(adaptation to the taste of the time and of the country for which it is intended, to the taste, in the final analysis, of the translator). Is this the current, normal practice? It’s possible. But unacceptable. Unacceptable to me.
Kundera has produced a litany of fidelity: his work must be translated word for word (which is how he describes his own revisions); the original syntax, or form, must be preserved in English; there can be no “mistakes;” and the characters’ voices must be captured exactly as he pictures them in English (even though he is not fluent in English).
Like most people, Kundera sees fidelity in terms of words. He wrote the essay “Sixty-Three Words” as a “personal dictionary” for his translators, including his key words, his problem words, the words he loves. (The dictionary, itself an eighteenth-century invention, is one of the culprits in the fidelity debate, because bilingual dictionaries gave people the impression that languages are made up of equivalent words.) On Kundera’s list are words such as beauty, being, comic, fate, flow, lightness, value. Words whose several meanings and connotations in Czech rarely match those of the closest equivalent in English. For example, the Czech word for “light” does not mean both bright and without weight, as it does in English, but it does mean easy or effortless much more strongly than our word does. Yet Kundera expects one English word to correspond to all his repetitions of a Czech word.
No translator can use a word fifty times in a novel and give it the same accumulation of meaning it has in the original. It might work thirty-five times, even forty-five times, but the other five or fifteen times, one or two other words must be used or the result will be either gibberish or something very different from what the author had intended. Kundera’s rule is right most of the time — and I, as an editor, often ask for this sort of consistency from my translators — but always repeating a word when the author does so can actually undermine the repetitive use of the word. Why? Because translation is not about words; no translator translates strictly on the level of words, but rather deals with phrases, sentences, concepts, sounds, tones, voices, dictions, etc. A critic who focuses on words will always find the trouble he’s looking for. An author who focuses on words will always feel betrayed. It’s like seeing every
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