Translating Milan Kundera

Michelle Woods

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781847695468
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Traduzione e interpretariato

Translating Milan Kundera uses new archival research to view the wider cultural scope of the translation issue involving the controversies surrounding Kundera's translated novels. It focuses on the language of the novels, Kundera's 'lost' works, writing as translation, interpretation, exile, censorship and the social responses to translated fiction in the Anglophone world.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera is adamant about how important translation is to his work. ‘Translation’, he writes, ‘is everything’ (Kundera, 1988a: 121). Kundera now writes in French, but for the majority of his writing career he wrote in Czech, though soon after he published his first prose work, his writing was banned in the only country in the world where the language is spoken. As a result, for 20 years Kundera wrote in a language that few people could read, yet in that time he became a bestselling international success thanks to the wide-ranging translation of his novels. Although Kundera gained a world-wide readership as a result of translation, his reactions to the process have never been positive: ‘Translation is my nightmare’, he told one interviewer. ‘I’ve lived horrors because of it’ (Elgrably, 1987: 17–18); a year later he wrote that for him translation was a ‘trauma’ (Kundera, 1988a: 121). His negative public statements on translation and translators have invoked a flurry of criticism, with Kundera painted as an irascible pedant causing trouble for the sake of an impossible ideal: to have exact copies of his Czech originals rendered in the foreign languages.

At the same time, the original Czech text of his novels, which Kundera described as a ‘matrix’, were left in the drawer, because most of them – Life is Elsewhere (1973), Farewell Waltz (1976), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Immortality (1991) – were first published in French, as La vie est ailleurs, La valse aux adieux, Le livre du rire et de l’oublie, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être and L’immortalité. Until the ban on Kundera’s work was lifted in Czechoslovakia, following the fall of the communist regime in 1989, his only work published in Czech was by a small publishing house named Sixty-Eight Publishers, based in Canada and owned by fellow Czech writer and émigré Josef Škvorecký. However, the editions ran to print runs of no more than 9000, and all the novels were published after they had been translated into French. Since 1989, Kundera has published only some of his work in the Czech Republic (a fact which has caused great consternation and criticism) – Žert / The Joke and Směšné lásky / Laughable Loves in 1991, Jakub a jeho pán / Jacques and His Master in 1992, Nesmrtelnost / Immortality in 1993 and Valcík na rozloucenou / Farewell Waltz in 1997. His defence of the slow publication of work that had never been read by the Czech public was that he was rewriting the Czech ‘originals’. There are, in Kundera’s words, three originating versions for each potential Czech version: the manuscript (the ‘matrix’), the Škvorecký version and the revised French translations, from all of which Kundera would construct a Czech version (Kundera, 1993b: 345–346).

Between 1985 and 1987, Kundera, who had been living in France for a decade, revised the French translations of all his Czech novels and declared them to be the authentic version of his body of work – more authentic than the originals themselves. In response to the fact that many translators were already translating from the French rather than the Czech versions because of the dearth of Czech-language translators worldwide, Kundera undertook this authenticising of the French translations with the express purpose of creating new ‘originals’ from which translations into other languages could be made. Also, French was becoming Kundera’s second writing language: he began writing critical essays in French in the early 1980s and published L’art du roman / The Art of the Novel in 1986 – his first book written wholly in French. His first novel written entirely in French, La lenteur/ Slowness, was published a decade later, in 1995. He has since published two more novels, L’identité/ Identity in 1997 and L’ignorance/ Ignorance in 2003 (though the novel was first published in Spanish in 2000) and another book of essays, Les testaments trahis / Testaments Betrayed, in 1993 in French.

As with other émigré writers who adopted a second language in which to write, such as Vladimir Nabokov (to whom, in terms of a preoccupation with translation, Kundera compares himself) and Samuel Beckett, Kundera has not only undertaken the translations in the second language but has blurred the boundaries of what can be constituted as an ‘original’ and a ‘translation’ because of his interventions (Kundera, 1991c: 325). The process of revising the French translations not only addressed problems with the transference from one language (Czech) to another (French), but also allowed an opportunity for Kundera to rewrite the novels. In some cases, where the material was too culturally specific, Kundera deliberately altered the translation to make it more accessible to a French readership. In other cases, he dealt with elements of the novel – and not the translation – with which he felt dissatisfied by omitting, altering and adding material.

