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40 INF IDELITY

I N THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND

Forgetting, the Czech-born novelist MilanKundera neatly epitomized what makestranslation impossible. His specimen wasthe Czech word lítost. On the one hand, hewrites, lítost means too much: “It desig-nates a feeling as infinite as an open accor-dion, a feeling that is the synthesis of manyothers: grief, sympathy, remorse, and anindefinable longing.” No word in any otherlanguage casts a semantic penumbra withthe same range and chiaroscuro. But on theother hand, lítost means too little. “Undercertain circumstances,” Kundera explains,lítost “can have a very narrow meaning, ameaning as definite, precise, and sharp as awell-honed cutting edge.” And no word inany other language leaves a semantic foot-print exactly the same size and shape.

Among his fans, Kundera’s discussionof lítost is famous. However, if you buyThe Book of Laughter and Forgetting today,you won’t find the two sentences justquoted. They’ve been excised. They werein the Czech original and in the Englishtranslation by UCLA professor MichaelHenry Heim that appeared in 1980. Butin the recent translation by Aaron Asher,issued by HarperCollins in 1996, the sen-tences do not appear. Nor are they in thecurrent French edition, which is the basisof Asher’s work. And you won’t find anyCzech edition of The Book of Laughterand Forgetting in print at all.

“To cross out what one has written isa highly creative act,” Kundera once toldan interviewer. No doubt Kundera himselfdeleted the lines about lítost, perhapsbecause he no longer stands by them. Fora decade and a half, Kundera has crusadedagainst unfaithful translations, and in thecourse of that campaign, his own gener-alizations about untranslatability may havebegun to sound too much like a sloppytranslator’s excuse. “He began to beobsessed,” explains Asher, Kundera’s long-time American editor and new French-to-English translator. “Maybe that’s too stronga word; maybe I shouldn’t use it; but thereare good obsessions.”

The crusade has been effective, but at acost. In America, Kundera’s most famousnovels have been reappearing in brand-newtranslations, which follow his Czech origi-nals more closely in vocabulary, syntax, andeven punctuation. But oddly enough, thesenew versions—all authorized by Kundera—are translated from the French, rather than

directly from Czech. They sometimes readawkwardly; in the circuitous journey fromCzech to French to English, flavor anddetails have been lost, and mistakes havebeen introduced. Furthermore, while retrans-lating his novels, Kundera has also beenrewriting them—sometimes tailoring themto his audience. As Allison Stanger, a polit-ical science professor at Middlebury College,noted in an open letter to Kundera in theNew England Review, “Your Czech audi-ence now reads one version of [The Joke]while your French- and English-languageaudiences read quite another.”

Every author has the right to be finicky,even ornery, about his masterpieces. Buta perfect translation may be a contradic-tion in terms. Is Kundera damaging hisbooks and reputation for the sake of anunreachable ideal? Between Kundera andhis translators, the air is thick with feelingsof betrayal. Lítost, roughly speaking, is theCzech word for “regret,” and Kunderaseems to be learning the hard way that youcan’t have translation without it.

MILAN KUNDERA rose to theworld’s attention hand-in-hand with thenews of his homeland’s political hard luck.Westerners sympathetic to the PragueSpring—the brief thaw in totalitarian com-munism crushed in 1968—read Kunderaall the more sympathetically because of it.The novelist seemed to be the world rep-resentative of “Czech Fate,” to borrow thetitle of a fatalistic essay he wrote shortlyafter the Russians invaded his country. Thatessay infuriated a young dissident namedVáclav Havel, and time proved Havel right:Kundera’s moody pessimism made for badpolitics. But it made for good novels. Inthe 1980s, The Book of Laughter andForgetting and The Unbearable Lightnessof Being became international best-sellersthanks to the dark gifts that, in Kundera’sopinion, the Czechs’ political destiny hadbestowed on them—a melancholy thought-fulness, a taste for existential paradox, anda talent for sexual libertinage.

But despite the push that politicalhistory gave him, Kundera has alwaysstoutly defended his novels from politicsper se. During the Cold War, he even-handedly loathed both his communistcensors and the Westerners who saw himas a dissident. “Spare me your Stalinism,please,” he snapped in 1980 at a TV pan-elist who suggested that his first novel was

a critique of Soviet totalitarianism. “TheJoke is a love story.”

If nothing else, Kundera’s experienceof communism taught him that literarystubbornness pays off. In December 1965Kundera had submitted to his Prague pub-lisher the manuscript of The Joke. In thenovel, a young man mails his girlfriend apostcard containing ironic praise of Trotsky;failing to appreciate the young man’s senseof humor, the Stalinist authorities whointercept the postcard ruin his life.

Throughout the following year, censorssummoned Kundera to their offices torequest changes in the novel. As Kunderasteadfastly refused, the censors becamemeeker and meeker, until finally their objec-tions vanished altogether. In 1967 TheJoke was published untouched, just asKundera wanted it. Three editions quicklysold out—120,000 copies, in a country ofonly fifteen million people. Kunderalaunched his career as a novelist with atriumph over editorial meddling.

