Original and Translation in the Czech Fiction of Milan Kundera

Abstract

'Translation is everything', wrote Milan Kundera, underlining the centrality of the translation process to his novels.1 Kundera's novels written in Czech were read almost exclusively in translation following a ban on his work in the then Czechoslovakia, effective from 1970 until the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. After 1989, it seemed that translation would no longer be a necessity for achieving a wide readership; Kundera began to write novels in the language of his adopted homeland, French, and also regained his Czech audience. By the end of the 1990s, however, only three of his six novels written in the Czech language had appeared in print in the Czech Republic.2 Aggrieved readers prompted Kundera to explain the delay: he commented that no original Czech manuscript existed, and that, before they could be published, these novels had to be rendered 'definitive'.3 In this article, I wish to invert Kundera's statement and suggest that, in Kundera's fiction written in Czech, everything is translation: that the original version of each of his Czech prose works has been displaced and rewritten, partly because of their translation into French and English.4 Seven works of fiction are involved. Kundera's first two prose works written and published in Czech, Zert (The Joke) and Smesne Idsky (Laughable Loves), have been altered, the originals replaced by new versions in Czech as well as in translation. The Joke will be discussed in full shortly. Smesne Idsky was published first as three separate collections of ten short stories between 1963 and 1968, then in a collated version containing eight of the stories in 1970. The 1968 Czech version was reprinted in 1981 and contained seven stories; Kundera had decided to omit the eighth when proofing the French translation. Smesne Idsky was published in the Czech Republic as a collection of short stories in 1991, with numerous alterations from the initial versions of the stories published 1963-8 and from the 1981 version. On Kundera's initiative, Smesne Idsky is published as a novel in German and Spanish (Das Buch der lacherlichen Liebe, Frankfurt, 1989, and El Libro De Los Amoves Ridiculos, third edition, Barcelona, 1998), while remaining a collection of