The French translations did not wholly replaced the Czech versions as the new ‘originals’, although they did become the new original versions for the English translations. In the 1990s, Kundera supervised and collaborated on the retranslation of all the English translations of the Czech novels from the French translations. However, in the cases in which Kundera published a new Czech edition of a novel – for example, Valcík na rozloucenou / Farewell Waltz in 1997 – the new edition, while revised and altered, does not entirely correspond to the ‘definitive’ and ‘authentic’ French revised translation. The history of the evolution of Farewell Waltz (1976) is symptomatic of Kundera’s working and translation process. First circulated in a samizdat edition in 1970 under the title Epilog, the novel, with some changes to the content, was first published in France in 1976 as La valse aux adieux. It was then published in Czech in 1979 by Sixty-Eight Publishers in Canada, with further changes to the content, some included (and some not) in the revised (by Kundera) French translations of 1984 and 1986. In 1997, Kundera published a new Czech edition in the Czech Republic, which contains some changes made in the revised French translations but also some changes unique to the new 1997 Czech edition.

As Kundera deliberately differentiated the Czech and French versions in content – as he has also done with The Joke (1967), Laughable Loves (1970), Life is Elsewhere (1973), and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) – the issue of fidelity has become increasingly more complex. If there is no one untouched original version of the novels, if even the manuscript is a ‘matrix’ (Kundera, 1977: 3), then with what justification can Kundera demand fidelity? The answer would seem self-explanatory, i.e. that Kundera demands fidelity to the definitive French version, because with novels such as Life is Elsewhere (1973), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), which have not been published yet in the Czech Republic, the French version is the most recently revised version, the closest to the author’s current vision of the novel. The English translations of Farewell Waltz serve as a possible example: the novel was first translated from Czech by Peter Kussi in 1976 as The Farewell Party and corresponded to the 1970 Czech edition, with the changes that would appear in the 1979 Czech edition. It was retranslated in 1998 from French by Aaron Asher as Farewell Waltz, which was closer – or more ‘faithful’ – to the 1986 French edition than to the 1997 Czech edition (Asher speaks no Czech). The new English edition is considered more definitive because it includes some of the content changes that Kundera made to the novel while revising the French translation, but it also slightly differs, in content, from both the French and Czech editions.

Kundera has been criticised for his policy of fidelity on two counts: firstly, because he rewrites the translations and deliberately alters them so they do not necessarily correspond to the Czech ‘originals’; and, secondly, because ‘fidelity’ – in the traditional translation sense – is now widely regarded to be an impossibility. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti characterised Kundera as ‘naïve’ because he apparently refuses to accept that a translation automatically incurs changes because of the cultural differences between languages – each language containing culturally untranslatable differences that need to be transformed in order to make the translation understandable (Venuti, 1998: 5–6). Kundera has, indeed, claimed that a translation is only beautiful if it is faithful and, strangely for a writer living and writing in two languages, apparently asserted that such fidelity is possible (Kundera, 1986a: 85–87), which seems curiously odd and even hypocritical given that Kundera deliberately alters the translations once he has control of them, an act which paradoxically implies that Kundera is both unaware of cultural difference between languages, demanding exact fidelity from his translators, while simultaneously cynically exploiting cultural differences in his own translation process.

