The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Milan Kundera was born in April 1929 in Czechoslovakia. He moved to France in 1975 and went to exile, losing his Czech nationality and becoming a French citizen in 1981.

In 1986 he switched to writing in French rather than Czech, with first the essay “L'Art du Roman“ (The Art of the Novel) then the novel "Immortality".

Bibliography:

Novels

The Joke (Žert) 1965
Laughable Loves (Směšné lásky) 1963-1969
Life is Elsewhere (Život je jinde) 1969/70
Farewell Waltz (Valčík na rozloučenou) 1970/71
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) 1978
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) 1982
in French:
Immortality (L'immortalité) 1988
Slowness (La Lenteur) 1994
Identity (L'Identité) 1996
Ignorance (L'Ignorance) 2000
The Festival of Insignificance (La fête de l'insignifiance) (2014)

He takes an active interest in the translations of his novels - hence some have been re-translated at his request.

His other outputs are harder to categorise as not all are translated and I think in some cases, the English translation may not have appeared in that for in the original. So I will confine list to English translations.

Plays:
Jacques and His Master: An Homage to Diderot in Three Acts

Essays:
The Art of the Novel
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
Encounter

If anyone is aware of anything in English not on the above list let me know - not least as I'm a Kundera completist so would love to read it. (Wikipedia and Goodreads list a New Yorker story but that is just an excerpt from The Festival of Insignificance)

Kundera is perhaps the most important novelist in my own reading development - not just for his wonderful fiction, but also for his essays: The Art of the Novel pretty much gave me a reading list pathway into 19th/20th Century European fiction.

I've read all of the above books - but most a decade or more ago. And this is relevant for the debate we had on the Saramago thread. The issue with his 2014 novel isn't so much that the author has aged, more than his attitudes and material have, e.g. his treatment of the female characters.

Its been ages since I read The Unbearable Lightness... and The Joke and I've felt lately I did not give Kundera enough attention.

Paul, what do you feel is his best and which is your favorite?

Immortality the best and The Joke my favourite.

Thanks for starting this thread Paul. I have read all of the novels and Testaments Betrayed, but most of them were a very long time ago - I read all of the ones my parents had when I was a student and several more in my early 20s, and everything since Slowness shortly after they went into paperback. I think I would need to revisit them to rank them fairly. I thought Testaments Betrayed was very interesting.

Paul, thanks for starting the thread. It's good to have one dedicated to Kundera.

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts did for me what 'The Art of the Novel' did for you. His non-fiction writings are magnificent pieces of creative literary criticism aren't they...Few novelists can write with so much lucidity on the dialectics of fiction than Kundera.

He's been my Nobel choice in two years running, so I'm hoping he gets it this time round because time is fast running out for him.

And I just wish he had kept on writing in his native Czech. Switching to French felt to me like a surrender to his own theory of neglect of the smaller languages (of Europe) which he so eloquently writes about in his non-fiction writings.

French didn't gain much by having another A-one writer to its old but the Czech language lost a lot when he exiled himself to writing in his adopted language.

But who knows what was going through his mind. Only a person who has been turned into a refugee or migrant on the pain of death can understand the metaphysics of mind-body exile, the disconnection, and the loss of identity that comes with it.

I am yet to come across his thoughts on switching languages, assuming he ever talked/wrote about it at length. Please share if you know he did.

Not sure I have seen his definitive reason but arguably a few things going on.

He believes more in a European novel than national literatures, so I think he would argue it doesn't matter what language he writes in, indeed better he takes part in a wider dialogue.

French like English is a more universal language - two of the recent Prix Goncourt winners are non-native speakers (Atiq Rahimi, Jonathan Littell) as are Jorge Semprún, Tahar ben Jelloun, and one of my favourites Andreï Makine)

And the cynic in me also wonders if it relates to his desire to control the translation process. His novels in French are now his own - plus it's not uncommon for translations to be done 2nd hand from less widely spoken languages (e.g. Ismail Kadare's translator David Bellos goes via the French) so he reduces this risk.

Other thoughts welcome....

Paul wrote: "And the cynic in me also wonders if it relates to his desire to control the translation process"

Interesting points, Paul. I have also thought about the translation process. My copy of "The Joke" does not mention the translator's name. When I googled I found a list of names, including the writer himself, who worked together to translate it from Czech. If Kundera knows English to the level that he contributed to the translation of his own book, then the English version is not a translation in a strict sense of the word is it? Do you know if he approved his other English translations as well?

I'd also like to clarify that I wasn't talking so much in terms of national literatures but language literature, if that makes sense. Literature plays a key role in the development and enrichment of a language. Smaller languages will suffer, as they indeed have suffered due to lack of high quality writing, if people keep switching to major/universal language in droves.

Sometimes I think that literary world is moving towards a sort of homogenisation as a consequence of globalisaiton, which will see smaller language give way to global ones. If it only pays to write in a major language then people will abandon their native language and make a switch. I see that happening in developing countries all the time. As soon as people learn a major world language, they want to read and write only in that language because it removes the tedium of translation and directly gives them a wider audience.

The Joke has been translated three times at Kundera's request. I think he had several retranslated as a result - he seems to rather like the translations by either Linda and Aaron Asher which keep closer to the originals (some have argued overly close).

Jibran wrote: "Paul wrote: "And the cynic in me also wonders if it relates to his desire to control the translation process"

Interesting points, Paul. I have also thought about the translation process. My copy o..."

Thats very interesting, Jibran. I never considered the effect literature has on language and language helping to support native languages.

On translation in general and Kundera in particular, I'd been trying to remember the book I had read by a translator arguing very much against his approach, i.e. that the translator was free to translate as he/she chose.

Remembered now iti s Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation

And for anyone interested the author has made it freely available as a PDF/epub/Kindle file:

http://www.catbirdpress.com/bookpages...