That triumph was short-lived. In August1968 Russian military force ended theCzech experiment in “socialism with ahuman face.” Paradoxically, however, thecapitalist West was first to insult the integrityof Kundera’s novels. In 1969, while stillin Prague, Kundera received the Britishedition of The Joke. Chapters had beenshortened, shuffled, and deleted altogether.“I was appalled,” Kundera later remem-bered. In a scorching letter to the TimesLiterary Supplement, he denounced hisBritish publisher for having “merely con-sidered my text as a free basis for bizarreinventions of manipulators.”

Soon after, as Moscow directed the “nor-malization” of Czech culture, Kundera losthis job teaching at a film school, and hisbooks were pulled from libraries and storesin Czechoslovakia. It would be a decadebefore Kundera was at liberty, economi-cally as well as politically, to take his trans-lations personally in hand. But the seeds hadbeen sown: Kundera had won an earlyvictory over editorial tampering, and wit-nessed outrageous infidelities in the trans-lation of his first novel. When at last Kunderawas able to examine his translations closely,he would not be inclined to compromise.

IN 1975 Kundera left his homelandand took up residence in France, wherehe has lived ever since. Four years later ashock revived Kundera’s anxiety about P

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translation. During an interview for theItalian newspaper Corriere della sera, AlainFinkielkraut asked Kundera why his recentnovels had moved away from the “floridand baroque” style of The Joke.

Kundera had no idea what Finkielkrautwas talking about. In Czech, Kundera hasalways been distinguished by his tempered,almost neutral prose style—a difficultachievement in that language. Thanks tothe Counter Reformation, the gap betweenspoken and written Czech is wider than inmost other languages. In 1621 the Czech-speaking nobles, largely Protestant, weredecimated; the Catholic Church labeledalmost all books in Czech heretical; andfor two centuries, Czech survived as a lan-guage spoken mostly by peasants and theurban lower class. Rip van Winkle slept foronly one generation; written Czech sleptfor six or seven. When it was self-con-sciously resuscitated, in the early nineteenthcentury, it sounded a bit medieval, and thatformality has not yet mellowed. Writerslike Jaroslav Hasek, Bohumil Hrabal, andJosef Skvoreck�y have taken literary advan-tage of the contrast between written andspoken Czech by reveling in dialect andslang. Kundera, however, has eschewedlow and high for a careful middle path. Hisstyle is relaxed but always correct, some-what like a medical manual for home use.

The night after his interview withFinkielkraut, Kundera read MarcelAymonin’s French translation of The Jokefor the first time. On top of Kundera’sdeliberately restrained prose, Aymoninhad layered un beau style, the way deca-dents used to drill jewels into living turtles’shells for ornament. Where Kundera hadwritten “The sky was blue,” Aymonin hadtranslated “Under a sky of periwinkle,October hoisted its showy shield.” Kunderawas furious. “Rage seized me,” he laterrecalled. Spurred by that rage, Kunderarevised the French translation, with thehelp of author Claude Courtot. A morefaithful French edition appeared in 1980.The rage also triggered a cascade of retrans-lations of The Joke in other languages—English (1982), Spanish (1984), Italian andPortuguese (1986), German (1987), andDutch (1988)—as Kundera took advan-tage of his growing prestige to switch tomore attentive publishers.

In the United States, meanwhile,Kundera seemed to be having better luck.The first American to translate a book of

Kundera’s was Peter Kussi. (I studied Czechwith Kussi at Columbia.) Kundera himselfhad solicited Kussi’s help, through AntonínLiehm, a mutual friend who had editedthe journal Literární noviny during thePrague Spring. Kussi’s 1974 translation

of Kundera’s novel Life Is Elsewhere wasnominated for a National Book Award.

Pleased with Kussi’s work, Kunderarequested that Kussi also translate hisFarewell Waltz, which appeared under thetitle The Farewell Party in 1976. And in

FOR A DECADE AND A HALF, KUNDERA HAS

CRUSADED AGAINST UNFAITHFUL

TRANSLATIONS. “HE BEGAN TO BE OBSESSED,”

EXPLAINS HIS LONGTIME AMERICAN EDITOR.

MILAN KUNDERA, 1963

42 INF IDELITY

the late 1970s Kussi translated a couple ofnew short stories by Kundera. At the time,no one—not even Kundera—realized thestories would eventually fit together intothe novel The Book of Laughter andForgetting. Kussi’s version of “The Cap ofClementis” appeared in The New Yorker inMay 1979. Shortly thereafter, Knopf refusedto allow Kussi to continue as Kundera’stranslator. “This parting I ascribe to themachinations of editors,” Kussi says today.Kundera himself has written that Knopf’s“reasons [were] obscure to me” and thatat the time Kussi “had all my confidence.”One gets the impression there was confu-sion on all sides but no hard feelingsbetween translator and author.

Luckily for Kundera, Knopf replacedKussi with a translator just as devoted andskillful, UCLA’s Michael Henry Heim. Yearsearlier, Heim had translated for a scholarlyjournal a chapter from The Joke that hadbeen gutted from the British translation.Kundera was “deeply touched by this noblegesture of solidarity with mistreated, humil-iated literature,” and at first he thought ashighly of his new translator as he had ofKussi. In Heim’s 1980 translation, The Bookof Laughter and Forgetting was a literaryand commercial success. Heim’s clean, fluentstyle appeared to be the perfect vehicle forKundera’s sparely told, interlocking storiesof sexual and political disillusionment.

