Allison Stanger
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In Search of The
Joke: An Open Letter to Milan Kundera
Dear Mr. Kundera,
Let me begin by making it clear that I have been deeply engaged by your
work for quite a long time. Indeed, I was driven to learn Czech in the
first place in large part by the desire to read your works in the language
in which they were originally written, especially since you had, on numerous
occasions, pronounced the existing English translations of much of your
oeuvre to be wholly inadequate. In my twenties, armed only with my knowledge
of Russian, I actually believed that I could teach myself Czech through
reading Nesnesitelná Lehkost Bytí (The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1988), with
no prior exposure to the language and only the assistance of a Czech-Russian
dictionary. I was mistaken. Later, I married a Czech emigre and learned
Czech the old-fashioned way. This year in Prague, I finally achieved a
longstanding goal: I read The Joke in Czech with your definitive
English-language translation, the fifth and final edition, alongside to
help me when I stumbled (this is identified on the title page as the “definitive
version, fully revised by the author”: Aaron Asher Books, HarperCollins
Publishers, 1992). As I anticipated, your first novel is all the more
captivating in the original. But I am writing now to tell you that in
reading it again I also discovered some things about the text that seem
to me unsettling.
That I chose the fifth English-language
edition to assist me was of course no accident. I was very much aware
that over the years you had expressed a great deal of dissatisfaction
with previous attempts to translate The Joke, including those
attempts that you had at one time endorsed as faithful renderings of your
novel into French (Gallimard, 1980) and English (Harper and Row, 1982).
In recent years, this lingering dissatisfaction evidently prompted you,
with the aid of the versions prepared by those who had labored before
you, to take on the monumental task of translating your own book—first
into French (Gallimard, 1985), and then into English (Harper and Row,
1992). Since your 1992 revised English translation concludes with the
notation “completed December 5, 1965,” the careful reader
would assume that this was to be understood as the definitive translation
of the unabridged original text. This assumption would seem to be reinforced
by the author’s note that you provided for this latest edition,
a preface which reviews the unauthorized editorial changes made in previous
translations of your novel, and which emphasizes the amount of time you
have invested in undoing these unwelcome revisions.
Under these circumstances, you may understand
how surprised I was to discover that your definitive English-language
translation, ostensibly the most faithful of renderings possible, in reality
introduces numerous changes into the original Czech-language text (Ceskoslovensky
Spisovatel, 1967). Although there is no way for the reader of the 1992
English version to recognize this without comparing the translation, line
by line, with the 1967 text, your definitive translation omits many passages
from the Czech original—over fifty by my count, a number of them
complete paragraphs. In the preface to this fifth English edition, however,
you inform the reader only that you initiated the retranslation process
by entering “word-for-word translations of my original, either in
French or English,” on “enlarged photocopies of the fourth
version,” presumably out of a concern for greater accuracy and fidelity.
Since I had set out to read the authentic
version of Zert, the text that I expected to underlie all the
translations, I was initially very puzzled by the discrepancies I had
unintentionally discovered. In an attempt to clarify this situation, I
began consulting the earlier English-language editions, and it was then
that I learned from your preface to the fourth edition (the once-authorized
Michael Henry Heim translation) that you had actually introduced modifications
into the original text while correcting the French translation in 1979.
Off I went in search of a French edition in Prague (as you are probably
aware, French, German, and English translations of your novel are now
readily available in the capital of your land of birth). Comparing the
1985 French edition, your final definitive reworking of the French translation,
with the 1992 English one, I found that these versions shared many of
the same deletions from the Czech original; and this French edition, too,
concludes with the note “Achevé le 5 décembre 1965.”
