Source — Wikipedia, "Milan Kundera"
- Title: Milan Kundera
- Publication: English Wikipedia
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: tertiary, neutral.
Extract
Kundera "made a conscious transition from Czech towards the French which has since become the reference language for his translations." Independently corroborating the general shape of the translation controversy discussed at length in margala-2010-transcultural-kundera-and-the-joke.md (which covers The Joke specifically, not The Book of Laughter and Forgetting): "Between 1985 and 1987, he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works himself" — establishing that Kundera's practice of personally revising and authorizing French versions of his Czech-original novels, rather than leaving translation solely to translators, is documented independently of the Margala article's specific case study.
Gaps
- Does not name The Book of Laughter and Forgetting or the Heim/Asher translations specifically, and does not mention "litost" — this project has not found a single source directly connecting Kundera's documented French self-revision practice to the specific 1996 Aaron Asher re-translation of this particular novel (see the word page's Gaps section).