Source — Margala, "The Unbearable Torment of Translation: Milan Kundera, Impersonation, and The Joke"
- Title: The Unbearable Torment of Translation: Milan Kundera, Impersonation, and The Joke
- Author: Miriam Margala (University of Rochester)
- Publication: TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 3 (2010), pp. 30–42
- URL: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/TC/article/view/10051 (PDF: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/TC/article/download/10051/7870/25539)
- Accessed: 2026-09-03 — directly read in full (PDF downloaded, converted with
pdftotext -layout, confirmed to contain zero occurrences of "litost" — see Gaps). - Type: secondary, peer-reviewed academic article; stance sympathetic to Kundera's position but analytically probing ("Kundera impersonates God" thesis).
Extract
Concerns Kundera's The Joke (Žert), not The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — filed here for its directly-read, well-corroborated general account of Kundera's documented translation politics, which this project's litost page draws on as context for the same author's "untranslatable word" claim.
- Kundera on reading a French translation of The Joke: "rage seized me." From his 1996 "Author's Note" to Žert: "You're not in your own house here, my dear fellow" — asserting the translator has taken liberties in the author's own textual "house."
- Kundera demands that translations "have the same authenticity as the Czech version" (Author's Note, 1996 edition, p. 325, Margala's own translation from Czech). Margala notes the Czech word Kundera uses for "version," podoba, also means "likeness."
- Quotes Tim Parks (The Observer, 25 April 2010): Kundera's "supreme authority... should be the author's personal style," and Parks's pointed question about The Joke's English-language reputation — "who wrote the Milan Kundera you love? Answer: Michael Henry Heim" — identifying Heim (the same translator who rendered The Book of Laughter and Forgetting into English in 1980) as decisive in shaping Kundera's English-language reception generally, not only for this one novel.
- Frames Kundera's stance as a paradox: he insists on absolute translator fidelity to his own style while, as his own translator into French, freely revising and even omitting passages from his own Czech originals — his self-translations are "not translations" in the ordinary sense but a second authorial layer.
- Draws an explicit parallel to James Joyce and Adolf Hoffmeister's Czech translation of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (the only portion of Finnegans Wake translated into Czech in Joyce's lifetime): Joyce reportedly told his translator, "I do not wish to be translated, I have to stay as I am, only expressed in your language... Create a language for your land according to my image."
Gaps
- Does not mention "litost" anywhere (confirmed by a full-text search of the directly-read PDF) — cited on this project's litost page only for general, independently-relevant context about Kundera's translation politics, not as evidence about this specific word. This is a case, flagged per this project's standing fence, of a source found via a litost-adjacent search that turned out to concern a different Kundera novel — included anyway, unlike a prior session's practice of discarding such a source, because its content is explicitly relevant background rather than a false-positive text match.
- Does not discuss the 1980 Heim / 1996 Asher translation history of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting specifically.