From these comparisons I was able to deduce, I presume correctly, that
a revised version of Zert came into being in the 1980s and has
continued to evolve since that time—that in fact both of your “definitive”
translations offer the reader something other than a faithful rendering
of the work in its original incarnation. Yet when the Czech publishing
house Atlantis approached you in December 1989 with a request to publish
a complete edition of your works in Czech, after you had taken such pains
to revise The Joke, you inexplicably seem to have authorized
the publication of the earlier, unmodified 1967 Czech text. Strangely,
in your postscript to the altered 1985 French edition, you make no mention
of the changes you have made over the years, nor do you refer to these
revisions when you summarize the international publication history of
your book in your January 1990 endnote in the latest Czech edition. The
curious situation that has resulted from all this is that your Czech audience
now reads one version of the book while your French- and English-language
audiences read quite another—yet the reader attempting to distinguish
among these “definitive” versions is never made aware of these
perplexing differences, or of the reasons for them.
While it does not alter the basic plot
of the novel, your editing does by definition modify the reader’s
immediate sense of the work and its texture. As you yourself point out
in the preface to your own English translation, and in the preface to
the earlier translation by Heim, “When Goethe was working on Wilhelm
Meister, he allowed his secretary Riemer to read proof for him and
strike out a superfluous word or touch up a phrase here or there, though
he would never have entrusted his poetry to him. In Goethe’s time
prose could not make the aesthetic claims of poetry; perhaps not until
the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority.
Ever since Madame Bovary, the art of the novel has been considered
equal to the art of poetry, and the novelist (any novelist worthy of the
name) endows every word of his prose with the uniqueness of the word in
a poem.” Taking you at your word here, what is the reader to make
of the apparent textual looseness that is suggested by the discrepancies
between the current Czech and French or English editions of your novel?
As the artist, the changes in the text are indisputably yours to make
(I am not confusing Goethe’s authority with liberties taken by Riemer),
but can a translation rightfully be described as a faithful rendering
of the original, when the original text itself and not just its translated
form remains a moving target? To put the question another way, how can
the language of prose be regarded as being as crucial and deliberate as
that of poetry when without clear notice it varies its explicit content
over time?
Although only you are in a position to
provide an explanation for the deletion of the material that did not find
its way into your currently authorized English-language translation, to
my mind the missing passages fall into one of three basic categories.
First, there are those omitted parts of the novel which are, for various
reasons, difficult to render into accessible English. An example here
would be the missing lines on page 40 of the 1991 Atlantis Czech edition,
where Ludvik, the novel’s Voltairean protagonist, speaks of the
origins of his aversion to tykání, the use of the
familiar form of the pronoun “you.” Since both French and
Czech distinguish between the polite and familiar forms of the second
person, it is perhaps not surprising to find a passage like this deleted
from the English version but retained in the French. (Other references
to tykání / tutoiement on pages 200 and 308 are
also omitted for the Anglo-American reader.) Similarly, Cenek’s
account of his sexual encounter with Alena at Easter time (page 88 of
the Atlantis edition) requires some knowledge of Czech Easter traditions
if it is to have its proper effect. To the uninformed non-Czech reader,
Alena’s request for a beating in exchange for a painted egg would
suggest something altogether different, something not supported by the
implied cultural context; hence these sentences, which would appear to
invite a more or less literal translation, have been deleted from both
the French and English translations.
