoid not only ‘jízdu na černo’, but also ‘jízdu na červenou’– ‘going’ or ‘driving on the red’. ‘Jet na červenou’ is the Czech way of saying ‘to run a red’.

But away from our reds and back to our blacks now, have another listen to the chorus of Traband’s song, ‘Černej pasažér’:

‘Jsem černej pasažér’ (‘I am a black passenger’) sings our stowaway, before lamenting that he doesn’t have any particular destination, nor is he traveling in any particular direction. ‘Vezu se načerno životem a nevím’, he continues. ‘Vezu se načerno životem’ is not a fixed phrase like ‘černej pasažér’, but it is a play on what has come before. It means, more or less, ‘I travel through life on the black’, or I suppose, in other words ‘my journey through life is clandestine’. Here’s another blast:

As you have probably already gathered, the word ‘černý’ means ‘black’ in Czech – though it can also be used when in English the word ‘dark’ would feature. You can talk, for example, about someone or something being a ‘černý kůň’ in Czech, which literally means a ‘black horse’, but which corresponds with the English idiom ‘dark horse’. Similarly, ‘černé myšlenky’ could be translated into English literally as ‘black thoughts’, though sound better translated as ‘dark thoughts’.

I hope all this musing on Czech idioms and the colour black hasn’t darkened your mood too much, and on that note, na shledanou, goodbye!