notes on work of Milan Kundera

Problem of Translation (notes on work of Milan Kundera) presented as a talk the JvE Akademie 1999
This is a short text about the work of Milan Kundera from a very personal point of view, the view of graphic designer. The text is not going to analyse any of Kundera’s book in particular, it will rather discuss Kundera’s compositional approach, and other aspects important for his work. There are mainly: problem of identity, variation and translation. The latter is of great importance for my personal work, and I will focus on this aspect of Kundera’s work.
Recently, there have been published a few books and reviews interpreting Kundera’s writings and giving them philosophical significance. Kundera has been described as a writer critiquing the society (dogmatic, politicised, consumer), portraiting with a sharp irony the decay of the society. I am not entirely convinced about this description, for me, Kundera has always been a novel man. In all his books, he has been been trying to use format of a novel to create a way of thinking that is specifically novel-like (not abstract, not theoretical, not philosophical, but questioning, and provocative). Mediation, or reflection becomes an inseparable part of his novels converging with narrative lines into a coherent piece.

problem of identity
Looking at Kundera’s books, his biography has been reducing for past 10 years to the one he uses today. The cover of his latest book “Identity”, reads following: “Milan Kundera was born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia and since 1975 has been living in France.” The reduced biographical information reflects Kundera’s skeptical view towards the trends of biographies. Historically, many biographies of authors replaced the original artwork. Kundera strictly refuses to publish any interviews, any photographs of his, any explanation of his book. All he is trying to say is in the novel, and if he did not say something, then he probably did not mean it say it. He believes in the novel as an autonomous form of art. I will come back later to the notion of a novel as a unique form of art.

Problem of Translation
Talking about translation, there is an obvious example of interpreting a finish piece of writing into another language. Books of Milan Kundera are translated today into 22 languages.

There is another kind of translation, which Kundera calls variation.
In the era when everything is being adapted, books to films, games to cartoons, cartoons to books, books to theatre plays, theatre plays back to films, Kundera is striving to achieve an absolute originality of his writing which is impossible to imitate in another form of art. He disbelieves adaptations, trying all his life to make a novel that is not possible to reduce or rewrite. “If the meaning of a novel survives its rewriting, it is an indirect proof of a low value of the novel” , comments Kundera in the foreword of Jacques and his Master. p. 14. JaP
A good novel is cannot be anything else but a novel, after an adaptation only insignificant storyline remains. Kundera is writing his novels exactly this way, one can not tell a story of the novel. He clearly differentiate between an adaptation, and variation. Using somebody else's work to make a a variation on the subject is a writing technique, that Kundera used often in his book. However, he would not try to imitate or “adapt” an original and try to reword it in his books or plays. In his essay Testaments betrayed, Kundera wrote: “All the transposition of Anna Karenina, that we know from theatre or movies are adaptations, thus reductions. The more adaptator is striving to remain discretely behind the novel, the more he betrays it. The reduction removes the elegance and meaning of the novel”.
After a disappointment with a Brussels theatre Kundera allows his only theatre play Jacques and his Master to be played uniquely by amateur and poor theatre groups. Lack of money is a guarantee for him that the director will choose the way of greatest simplicity.

Kundera borrowed variation from Beethoven who coined the term first in music. Jacques and his Master is a variation on Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fatalist, and is a tribute to the technique of variation. His later books are equally a series of variations. Kundera comes form the family of musicians and in the early age he was introduced the art of music composition. Even now he is still a remarkable piano player.
Kundera is experimenting within the same formal characteristics of the novel. Composition of all Kundera's novels have same archetype, made from 7 parts, each one striving to be autonomous, different and independent. The table of content is always in from to give the reader an idea about the structuring the book.
Joke, Kundera’s first novel, is employing a composition known from early century avantgarde music composers. The novel is told by 4 people, Monologue of Ludvik takes 2/3 of text the others take 1/3 of which Jaroslav 1/6, Kostka 1/9 and Helena 1/18. According to the author, this mathematical structure clarifies the personalities. Kundera is playing with different intensity of light which externally clarifies the character.