The concord would not last. By thispoint, a new figure had entered the story—a high-profile American editor named AaronAsher. Perhaps Kundera would eventuallyhave fallen out with Heim in any case. But,as Kundera’s editor, Asher was closelyinvolved with their earliest disagreements.“He is the mystery man,” Smith Collegeprofessor Maria Nemcová Banerjee sayswhen Asher’s name comes up. Asher com-missioned Banerjee to write TerminalParadox (Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), herstudy of Kundera’s novels, and he has donegood turns for many of the other figuresin the Kundera saga as well. But over theyears, while Kundera has become morereclusive—he stopped talking to journal-ists in 1985—Asher has become more andmore the author’s intimate.

Asher’s privileged access has arousedcuriosity and suspicion, as has his meta-morphosis from Kundera’s editor into histranslator. He has become something ofa lightning rod for anger about Kundera’shigh-handedness. “I’m behind the eightball,” says Asher. He insists his goalthroughout has been to ensure morefaithful translations for Kundera, and heis unhappy about “having to defend some-thing that needs no defense.” To dispelsome of the mystery surrounding his rela-tionship with Kundera, Asher offers hisown account.

Since the early 1970s Asher had beenhearing about Kundera from Philip Roth,whose books Asher edited. Another Asherauthor, Carlos Fuentes, finally introducedhim to Kundera in 1979. Kundera waseager for an American publisher who wouldaccommodate his scrupulous attention totranslations, and Asher soon lured him toHarper & Row. Heim was asked to con-tinue as Kundera’s translator. “I admiredHeim’s translation of The Book of Laughterand Forgetting,” Asher says now. He com-missioned from Heim a brand-new trans-lation of The Joke, as well as translations ofa new manuscript (The Unbearable Lightnessof Being) and an older play (Jacques andHis Master). As Asher himself admits, thesecommissions would turn out to be some-thing of an irony in light of later events.

Trouble started in the mid-1980s, whenKundera began to look over Heim’s

IN 1967 “THE JOKE” WAS PUBLISHED UNTOUCHED,

JUST AS KUNDERA WANTED IT. HE LAUNCHED HIS CAREER AS

A NOVELIST WITH A TRIUMPH OVER EDITORIAL MEDDLING.

STILLS FROM THE JOKE , 1968

TOP:

PHOTOFEST (2X);

BOTTOM,

FROM LEFT:

COURTESY PETER KUSSIA

ND MIC

HAEL HENRY HEIM

PETERKUSSI

MICHAELHENRY HEIM

working translation of The UnbearableLightness of Being. “Kundera’s English hadgotten good enough for him to expressdoubts to me,” Asher says. According toAsher, Kundera flagged passages that struckhim as problematic and asked for Asher’sopinion. Revising the translation was “verydifficult,” Asher remembers, in part becausefax machines were not yet common. Buteditor and author worked over the proofsfor months—Kundera writing in French,Asher replying in English. “What irksomemonths they were!” Kundera told an inter-viewer shortly afterward.

It was Asher’s first experience workingso closely with Kundera’s prose—a col-labortion that would soon deepen.Nonetheless, Asher insists, the result“wasn’t a retranslation by any means. TheUnbearable Lightness of Being is Heim’stranslation; it has his signature on it.”

Heim recalls the process of revising TheUnbearable Lightness of Being somewhatdifferently. “I had quite an exchange ofletters with Kundera,” Heim explains, “butas the correspondence was in Czech, Asherwas out of the loop.” According to Heim,the back-and-forth between translator andauthor was “perfectly amiable.” Somepoints Heim conceded, and on others hestood his ground.

At least publicly, there was, as yet, nosign of a rift.

EVEN KUNDERA has won-dered: “An undue obsession with trans-lations? I can’t say.” In his own defense,Kundera has pointed out that for nearlytwo decades, Czechs formed only a hun-dredth or a thousandth of his readership.“My books lived their lives as translations;as translations they were read, criticized,judged, accepted or rejected. I was unablenot to care about translation.”

Attentive, however, is not the same asimplacable. In Kundera’s case, an exile’snatural concern has been aggravated bya philosophy of translation that is unusu-ally hardline.

Traditionally, the translator has beencaught, like the runner in a game of pickle,between fidelity and license. Neither baseis safe. If he is strictly faithful to the orig-inal text’s linguistic structure, the resultmay be choppy, if not incomprehensible.But if he freely recasts the original text’sstructure in order to convey its meaningclearly, he risks losing the linguistic details

KUNDERA IS ELSEWHEREIN THE MID-1980S, WHEN MILAN KUNDERA CHOSE TO PUBLISH THE

authorized edition of his works in French rather than Czech, he could haveargued that history had forced his hand. While they held power, the CzechCommunists were never going to let their most famous exile come home, andat the time no one knew the Velvet Revolution was less than five years away.But Kundera rubbed salt in the wounds of his fellow Czechs. He declared,“Even if I could go back I would never wish to!” And since the VelvetRevolution of 1989, with rare exceptions, he hasn’t. When he does go, hetravels incognito—a fact Czech journalists have twitted Kundera for, whenthey have detected his presence at all.

