Joke’s omitted sections. Kundera later wrote of Heim’s act: “I was deeply touched by this noble gesture of solidarity with mistreated, humiliated literature.”
Kundera sees not only deletions as betrayals, but also anything he considers “rewriting,” something every translator has to do to some extent to make literature work in a language it wasn’t intended for. In his essay “Sixty-three Words,” in the section “Rewriting,” Kundera quotes himself, from his play Jacques and His Master, from the words he placed in the Master’s mouth: “Death to all who dare rewrite what has been written. Impale them and roast them over a slow fire! Castrate them and cut off their ears!”* Ironically, those words were originally translated into English by Michael Henry Heim, against whom Kundera was to make good his threat, at least figuratively. Kundera did this by revising Heim’s translation of The Joke without the translator’s permission, and attacking Heim in the new edition’s preface. Then Kundera asked his American editor, Aaron Asher, to do a completely new version of another novel translated by Heim, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And the translation wasn’t even from Czech, but rather from a heavily rewritten (by the author, fifteen years later) French translation.
What had Heim done to deserve this unusual treatment? He hadn’t omitted anything or moved anything around, as had happened with the first translation of The Joke. No one had even accused him of doing an incompetent job. What he had done was to be unfaithful. In his “Author’s Note” to the “definitive version” of The Joke, Kundera describes his experience of reading Heim’s translation years later:
I had the increasingly strong impression that what I read was not my text: often the words were remote from what I had written; the syntax differed too; there was inaccuracy in all the reflective passages; irony had been transformed into satire; unusual turns of phrase had been obliterated; the distinctive voices of the characters-narrators had been altered to the extent of altering their personalities . . . I was all the more unhappy because I did not believe that it was a matter of incompetence on the translator’s part, or of carelessness or ill will: no; in good conscience he produced the kind of translation that one might call translation-adaptation
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