Source — Wikipedia, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
- Title: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Publication: English Wikipedia
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Laughter_and_Forgetting
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: tertiary, neutral.
Extract
Milan Kundera's 1979 novel (Czech: Kniha smíchu a zapomnění), structured as seven interconnected narratives. Part Five, titled "Litost," is built around the concept: Kundera defines it in-text as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery," introduced as a word he calls untranslatable.
Publication history: finished 1978; first published in French translation, Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli (1979); English translation by Michael Henry Heim, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1980; a Czech-language exile edition followed in April 1981 (68 Publishers, Toronto — the book could not be published inside then-Czechoslovakia). Several sections had already appeared in The New Yorker.
Note on English-language Wikipedia's title "Litost": the bare title "Litost" (no diacritic) is not a separate dedicated article on the word — it redirects to this novel's own article, which is where the word's definition is discussed. This project found no standalone English Wikipedia article about the word itself, unlike (for instance) ubuntu or wabi-sabi.
Gaps
- This article states Kundera's own in-text definition and the translator/publication facts but does not discuss the later Aaron Asher retranslation (1996) or Kundera's dissatisfaction with the Heim translation — see
margala-2010-transcultural-kundera-and-the-joke.mdandwikipedia-milan-kundera.mdfor related but not word-specific material on that dispute. - Does not discuss whether the word appears in Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables — genuinely unchecked, as for every other word on this project's file.