Kundera-twitting is something of a national sport. Any downturn inKundera’s post-Czech career is headline worthy—NEGATIVE REVIEWS OF

KUNDERA’S NEW NOVEL and UNFAVORABLE RECEPTION OF KUNDERA’S BOOKS aretwo recent examples. A few years ago, the novelist Michal Viewegh satirizedKundera as returning home, likethe hero of The Joke, for a “beau-tiful demolition”—the seductionof Mrs. Václav Havel. “Sadly Imust devote most of my time tocorrecting the work of my transla-tors,” Viewegh’s Kundera com-plained. “Whenever I think of it,rage seizes me. Instead of my orig-inal sentence ‘I plunged my indexfinger into her glowing buttocks,’one Spanish translator shamelesslyused a text of his own with thewording ‘I kissed her chilly face.’”For Kundera’s seventieth birthday,this past April, Lidové novinyprinted an article tailor-made tograte on the author’s nerves. Thepaper’s editors baited Kundera on“the querulousness with which heintends to keep his work under hiscontrol.” They wrote that his crys-talline style today risks being “rele-gated to the level of kitsch.” Andthey reprinted an unflattering observation from Le Journal du Dimanche: Themore Kundera resembles the French, the less he interests them.

Why are the Czechs out to get Kundera’s goat? In part, they are annoyedthat he and his Czech publisher, Atlantis, have released his books so slowly.Kundera’s writing was once available in Czech from 68 Publishers, run by theémigré authors Josef and Zdena Skvoreck�y in Toronto. But before the VelvetRevolution, it was dangerous to smuggle the books into Czechoslovakia, andsoon after, the Skvoreck�ys closed up shop. As a result, some of Kundera’s mostfamous Czech-written novels—The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, TheUnbearable Lightness of Being, and Life Is Elsewhere—have never been widelyavailable in the Czech-speaking lands. (Kundera refuses to rerelease themuntil he has established definitive Czech texts—a task he may or may notchoose to undertake.) Nor has Kundera yet announced any plans to translateinto Czech the books he has written in French: The Art of the Novel,Testaments Betrayed, Slowness, and Identity.

Kundera has answered these reproaches with a mix of self-deprecation andself-importance. On the one hand, he has claimed to be “not at all sure that [the

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that make it distinctive as a work of liter-ature. As one Italian proverb puts it, “Thepretty ones are never faithful, and thefaithful ones are never pretty.”

In “The Task of the Translator,” theGerman critic Walter Benjamin famouslyresolves this conundrum with an extremechoice: fidelity, at the expense of eleganceand meaning. Choppiness is good,Benjamin asserts, because it indicates thatthe translator has not smoothed away thedetails that distinguish the original fromthe target language—and from the pure lan-guage they both aspire to become.Benjamin’s theory of translation soars beau-tifully into the empyrean, but it’s not entirelypractical. Though he advocates “a literalrendering of the syntax” of the original,Benjamin acknowledges that his strategyis “a direct threat to comprehensibility.”

Nonetheless, Kundera has adoptedsomething like Benjamin’s radical fidelity(shorn, however, of the Romantic notionof “pure language”). “O ye translators, donot sodonymize us!” he writes in an essaythat excoriates French translators of Kafkafor showing off their synonymicons. LikeBenjamin, Kundera eggs his translatorseven to solecism. “For a translator, thesupreme authority should be the author’spersonal style,” Kundera writes in TestamentsBetrayed (1993). “But most translatorsobey another authority: that of the con-ventional versionof ‘good French’ (or goodGerman, good English, etc.).” It exasper-ates Kundera to hear a translation praisedfor its “flow.” He cherishes even the idio-syncrasies of his punctuation, and hasboasted that he “once left a publisher forthe sole reason that he tried to change mysemicolons to periods.”

In less polemical moments, Kunderahas conceded that no translation can beabsolutely faithful. He insists, however,that a translator unafraid of odd-soundinglanguage will not only render the author’sstyle and thinking more accurately but alsoenrich the target language.

This rigid fealty is not the norm—atleast not according to translators andscholars of translation. “To be too close tothe original, as Kundera wants his transla-tors to be, undermines the English poeticsof the text and works against, rather thanin favor of, the translation,” says theUniversity of British Columbia’s PeterPetro, who edited Critical Essays on MilanKundera (G.K. Hall, 1999) and is himself

a Slovak-English translator. In the opinionof Robert Wechsler, whose publishinghouse, Catbird Press, has exposed Americanreaders to lesser-known Czech authors suchas Vladimír Páral and Jáchym Topol,Kundera “should be seen as an extremist.”

IN 1988 Daniel Day-Lewis andJuliette Binoche starred in Philip Kaufman’smovie version of The Unbearable Lightnessof Being. “Not my film,” Kundera grum-bled in Le Nouvel Observateur, complainingof the “doleful monotony of film orgasms.”But the movie pushed Kundera’s interna-tional reputation to its peak. That year,Kundera finished his seventh book offiction, Immortality—the last he wouldwrite in Czech—and, thanks to his movie-enhanced clout, he was in a position todictate terms. Returning to his earlier trans-lator was one priority. “He wanted Kussi,”recalls Asher, who had moved from Harper

& Row to Grove Press. For the first timein his translation career, Kussi was wellpaid—“very well paid,” he admits. Toensure that the translation met Kundera’sstandards, author and translator agreedthat as soon as Kussi had finished his draft,he would bring it to Paris for consultation.Once the two men agreed on a final version,“that would pretty much be it,” says Kussi.