Kundera was once criticised in a literary magazine for having a fancy writing style. This was uncomprehensible for me, knowing Kundera’s restricted vocabulary, his use of metaphors and adjectives. Later it turned out that it was the French translator which enriched his vocabulary. After the criticism, Kundera examined the available translations of his books. Milan Kundera, as most of the writers, is obsessed by the meaning of each word, is very precise in intonation, tempo, and rhythm of sentences. Therefore, it was a personal disaster for him when he compared translations. Whole paragraphs were deleted, sentences shuffled, style moved to more emotional level.

You may say that I am a lucky one, because I can read the original texts of this writer which is obsessed with the accuracy of his writing. Although his early books were all written in Czech, they were banned by the communist government, and had never been published in Czechoslovakia. Now 10 years after the change of the regime, only 4 out of his 10 novels were published in Czech. The others, mostly more recent ones, I am forced to read in translations.
After settling for good in France, Kundera was rewriting and supervising French translation of his previous novels for two years. Since the 1987, in all his books published by Gallimard, there is a note: entièrement revue par l’auteur, a la même valeur d’authenticité que le texte tchèque (entirely reviewed by author, having the same value of authenticity as the Czech text) Those revisions were so dramatic that the Czech original text can no longer be considered original, instead the French translation became authorised text approved by Kundera. And because the Czech readers are only one thousenth of all Kundera’s readers, The Czech translations are still waiting to be made. After the first edition of Immortality there were 14 reprints, Kundera made changes for the each rerun. After finishing the book he remarked: “I was writing it (in the best spirit) year and a half; translating it, I spent (tired, bad mood) two years.”

Kundera fights against the “good French”, good English or German, which is taught at schools. If the translators would translate all the major pieces of literature to a conventional “good” language, they would remove any originality of their art. “...every author of some value transgresses against “good style”... [..] the translator’s primary effort should be to understand that transgression.
In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera focuses directly on the role of translator. He suggests that most of them suffer a “synonymising reflex”. “The need to use another word in place of the more obvious, more simple, more neutral one may be called the synonymising reflex — a reflex of nearly all translators. Having a great stock of synonyms is a feature of “good style” virtuosity; if a word “sadness” appears twice in the same paragraph of the original text, the translator, offended by the repetition (considered an attack on obligatory stylistic elegance) will be tempted to translate the second occurrence as “melancholy”.” TT, p 108

Kundera goes on and uses Kafka’s The Castle as an example how translators smudges the original ideas. Kafka’s vocabulary is relatively restricted and Kafka is using simplest, the most elementary verbs: go, have, be, do, must, can. Translators, however, “correct” Kafka and enrich his vocabulary by replacing “have” for “never ceased to experience”, “be” for “advance”, “thrust”, or “go a long way”, and “go” for “walk”.

Kundera is horrified by the approach and makes his own translation of some passages confronting them with existing translations and Kafka’s original. Kundera remarks: “What a terror the words “be” and have” strike in all the translators in the world! They’ll do anything to replace them with words they consider less routine.
That tendency is also psychologically understandable: what can the translator get credit for? For fidelity to the author’s style? That’s exactly what the readers in the translator’s country have no way of judging. On the other hand, the public will automatically see richness of vocabulary as a value, as a performance, a proof of translator’s mastery and competence.”

Kundera also shows the importance of preserving repetition in translating art. Repetition is important from many points of view, from the melodic beauty, slowing down the tempo, giving the sentence the desired importance. Kundera suggest a simple rule: “a word is repeated if it is important. If an author develops a lengthy argument, and repetition is a semantic tool how to support the argument, a word cannot be replaced by a synonym.” In the text of The Castle, Kafka is using one single name for his character: K. In the translations, however, K is referred to him by the words “strangers”, newcomer”, “young man”, etc.”

Milan Kundera is not happy to remain Kundera and to rely on his reputation. His signature would be a guarantee of success of any future book. Kundera, however, constantly reevaluates his writings, looking for the ideal novel-like form of writing. He is very concerned about seeing his body of work as a whole, where each novel can be read individually as well as as part of a bigger picture, when each book is clarifying the previous one. For this reason, he does not allow to publish or to translate his early experiments with poetry or some short stories.

We should never take Kundera too seriously. Although his work has been analysed by many philosophers, psychoanalysts, literature critics, he has an apparent pleasure in mystification and easiness of his writing. He is mocking life, ridiculing people not saving himself as the creator of this world. He may be obsessed by existentional problems, but life as described by him is taken as if seen from a distance. After all he, himself wrote: “No novel worth its name doesn't take things seriously...”.