Second, there are passages in the original
that appear to have been omitted for aesthetic or stylistic reasons. In
the case of those which permit us access to the memory of the novel’s
principal character, their absence does alter to some extent our understanding
of the people who inhabit the novel. I believe this is true, for example,
of the deletion on page 82, where Ludvik recalls his unanswered love letters
to Lucie, written when he was a young man serving time in hard labor for
the crime of writing a prank political postcard to an earlier girlfriend:
I would like to read my letters today, and at the same
time, I am glad that I am unable to read them; a person has a great advantage
in that he cannot revisit himself in a younger edition; I fear that I
would find myself irritating and that I would then tear up even this narrative,
because I would recognize that the testimony, which I give about myself
here, is much too steeped in my contemporary attitudes and opinions. But
what remembrance is not at the same time (and involuntarily) a repainting
of an old picture? What remembrance is not a simultaneous exposition of
two faces, that of the present and that of the past? What kind of a person
I really was no one will ever find out. [my translation]
In a similar way, the paragraphs missing
from Ludvik’s description of his “demolition” of Helena
leave us with an account in which it is harder to perceive the ruthless
calculation and skill with which her seduction is accomplished. Two such
passages, restored below, confront us with a coarser, more cynical Ludvik
than one finds in the currently authorized English translation:
The liquor had already affected Helena, and she announced
that life was good in spite of all the inequalities that were still with
us. In any case it was up to individuals what sort of life they made for
themselves. I chewed at the stringy Spanish fowl and proclaimed, with
my mouth full, that the place became really beautiful when I was sitting
there with her. (...) Helena’s cheeks were flushed (clearly a result
of the liquor), which emphasized their roundness and detracted from her
elegance. But I magnanimously ignored this (clearly a result of the liquor),
telling myself with malicious glee that it was a mercy of the fates that
Helena was at least as presentable as she was, since even if she’d
been hideous, hunchbacked or crippled I’d still have made an attempt
on her and tried to get her into my power.” [page 186 of the Atlantis
Czech edition; David Hamblyn and Oliver Stallybrass translation]
“This isn’t a bar—it’s an ordinary apartment,”
said Helena, when she’d gone in and looked down the hallway into
Kostka’s room.
“It’s not an ordinary apartment. It would be if you or I lived
in it. The special thing about this place is that it’s neither mine
nor yours—there’s none of my washing lying around here, or
yours, or my memories or your memories, it doesn’t have the air
of my home or of your home. It’s a stranger’s apartment, and
because of that it’s pure as far as both of us are concerned and
so we can both feel free in it.”
I’d managed to extemporize a rather remarkable defense of the very
principle of the borrowed apartment. But my eloquence was quite superfluous.
[page 188 of the Atlantis edition; Hamblyn and Stallybrass translation]
The reader without a knowledge of Czech
is also deprived of a suggestive account of the nature of Ludvik’s
professional life following his partial rehabilitation:
It had become an invariable custom in our institute that
all journalists were routed to me and I was the one who was always sent
to lecture on behalf of the institute when we were requested to do so
by various educational bodies. This apparent honor was a matter of some
sadness for me. I’d begun my own research almost ten years later
than my colleagues—I had been only an undergraduate in my thirties.
For a few years I’d tried desperately to bridge the gap but had
then realized the futility of devoting the second half of my life to a
pathetic pursuit of lost years, and so I resigned myself to it. Luckily,
this had its compensations: the less I chased after success in my own
narrow field, the more I could allow myself the luxury of looking out
onto other areas of research, onto man’s being and the existence
of the world, and could experience the joys—among the sweetest there
are—of speculation and reflection. My colleagues, however, knew
well that if such contemplation gives a man personal pleasure, it’s
of little use for a modern scientific career, which demands that the scientist
burrow zealously in his own field or sub-field like a blind mole and never
lose a minute lamenting horizons. For this reason my colleagues half envied
me my resignation and half despised me for it, they let me know with gentle
irony, calling me the institute’s “philosopher” and
sending me journalists and news editors from the broadcasting companies.
[page 178 of Atlantis edition; Hamblyn and Stallybrass translation]
Third, and perhaps most importantly, a
number of the deleted passages serve to situate the novel squarely in
the Czech Lands at a particular moment in history. Some of these are sections
that a publisher might deem unlikely to be of very great interest to the
non-Czech reader. The substantial pruning of Jaroslav’s reflections
on Moravian folk music in Part 4—the very section with which the
1969 Hamblyn and Stallybrass translation took liberties unacceptable to
you—would seem to be one clear instance of editing which is done
with the general interests of a particular audience in mind, one which
might be made uneasy by materials that tend to be regarded as provincial.
Other deletions, more disturbingly, effectively
obscure the complexities of post-World War II Czech history, rendering
it more readily in keeping with the West’s prevailing preconceptions.