“But that wasn’t it,” Kussi continues.“I found myself in a very, very unpleasantsituation.” Changes began to appear in themanuscript after Kundera had signed offon it, and Kussi could not figure out whowas responsible. Concerned, he wroterepeatedly to Kundera but received noanswer. He fought to restore as much ofhis translation as he could, but manychanges appeared in the final, printedversion without his approval or any wordfrom Kundera. Despite this confusion,Kundera’s novel and Kussi’s translation N

EAL PETERS COLLECTIO

NS

STILL FROM THE UNBEARABLELIGHTNESS OF BEING , 1988

novels] are still worth the trouble of resuscitating.” But on the other, he hasclaimed to have better things to do. Editing is time consuming, Kundera argues,because he has to compare at least three versions of each of his novels: the orig-inal Czech manuscript, the book as printed by the Skvoreck�ys, and the correctedFrench edition. Rather than spend his remaining years in tedious, backward-glancing labor, he has chosen to “give radical priority to my fragile present,which for a long time now has not been lived in Bohemia.”

Kundera did, however, publish a Czech edition of The Joke in 1991, andthe first person to take a close look at it has discovered something curious.For his new edition, observes Allison Stanger, Kundera did not combine hisearlier texts; rather, he “inexplicably seems to have authorized the publicationof the earlier unmodified 1967 Czech text.” As a result, in over fifty places,Kundera’s new Czech edition doesn’t match his authoritative English orFrench editions. “I stumbled onto this while trying to improve my Czech,”says Stanger, an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College,explaining why she read the 1991 Atlantis edition and the 1992 Englishedition of The Joke side by side.

Some of the passages, Stanger guesses, were deleted from the officialFrench text because they would have been too cumbersome to explain tonon-Czech readers. Otherchanges, however, are moreintriguing. In his vitriolic 1992author’s note, Kundera allegedthat in Heim’s hands, “Ludvík,that thoughtful, melancholyintellectual, became vulgar andcynical.” Ironically, Stanger hasdiscovered “a coarser, morecynical Ludvík” in passages

retained in the 1991 Czech edition but absent from the novel’s 1982 and1992 English editions. Even more provocatively, Stanger has found that inCzech, Kundera more often allows his characters to retain a political com-plexity—a warm regard for communism’s promise, even after disappoint-ment—that he has streamlined out of the English and French versions.

That last discovery no doubt resonates with Kundera’s Czech detractors.In the mid-1980s, the dissident Milan Jungmann accused Kundera of havingmisled Westerners about the extent of his communist past—of having“turned his biography into kitsch for uninitiated foreign readers.” “Half ofmy life I spent as a relatively unknown Czech intellectual,” Kundera had toldPhilip Roth in 1984. Nonsense, Jungmann countered. In fact, Kundera’sname was “a household word” in the 1950s and 1960s. “He was the best-known spokesman of a wave undermining the borders between socialist andworld culture,” Jungmann wrote. Kundera’s poetry, articles, speeches, andplays were eagerly anticipated and widely acclaimed. He won the KlementGottwald State Prize in 1963 and taught for years in the tony Prague filmschool that launched the Czech New Wave. In The Joke, Kundera wouldmock the propaganda surrounding the Stalinist culture hero Julius Fucík, a

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1999 45

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MARTHA KAPLAN/W.W

. NORTON;

TAD MERRIC

K PHOTOGRAPHY

jointly won a prize from the British news-paper The Independent in 1991.

Kussi’s frustrations were minor com-pared to the blow that Kundera was aboutto deal Heim. In 1990 Asher returned toHarper & Row, which had been rechris-tened HarperCollins, and began acquiringthe paperback rights to all of Kundera’searlier novels. When Asher suggested apaperback rerelease of Heim’s earlier trans-lation of The Joke, Kundera hesitated. In1982 Kundera had trusted Heim’s work—in fact, he had praised it as “the first validand authentic version of a book that tellsof rape and has itself so often been vio-lated”—but now he was “gripped by sus-picion.” Sure enough, upon scrutinyHeim’s translation struck Kundera as “notmy text.” Where he disapproved of Heim’srendering, Kundera laboriously patchedin turns of phrase from the earlier, reviledBritish translation, or inserted his own“word-for-word translations either inEnglish or in French.” Asher collatedKundera’s changes to create a brand-newedition—the fifth in English—releasedunder Aaron Asher’s personal imprint atHarperCollins in 1992.

“I offered to send Heim the revisedversion,” Asher says today. “Most of it isstill Heim’s.” Trust, however, had brokendown. Heim refused to allow his name onthe book. “I had not been consulted aboutthe changes,” Heim writes by email, “andtherefore could not lend my name tothem.” The book was published withoutany translator listed at all.

