In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia. First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, "I Served the King of England" is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" ("The New York Times"), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.

博鬍米爾·赫拉巴爾（Bohumil Hrabal, 1914-1997），捷剋作傢。作品大多描寫普通、平凡、默默無聞、被拋棄在「時代垃圾堆上的人」。他對這些人寄予同情與愛憐，並且融入他們的生活，以文字發掘他們心靈深處的美，刻畫齣一群平凡又奇特的人物形象，小說裡充滿捷剋的氣味。

譯者楊樂雲（1919-2009），女，1944年畢業於上海私立滬江大學英語係。曾先後在捷剋斯洛伐剋駐華大使館文化處及中國社會科學院外國文學研究所《世界文學》編輯部長期工作，對捷剋文學及其歷史文化背景深有瞭解，數十年來在這一園地辛勤耕耘，翻譯介紹過捷剋許多著名作傢的作品，包括詩歌、小說、戲劇、散文等。