The average American reader these days—especially with the image
of the Velvet Revolution squarely in mind, and with the almost universal
sense that Communism in practice proved itself to be a colossal error—is
unlikely to be aware that the Czechoslovak Communists actually won a plurality
of the vote in free elections in 1948. Such a reader is even less likely
to know that many Czechs initially welcomed liberation by the Red Army,
or that having been betrayed by the West at Munich and occupied by Nazi
Germany for seven years, some Czechs at the close of the war saw a new
era of Slavic solidarity in the making that would right old wrongs, at
both the international and domestic levels. The original version of your
novel contains characters whose views convey some of the tragic false
hopes that initiated the country’s near spiritual ruin in the decades
that followed, but the passages that served to illuminate this situation
have now been removed from the versions you present to your French- and
English-reading audiences. Here, for instance, is the voice of Jaroslav,
who initially perceived communism as a means of resuscitating the patriarchal
past preserved in folklore:
I remember the days when there were field horses tied
to the trees in our streets. A few days earlier the Red Army had broken
through to our township. We all put on ceremonial costume, took our instruments,
and went out to play in the park. We drank and played non-stop for hours
on end. The Russian soldiers responded with their own songs. At the time
I had said to myself that a new era was on its way. A Slavic era. Just
like the Roman Empire and the German Empire, we too were the heirs to
antiquity. We had slumbered for many centuries. But we had slept well.
We were refreshed. We were ready! [page 143 of Atlantis edition; Hamblyn
and Stallybrass translation]
Along the same lines, in the original we
are given these observations by Helena, the instrument of Ludvik’s
failed attempt at revenge, who remains sentimentally attached to the spirit
of her youthful devotion to the communist movement, even after the revelations
of Stalinism’s horrors:
“The young people of today are different from us,”
she said. “They’ve had everything free, everything handed
out to them, and they can’t understand why even to this day I’m
moved when I hear a Russian chastushka.” [page 192 of Atlantis edition;
Hamblyn and Stallybrass translation]
And again, here is Jaroslav, reflecting on the significance of folk music
for a small nation under German occupation:
There are certainly merits in having one’s back to
the wall. A war was on, and the life of a nation was at stake. We heard
the folk songs and we suddenly saw that they were the most essential of
essentials. I dedicated my life to them. Through them I merge with the
stream which flows deep below. [page 130 of Atlantis edition; Hamblyn
and Stallybrass translation]
No matter how skillfully it may be done,
cutting passages like these from the English and French translations inevitably
detaches the characters from the specific times and circumstances in which
they live. As a result, the comfortably “cosmopolitan” reader
is relieved of the need to contend with the confusing history of “a
far-away nation about which he or she knows little,” to paraphrase
Neville Chamberlain. This makes for a simpler, more generalized narrative;
from a commercial perspective, something is gained, but at the same time,
something greater is obviously lost. These missing parts of your novel
endow it with precise local elements that work against the overwhelming
contemporary tendency toward historical amnesia. To borrow your own words
from Testaments Betrayed, such local elements challenge the foreign
reader to “be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths
that differ from his own,” the challenge which you tell us is at
the very center of the art of the novel.
So why do these parts of the novel wind
up in the wastebasket when the work is presented to French- and English-language
readers? Would it be inappropriate to expect such readers to struggle
with the nuances of the historical situation that the book addresses?
In the end, one cannot help but wonder whether editing of this sort is
a fate reserved only for books written in the languages of the small nations,
those on the losing side of large historical developments for most of
their existence. After all, don’t we instinctively anticipate that
readers of novels written in the Empire-building languages will make more
of an effort to grasp the particularities of the history depicted? Aren’t
readers of The Charterhouse of Parma expected to develop some
familiarity with the response of the local population to Napoleon’s
military venture into Italy? And aren’t readers of War and Peace
presumed to have some grasp of the range of possible reactions to the
little emperor’s Russian campaign? It is possible, of course, that
the decision to retain the historical particulars in the Czech text while
eliminating them from the French and English versions implies a sense
that while Czech readers may be counted on to remember the precise moods
and attitudes of a complicated historical moment, French- and English-language
readers are not likely to be up to the demands of such intimate understanding.