There was, however, an author’s note.It told the story of an author betrayed byhis translators over and over again. Witha touch of melodrama, Kundera portrayedHeim as having earned Kundera’s trustonly because he was the most slippery kindof traitor: the kind who means well. “Iwas all the more unhappy,” Kundera wrote,“because I did not believe that it was amatter of incompetence on the translator’spart, or of carelessness or ill will: no; ingood conscience he produced the kind oftranslation that one might call transla-tion-adaptation. Is this the current, normalpractice? It’s possible. But unacceptable.Unacceptable to me.”

As a personal attack on a translatoradmitted to be working in good faith,Kundera’s note was virtually unprece-dented. Heim is probably one of the fewtranslators whose reputation could have

IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC, KUNDERA-

TWITTING IS SOMETHING OF A NATIONAL

SPORT. ANY DOWNTURN IN KUNDERA’S

POST-CZECH CAREER IS HEADLINE WORTHY.

JOSEF SKVORECK �Y

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ALLISON STANGER

46 INF IDELITY

survived it. His work has been recognizedby the American Literary TranslatorsAssociation; his translations of Danilo Kisand Bohumil Hrabal have been widelyacclaimed; and he is currently at work ona new Günter Grass novel, My Century,due out from Harcourt Brace this fall.When Heim is asked today about hisquarrel with Kundera, he warns that it is“not my favorite topic.” He answers areporter’s questions about dates and facts,but politely declines to elaborate. “I standby the work I did,” he says. Last December,at a San Francisco Slavicists’ conferencewhere translations of Kundera were dis-cussed, Heim said only that he was happyto have had the opportunity to translatethe best of Kundera’s novels.

In private, however, Heim has admittedthat he was upset. “Heim said to me, ‘Idon’t really want to talk about it; I washurt,’” says Banerjee, who for her part has“always liked Heim’s translations.” Thetight-knit world of translators is not happyabout how Heim was treated. “I am withMichael Heim on this,” says Petro. “Anauthor can say whatever he wants, but heis rarely so strong in the target languageas to be the judge himself. One has to havea respect for the translator, after all.”Wechsler thinks Kundera has been “sortof a bully.” Kussi calls it “questionable oroutright wrongheaded” of Kundera to“attack his translators in public.

“He’s consistently been raising his trans-lators to the sky, then becoming disillu-sioned with them,” notes Kussi, whoseexperience parallels Heim’s. Over the years,he recalls, “Kundera had treated me verywell.” Kussi had been the author’s guestin Paris and on Belle-Île, off the Brittanycoast, and when Kussi wanted to write anessay on the author, Kundera had coop-erated. Kundera and Kussi had workedhappily together updating Kussi’s versionof Life Is Elsewhere; in the preface of theresulting 1986 edition, Kundera haddubbed Kussi “a true artist among trans-lators.” “I benefited on balance,” Kussireadily admits. But the late changes to his

translation of Immortality had upset Kussi,and in the mid-1990s, it nonplussed himto receive a cool, businesslike letter fromKundera, asking if he would be willing torevise Farewell Waltz. “It was almost as ifhe was hoping I would say no,” Kussi says.He did not revise his old translation. Asit happens, Kundera found a way—a highlyunusual way—to manage without him.

IN HIS 1986 book The Art of theNovel, Kundera recalls with horror meetinga translator who knew no Czech. Whenasked how he had translated Kundera’sfirst novel, the man took a picture ofKundera out of his wallet and replied,“With my heart.” As Kundera wrylyobserves, “Of course, it turned out to bemuch simpler: He had worked from theFrench rewrite.”

But nowadays, Kundera is demandingthat his novels be translated from theFrench rewrite, rather than from the Czechoriginal. How did it come to this?

Part of the answer lies in Kundera’sgrowing pride in his identity as a Frenchcitizen. The communists stripped Kunderaof his Czech citizenship in 1979, and hewas “moved and filled with gratitude” byFrance’s gift of citizenship two years later.In 1984, his French improved by nearlya decade of living in France, Kundera began“the detailed revision of all my Frenchtranslations.” In the end, the revisionswould cost Kundera more than two yearsand “as much energy as the writing of twonew books.” But at long last, in 1987,Kundera triumphantly instructed Gallimardto print at the back of each revised Frenchvolume a notice declaring that the newtranslations had “the same authenticityvalue as the Czech text” (“la même valeurd’authenticité que le texte tchèque”). In themid-1980s, furthermore, Kundera beganwriting his nonfiction in French ratherthan Czech. Not Kundera’s books butKundera himself seemed to be undergoingtranslation. And why not? At the time, theIron Curtain looked permanent.

In the early 1990s, HarperCollins pro-

KUNDERA PRAISED HEIM’S WORK AS

“THE FIRST VALID AND AUTHENTIC VERSION

OF A BOOK THAT TELLS OF RAPE AND HAS

SO OFTEN BEEN VIOLATED.”

CTK/SOVFOTO

posed paperback reissues of four of Kundera’sCzech-written books. Suspicious of the oldEnglish translations, proud of his Frencheditions, and estranged from both of hislongtime Czech-to-English translators, theauthor considered an unorthodox alterna-tive: Instead of correcting the old transla-tions, why not commission brand-newtranslations from the French? “He askedme to take a look,” says Asher, “and askedsome other people to take a look. The upshotwas that yes, according to his principles, ifnot everybody else’s, these books would becloser to what he had originally written ifthey were retranslated.” Asher’s wife, Linda,had been elegantly and accurately trans-lating Kundera’s French nonfiction since1984, but she was busy with Kundera’s essaycollection Testaments Betrayed. Accordingto Asher, an impatient Kundera asked him,“Why don’t you do it? Your French is goodenough. You know exactly what I need.”Asher, who had recently left HarperCollinsto go freelance, accepted.

