touch on the shoulder, every kiss on the cheek, as an act of infidelity.
In “A Sentence,” an essay in Testaments Betrayed, Kundera took a sentence from Kafka’s The Castle and examined the way it was brought into French by three translators. One of the principal things Kundera took these translators to task for was their failure to replicate all of Kafka’s repetitions. In his own French version, Kundera faithfully replicates them all, but the result is lyrical, while Kafka’s repetition in German is powerful. When the effect of repetition in the two languages is not the same, this sort of fidelity to words is actually less faithful than a freer, more thoughtful approach.
In other words, Kundera’s view of repetition is just as much a matter of his taste as Heim’s view of irony is a matter of his. Every translator “adapts” to some extent, and therefore every translator can be considered unfaithful or falsely peddling his work as translation. However, this is a problem not with translation, but rather with the notion of fidelity. The whole of a translation is much more important than its parts. Fidelity is not about the kiss, but about the feelings behind it.
But perhaps Kundera is right. Perhaps the author should call the shots and tell his translators what to do and what not to do. After all, the book does come out under the author’s name. Even if a Kunderian translation would not be quite as good, or at least not as readable as it might have been, only the author (and his foreignlanguage publishers) pay the price. And there isn’t much of a price, because few reviewers are going to blame a translator for being too faithful, for keeping every repetition of a word. And few readers will notice. If it doesn’t really matter, then why not let the author have his way?
Because this places the translator in the position of a transcriber rather than an artist. Translation is interpretation, a series of decisions based upon the translator’s knowledge, skills, and sense of judgment. It is only because of the way our laws work that an author can do what Kundera has done, and even then it can be done only because Kundera is that rare animal: a foreign author whose works actually sell in English (despite, or perhaps because of, the unfaithful translations he’s been afflicted with). A composer does
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