But here again, the underlying suggestion is that each audience requires
a work in its own image.
In taking the liberty of reviewing some
of your recent omissions and translating a few of them here, I do not
wish to overstate the significance of the discrepancies between the old
and new versions of The Joke, nor do I wish to challenge your
prerogative as an author to alter your own work. It is, after all, hardly
unusual for a writer to see a new edition of his work as an opportunity
for revision—consider the New York Edition of Henry James’s
novels, for instance. Indeed, a colleague of mine, Sergei Davydov, tells
me that the writings of Pushkin present us with one of the most vivid
examples of continuous editorial change. The editors of his Collected
Works have had to contend with this legacy in imaginative ways, publishing
both the first and the last versions side by side, with commentaries on
the intermediate versions. Nabokov, too, was inclined to modify his Russian
novels when he translated them into English. The more radical discrepancies
between the Russian- and English-language versions of his autobiography,
however, prompted him to assign them different titles, as you no doubt
know.
In the end, I am still uncertain about
the implications of your own editorial practice. In what light, I wonder,
should we view the differences between the Czech and English versions
of your first novel? The differences between them are surely not radical
enough to require two titles. But if the changes you have introduced make
for a better work, one truer to your deepest aspirations, shouldn’t
these modifications also be carried into the original-language version,
whenever the opportunity arises to reprint that text? If, despite the
alterations made in the translations, that original Czech text remains
unchanged, wouldn’t this suggest that there are considerations other
than purely aesthetic ones which are guiding the revisions? Even when
modifications of this sort are approved by the author, at what point may
they be seen as constituting a form of self-censorship for marketing purposes?
And if changes made in one language are understood to be inappropriate
for the original language in which the work was conceived—if there
are to be different versions of the work for different audiences—doesn’t
the very notion of a “definitive” text fall apart? How many
changes made to accommodate particular audiences are permissible before
the sense of the work’s integrity is hopelessly compromised?
To pose the basic question in another,
more practical, way: if a reader now wants to experience Zert / The
Joke / La plaisanterie as the author intended, what text should he
or she read? The original Czech-language edition certainly will no longer
suffice, since the text has evidently evolved since its initial creation.
If one reads both the original and your latest revised English-language
translation, can one indisputably be said to have read the novel, or must
one also take account of your French-language version? Fifty years down
the road, which edition should readers consider to be definitive—and
in what language? In leaving the reader with a range of alternative versions,
does the author have any obligation to distinguish among them, acknowledging
and explaining the various modifications he has chosen to make? And under
these bewildering circumstances, is it conceivable that there could be
anything like a reliable translation by anyone other than the author himself
while he is still living?
I direct these questions to you precisely
because of the values you have taken such pains to elucidate and defend,
most recently in Testaments Betrayed. There and elsewhere, you
have persuasively demonstrated that world literature itself is at stake
in the art of translation. The author is obviously the ultimate judge
of whether his or her work has been faithfully rendered into another language—at
least when the author possesses an adequate knowledge of that other language—and
the translator must treat each word in the text as unalterable, unless
the author gives him leave to do otherwise. On this, I believe, we agree;
and we are in agreement, too, in holding that what the writer has discarded
prior to publication is none of the reader’s business. But once
the work appears in print, shouldn’t the reader be apprised of the
work’s status in the eyes of the author—of exactly where it
stands in relation to alternate versions? In contemplating a text which
came into being in the late 1960s, shouldn’t readers in the West—especially
now—be challenged to comprehend in its full complexity the life
of a country that went out of existence on the first of January, 1993?
And at this moment in their own history, shouldn’t the speakers
of
your mother tongue have the benefit of those stylistic adjustments you
have made in the novel in presenting it to an admiring world-wide audience?
Yours sincerely,
Allison
Stanger
Prague,
1 April 1996
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