Some critics believe that Kundera had a very specific agenda in at once complaining that translators were being unfaithful while he himself altered the novels in translation (Stanger, 1997), i.e. that Kundera tailored his translations for a specific audience. Allison Stanger argued that Kundera deliberately removed certain material from the English and French translations of The Joke (1967) in order to ingratiate himself with those readerships by simplifying Czech history to comply with Western assumptions, for instance by removing a passage that suggested Czech collaboration with the Red Army (an image that ran contrary to Western perceptions of Soviet domination and Czech victimhood), or by removing passages that, though acceptable to a Czech readership, would potentially be seen as sexist in the West. These allegations would be mitigated, Stanger argued, only if Kundera genuinely felt that his changes made for an aesthetically superior vision of the novel. But because Kundera made no such changes in the Czech original, Stanger intimated that this was not the case. In an article indicting Kundera’s ‘betrayal’ of his translators and readers, Caleb Crain pointed to Stanger’s assertions as proof that Kundera’s alterations to the translations were cynical acts of contingency (Crain, 1999: 45).

These views echo a certain strand of Czech literary criticism which suggests that Kundera not only altered his translations for a Western audience, but also altered his own writing. In his widely circulated 1988 samizdat essay Kunderovské paradoxy / Kunderian Paradoxes, Milan Jungmann made similar arguments, stating that The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was written with the intention of becoming a Western bestseller novel, because of the erotic content and because of the simplification of Czech history in the novel. Jungmann also accused Kundera of rewriting his image, presenting himself to the West as an unknown writer and a critic of the regime. However, because of his poetry and plays, Kundera had been an important literary figure in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. He later removed this work, some of which was strongly communist, from his bibliography by not translating it (Bauer, 1998a: 12–13). The suspicion that Kundera betrayed his Czech readers and his own talent has been reinforced by his decision to write in French, regarded by some Czech critics (including Jungmann) as a conscious decision to move from the periphery of European culture to its centre, and, in doing so, seeking fame and recognition.

As if shaking a kaleidoscope and not waiting for it to settle, these criticisms have told only part of the story. To gain some insight into Kundera’s search for ‘fidelity’, his rewriting instinct, his awareness of audience and his blurring of the original / translation boundary in his work, some assumptions need to be challenged. The first is this original / translation distinction, a binary echoed in the search for authenticity / inauthenticity in Kundera and his work. Stanger criticises Kundera for his privileging of the translation of The Joke (1967) over the Czech original, yet goes on to do the same thing by detailing the changes in the translations but not identifying any changes in the Czech version between 1967 and 1991. In fact, Kundera rewrote The Joke three times in Czech – in 1968, 1969 and 1991. Not one critic – Czech or otherwise – has made any systematic comparison among the different Czech editions Indeed, Kundera has rewritten the bulk of his work in Czech. His rewriting reflex began with his very earliest work, which he published in different and substantially rewritten editions, suggesting that, while translation has provided an opportunity to rewrite, it is not the sole reason for it. Based on Kundera’s own comments that his Czech manuscript serves as a ‘matrix’, any new Czech edition would have to be rewritten from three originating versions. Thus, there are no sole source Czech originals. Kundera’s own formulation could in fact be reversed: everything is translation.

Kundera has also translated himself. His personal withdrawal from media contact, in order to avoid reductive assumptions about himself that might cloud his work, has resulted in an intensification of the search for the authentic Milan Kundera. He has become, as was once written about J.D. Salinger, ‘a story demanding resolution, intervention and exposure’ (Remnick, 1997: 42). Because he rewrote his bibliography, the contemporary ‘authentic’ representation of him might be characterised as that of a Czech turncoat and an opportunist in the West. This chameleon move was further enhanced by his embrace of France, regarded by some as an opportunistic move into the centre of Western European literary discourse and a further denial of his Czech heritage. By dwelling on Kundera’s reinventions, some Czech and Anglo-American journalists and critics, such as Milan Jungmann, Michal Bauer, Caleb Crain and Allison Stanger, have neglected serious evaluation of his work. The question is whether Kundera’s rewriting of himself or, in connection, of his bibliography, makes him or his work any less authentic. Kundera has played with reinvention in his fiction, inserting himself into his novels as a character and demystifying the notion of the authentic author. In addition, using translation as a theme in his fiction, Kundera suggests that rewriting one’s past is an existential reaction to the creation of the present self. Kundera is continually preoccupied with the problems of the themes and forms of his early work, much of which has been removed from his official bibliography, in his later authorised fiction. Kundera has not exercised a contingent ‘forgetting’ of his past work (and his communist or Czech past); rather, as Jan Lukeš has argued, he is one of the few Czech writers to deal with the consequences of the past by making it art (Lukeš, 1997: 82). The reconsideration of his authentic original past as art is both inauthentic (fiction) and authentic (existential enquiry). Kundera’s past is his life’s work.

