reading public than anyone has in years. In the form of essays, prefaces, revisions, and retranslations, Kundera has made it very clear that he wants translations of his works to be faithful. He has also made it clear what he means by fidelity. And by its flipside, betrayal, as well.
I will use the Kundera story to make three principal points: (i) that betrayal is important to the notion of fidelity, and hence to our view of translation; (ii) that our Romantic image of the author is both very powerful and central to the fidelity metaphor’s continuing popularity; and (iii) that law and power are major considerations not only in determining what fidelity is, but also in its enforcement. I will also use this opportunity to discuss several common misconceptions concerning the application of fidelity to actual translation problems.
First, let me disclose my connections: I know some of the participants rather well (two of Kundera’s English-language translators have translated for my publishing house); I know two others of Kundera’s translators, who have translated his work from the French; and I am a very minor participant in this story: I consulted with Peter Kussi on his English translation of Kundera’s last Czech-language novel, Nesmrtelnost (Immortality).
Betrayal plays a central and open role in Kundera’s approach to translation, because betrayal has played such a central role in Kundera’s life and work. Czech Communism betrayed the ideals Kundera, like most young Czech intellectuals, held in the late 40s, and then Kundera’s work was banned starting in the early 70s. His story of translational betrayal began with the first English translation of his first novel, The Joke, which was published in Great Britain without the sections on Czech music and with some of the novel’s chapters rearranged. The translators, David Hamblyn and Oliver Stallybrass, have claimed that the deletions were necessary to get a young, unknown Czech author published in the West, and that they repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, tried to communicate with Kundera. Kundera took these changes as a betrayal and, after his first major success in the United States, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he asked that The Joke be translated into English again. And it was, by Michael Henry Heim, who had on his own translated for a literary journal two of The
86