Today, the Ashers together hold theKundera franchise. In addition to revisingThe Joke, Aaron has retranslated from theFrench The Book of Laughter and Forgetting(1996), Farewell Waltz (1998), and LifeIs Elsewhere (due out in 2000). A revised,but not retranslated, Laughable Loves willappear this fall. In addition to Kundera’sessay collections The Art of the Novel andTestaments Betrayed, Linda has translatedKundera’s new novels, Slowness (1996)and Identity (1998), both of whichKundera composed in French.

AS EVERY translator knows, it iseasy to pick apart a translation. It is easyto find an awkward passage that never fin-ished its journey through translatorese andinto English, or a knotty passage that wasfurtively omitted, or a plain old-fashionedmistake. With that caveat in mind, onemight still consider the question loomingover this debate: Are the new translationsof Kundera better?

The answer depends, in part, on whatyou are looking for. Asher stresses that adifference in philosophy is at the heart ofKundera’s break with his American trans-lators. “Heim and Kussi are very good trans-lators,” he says, but “they’ve allowedthemselves some latitude. They didn’t dobad translations; their intentions weren’twicked. But a translator is comparable to aperformer, a pianist, not the composer. If

communist journalist executed by Nazis. But as Derek Sayer notes in hisindispensable history The Coasts of Bohemia (Princeton, 1998), in 1955Kundera was still so much a part of that culture that one of his own poemsportrayed Fucík as a sort of Marxist Christ.

In Kundera’s defense, the literary critic Jan Trefulka pointed out last summerin Lidové noviny that “The political loosening of the 1960s did not happen of itsown accord.” A longtime friend of Václav Havel’s, Trefulka, too, was a commu-nist before the Russian invasion turned him into an impeccably credentialed dis-sident. The Prague Spring owed much to intellectuals of Kundera andTrefulka’s ilk, who laid the groundwork for liberalization inside the Party.

These fierce disputes about Kundera’s artistic and political past have beenlittle reported in the West, and here, too, one senses the power of transla-tion’s almost invisible hand. The Russian invasion forcibly changed Kunderafrom a Czech writer into an international writer, whose books were readmainly in foreign languages. Thanks to circumstance and copyright law,Kundera was given an opportunity that most mature artists can only dreamabout: He was able to decide which of his works he wanted the world tojudge him by. Defensibly enough, he has quarantined his early, socialism-tinged work. Hard as it is for Czechs to read Kundera’s late, capitalist novels,it is much harder for Westerners to read his early, communist poetry andessays. The Czechs, as a result, know a Kundera even more muddied, human,and self-contradictory than the rest of the world knows.

Younger Czech critics, uncompromised by the bad old days, have taken upJungmann’s indictment of Kundera’s “strange creative schizophrenia.” Butolder Slavs and older Slavicists tend to shrug it off. Says the critic Peter Petro,“I salute people brave enough to change their mind.”

So does Kundera, apparently. In the original Book of Laughter andForgetting, Kundera harshly criticized an actual Czech singer named KarelGott, who collaborated heavily with the Communist regime after the Russian crackdown. But in the new French and English editions, “the Idiot of Music,” as Kundera once called him, is off the hook. As DeborahGarfinkle, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, noted in an article earlier this year, Karel Gott has been renamed Karel Klos—a creature of pure fiction. —C.C.

KUNDERA AT A CZECHOSLOVAK WRITERS’ UNIONMEETING IN PRAGUE, 1967

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1999 47

48 INF IDELITY

a translator thinks he’s a composer, heshould get out of the concert hall.

“There are some passages in these trans-lations that sound foreign,” Asher admitsof his own work. “I like the foreignness.”Under a theory of translation like Kundera’s,even stilted prose may be an asset.

Michelle Woods, a graduate student atTrinity College, Dublin, has studied the dif-ferent editions of The Joke. In her opinion,the style of the 1992 Asher-Kundera editionconforms, for good or ill, to Kundera’s rig-orous translation philosophy; to Woods, thenew Joke sounds “less familiar, lessidiomatic” than Heim’s 1982 version. Myown impression is that with a few excep-tions, the difference between the two isnot dramatic. Paradoxically, the 1992 Jokemay be an improvement because itsimprovements are so modest: It is largelyHeim’s text, with intermittent fixes.

Aaron Asher’s translations of Kunderafrom the French, however, are somethingelse entirely. As Benjamin wrote,“Translations…prove to be untranslatablenot because of any inherent difficulty, butbecause of the looseness with which

meaning attaches to them.” Kundera hasadmired Leos Janácek’s attempt to capturethe nuances of speech with musical nota-tion, and he has appreciated Hemingway’sdelicate ear for the rhythms of dialogue.Since Kundera knows that such subtleachievements are fragile, it is hard to under-stand why he imagines that his own stylecan survive a double translation. Like thechildren’s game of Telephone, the processamplifies garbling.