The second issue, in the light of the above-suggested complexities, is fidelity, which is a vexing one for critics in view of Kundera’s claim that a translation must be faithful while he simultaneously is rewriting the translations and his Czech originals. The general view has been that Kundera demands fidelity for the simple reason that he is difficult and that he intends to antagonise his translators almost for the sport of it, feeding the constructed image of Kundera. Another possibility has been suggested by his long-time American translator, Peter Kussi, who wrote that Kundera was searching for a fidelity to his ideal of the novel, which is also an unattainable fidelity, especially for the translator, for whom it is impossible to know the author’s intent (Kussi, 1991: 70). Perhaps there is yet another type of fidelity, one which Kundera proposed in the 1990s (though he had made it clear to his translators from the first translations) but which critics have so far ignored, which is a fidelity to the ‘author’s style’. Such a fidelity is markedly different from demanding a fidelity to meaning or content, both of which have little relevance within the context of Kundera’s revision praxis. A fidelity to the author’s style refers to transferring the way in which the author uses language into the target language. For Kundera, this is the most difficult aspect of the translation because it is the most threatening aspect of the work of the art – Kundera argues that each work of art qua art is a transgression of the given cultural norms of style. When the work is translated into another language, its style is often assimilated automatically into the target culture’s stylistic norms in order to render the work less foreign and more accessible, but, in doing so, the translation removes or dilutes what makes it art in the first place (Kundera, 1996b: 99–120).

In all the talk of translation, Anglo-American literary criticism has not focused on the language in Kundera’s novels (as opposed to the language of the novels). Unlike other Czech writers, such as Bohumil Hrabal, Kundera is still overlooked as a real Czech language stylist. As Kussi pointed out, Kundera is regarded as having a ‘classic’ style that owes more to the rational than the poetic literary mind (Kussi, 1991: 69). Yet Kundera has a very specific linguistic project that connects all his prose work and indeed connects his prose work to his earlier experience with poetry. The use of an intricately constructed language owes much to Kundera’s musical education (his father, a pupil of Leoš Janácek, was a professor of music), especially his use of melody, motif and polyphony. In his use of ordinary language and dialogue, which is infused with beauty because of the manner of its usage, Kundera, a great admirer of Janácek, attempts an aesthetic quite similar to that of the composer. Words are used constantly in refrain not only in each novel, but also intertextually with his other novels and his other yet untranslated work. Some of these words are what Kundera has defined as ‘theme-words’, functioning again on a musical model – that of Schoenberg’s ‘tone-row’ – words that reoccur throughout a novel (or novels) to set off an existential enquiry into the word in its constantly new and different context (Kundera, 1988a: 84–85). Words are also repeated in smaller frameworks within passages that often include several different repeated words and phrases, which lend a tonality to the character’s or narrator’s voice. Some of this melodic repetition is of course untranslatable – Czech vowel sounds and the uniform endings of Czech verb conjugations are impossible to reproduce in English – but as a whole the stylistic repetition is a translatable element of the text. Kundera does not believe the words’ meanings to be absolutely translatable, but the repetition of the same word is. The manner in which the word is used – as a motif, as a refrain – is a large part of the textual meaning. Also translatable is the way in which the melody breathes, and that can be helped by the punctuation. Received opinion is that punctuation should be culturally translated; for instance English sentences tend to be much shorter than Czech sentences, and the translation should take this into account. However, Kundera argues strongly against this acceptance, pointing to English–language novelists who do not adhere to accepted punctua...