The inventor of the cock-and-bull story?

I had more quotes from the recently released Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of Gab by Bohumil Hrabal that I didn't mention, but I didn't want the post to run too long. I stumbled across a copy of Hrabal's 1966 story collection The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (sometimes titled The World Cafeteria) and I realized the last entry in Rambling on was an introduction to the earlier collection. A passage in the earlier translation struck me as much as it did in the recent release, so I'll provide a short post with the "paragraph" that struck me. Well, paragraph is misleading for a six-page sentence, but you catch my drift. The earlier version was translated as "Handbook for the Apprentice Palaverer" by Michael Henry Heim, but I'll go with the recent version titled "An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of Gab" by David Short in the Karolinum Press edition.

…I'm a corresponding member of the Academy of Rambling-on, a student at the Department of Euphoria, my god is Dionysos, a drunken, sensuous young man, jocundity given human form, my church father is the ironic Socrates, who patiently engages with anybody so as to lead them by the tongue and through language to the very threshold of nescience, my first-born is Jaroslav Hašek, the inventor of the cock-and-bull story and a fertile genius and scribe who added human flesh to the firmament of prose and left writing to others, …

— from Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab by Bohumil Hrabal
English translation by David Short
Afterword by Václav Kadlec
Illustrations by Jiří Grus
Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 978-80-246-2316-0


The end of this paragraph in Heim's translation is "and his human qualities made the others feel uncomfortable with their pens." When I hear cock-and-bull story, though, Laurence Sterne is the first name to come to mind. Heim's translation has a slightly different take—"inventor of the beer-hall story"—that sounds better, but even there I would argue with Hrabal about this. Over a pint in the pub, of course. But then, maybe that's what he intended.