Asher’s fidelity to the punctuation andarrangement of clauses in the originalCzech is uncanny, given that he does notknow that language; and at times, it isingenious, attesting to Kundera’s closeinvolvement and Asher’s hard labor.Furthermore, to Asher’s credit, there area number of spots in the new Book ofLaughter and Forgettingwhere he has cor-rected Heim’s literary “improvements.”For example, Asher succeeds in restoringan unusual simile (“all the years of her mar-riage landed on her like a heavy sack”) thatHeim had flattened into a cliché (“like aton of bricks”). Kussi is a more cautioustranslator than Heim. Asher, however, does

restore a maple that had turned into analder in Kussi’s Farewell Waltz.

But my own sense is that the flaws inthe French-to-English retranslations faroutweigh their merits. Take Asher andKundera’s disregard for “flow.” It may beprincipled, but at times it’s a serious imped-iment to the reader. “Why don’t I go (andnever will go) and inform on him?” Olgawonders to her own and the reader’s baf-flement in Asher’s Farewell Waltz. Or,earlier in that book: “Olga thought himridiculously theatrical, and she was delightedto see him go and that, finally, she wouldsoon be alone with Jakub.” These sen-tences may be faithful to Kundera’s syntax,but they are hostile to the reader.

Furthermore, as an inexperienced trans-lator, Aaron Asher makes outright mistakes.Asher needlessly creates verb-tense chaosby translating “Voici deux mois qu’ils avaientfait connaissance” as “It is two months sincethey met.” Kussi’s “They had met twomonths earlier” does the trick just fine. Inthe Book of Laughter and Forgetting, whena communist dictator writes a letter to themusician Karel Gott (renamed Karel Klos

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1999 49

FRANCOIS

LOCHON/GAMMA LIA

ISON

in the new edition), Asher mistranslates thedictator’s reassuring “nous ne vous en voulonspas” as “we want nothing from you.” In fact,the sentence contains a common Frenchidiom meaning “we are not angry with you.”

With misplaced loyalty, Asher has alsoreproduced awkward turns of phrase thatwere only translator’s expedients in Frenchand never appeared in the original Czech.For example, in Asher’s Farewell Waltz,Ruzena complains of her lover Klíma thatafter their one-night stand “he had shownno sign of life.” That’s a doggedly faithfulrendering of the French “il n’avait pasdonné signe de vie”; in English, the expres-sion usually describes the comatose ratherthan the merely inattentive. The Czech textdoes not justify the blunder: “se neohlasilani sluvkem” (literally, “he did not announcehimself by even a small word”). Similarly,in Asher’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting,Edwige tells her lover “I’m making pee,”because in French that’s what one does—on fait pipi. In English and in Czech,however, urination takes place as a verb,and Heim’s “I’m in here peeing” is muchcloser to the efficient Czech “curám.”

“ AN UNDUE OBSESSION WITH TRANSLATIONS?”

KUNDERA ASKS. “I CAN’T SAY. MY BOOKS LIVED

THEIR LIVES AS TRANSLATIONS.... I WAS

UNABLE NOT TO CARE ABOUT TRANSLATION.”

MILAN KUNDERA

50 INF IDELITY

In other spots, Asher has introduced nonsequiturs, because he has separately trans-lated two sentences with word-for-wordfidelity, but failed to take into account thatwithin their new English context, the sen-tences must accommodate each other. “Iwonder...which of your distant ancestorshad a big nose,” a father muses to his wifein Asher’s Farewell Waltz, while staring attheir toddler son, and then adds, “Isn’t thatright?” In Kussi’s version, the father asks,“Who knows? Maybe one of your distantancestors sported a long schnozzle,” and con-tinues, more logically, “Isn’t that possible?”

At the end of the day, I also miss Heim’sand Kussi’s greater command of literarystyle. “Everyone gave way to dishearten-ment” is no more accurate than Kussi’s“Everyone suddenly felt very let down,”but it is much less felicitous. Heim’s Bookof Laughter and Forgetting compares thelonely, isolated Tamina to a walled-in“patch of grass,” which is poignant. ButAsher describes her as “a bit of lawn,”which sounds like something that needsto be mowed. A man described in Kussi’sEnglish as a “courier of disaster” becomesin Asher’s a “mailman of misfortune.”

In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera dis-cussed Stravinsky’s attempt late in life tomake authorized recordings of himselfplaying and conducting his own music.The attempt is somewhat analogous toKundera’s intervention in his own trans-lations, and in Kundera’s case, as inStravinsky’s, “this wish to take on the roleof performer himself often provoked anirritated response.” A few irritated trans-lators may be a small price to pay for artisticintegrity. And in fact the translators inquestion have already dusted themselvesoff and moved on. But Kundera’s tightcontrol is not serving his work. Like ajealous husband trying to enforce his wife’slove, Kundera faces an unpleasant real-ization: Commanding obedience may notbring his texts any closer to him.

Caleb Crain is a contributing writer for LF.His translations from the Czech haveappeared in Daylight in Nightclub Inferno:Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation (Catbird, 1997) and The TenorSaxophonist’s Story by Josef Skvoreck�y(Ecco, 1996). Next fall, Yale UniversityPress will publish American Sympathy,his study of men’s friendships in earlyAmerican literature.