The Czech word pohoda can keep a translator awake at night. Along with its derivatives pohodový and pohodovì it has irritated me for about twenty years. It is not that it is in the strictest terms untranslatable, but that it has expanded rapidly to cover a range of meanings requiring different translations in English, while evidently remaining one and the same word to the Czechs themselves.
Until that twenty-year old epiphany I had barely heard it. I knew it from literature and it was in standard monolingual dictionaries but as a bookish expression it stayed on the edge of my awareness. Since then, its meaning has ballooned from denoting primarily pleasant weather or a pleasant atmosphere - and metaphorically an agreeable state of mind and/or body, well-being - to a colloquialism conveying all manner of pleasant, desirable, suitable, or simply good states of affairs.
While its pleasure seems to have flourished for the Czechs, it has caused my translatorly satisfaction to dwindle.
Pohodas primary 20th century sense has generally carried the superfluous automatic epithet pøíjemná (pleasant) or, often, krásná (beautiful) unless it is qualified by some other adjective, such as jarní (spring). There is no direct, one-to-one English equivalent. In the common metaphorical sense the word indicates a range of possible translations; many of these carry an atmosphere of interiority, suggesting that the addition of the adjective duevní (mental, of the soul) might also be superfluous, though the phrase duevní pohoda does have an ideal equivalent in peace of mind (already, then, miles away from pleasant weather).
The utterance To je pohoda once equated to (crudely) What lovely weather or What a lovely day, but today it may be used of almost any situation or place that evokes the same sense of pleasure that such a day or weather might. In its most up-to-date sense it conveys an assurance that things are either ideal or couldnt be better (Thats great, Everythings fine). The same is true of the expression To je v pohodì, which comes closer to Its okay, Dont worry, No problem, not to mention for its truncated form V pohodì my least favourite English response, Sorted! (where has the weather gone now?).
In fact, V pohodì, as used by media folk (and those who would imitate them), may mean little more than yes, great, excellent, obviously, youre welcome; its inglorious blossoming (along with pohoda itself, and pohodový) since November 1989 has not escaped the murderously aquiline eye of Vladimír Just, who in his Slovník floskulí (Prague, 2003), lambasts all the worst excesses of latterday Czech political and journalistic newspeak.
The inflation of the words meaning is further reflected in the adjective pohodový and the adverb pohodovì, which appear in a dictionary of recent Czech neologisms by Olga Martincová and others.
Josef Fronek has made an admirable attempt to capture the range of meanings of pohodový; his own Czech-English dictionary entry offers in the first sense: pleasant, lovely, enjoyable, [slang] swell, super, and in the second: (of a person) level-headed, calm, unruffled, [colloquial] unflappable, cool. At which point it becomes clear that perhaps cool - in its modern sense, covering a wide range of things, persons and situations - is the nearest single equivalent for pohodový.
Cool itself, like pohoda if not so intimately, is a word widely associated with weather conditions. (This also makes the recent widespread slang intrusion of cool into teenage Czech thoroughly redundant. Similar meteorological associations may also attach to the English fine, though not to the long-established Czech fajn.) For pohodovì, Olga Martincová offers meanings translatable as pleasantly, unhurriedly, calmly, while Fronek offers calmly, unhurriedly.
Meanwhile, this linguistic flux has created a pohoda-related oddity. The Czech language makes available the negative prefix ne- for verbs, adjectives and nouns [hence dìlat/nedìlat (do/not do), zajímavý/nezajímavý (interesting/uninteresting)]. But the analogous form to pohoda nepohoda - merely means bad weather; it has been stranded as a purely lexical negative, totally untouched by all that has happened to its non-negative sister.
For English-Czech dictionaries it is hard to see how the frequency and prolificity of pohoda or variations of it might be truly conveyed. My own calm escapes me.
