not control the way musicians play his work; a jazz musician, for example, can turn it upside down and inside out and the composer can just collect royalties. A playwright cannot control the way actors read his lines, although powerful ones do sometimes control major productions. There are simply too many performances of plays and concertos. Kundera’s position, then, involves not so much a question of fidelity as it does one of law, power, and the economics of publishing. Or, to play with the fidelity metaphor, the more powerful the author, the easier it is for him to make the translator sign a prenuptial agreement or to divorce the translator quickly and easily when she commits adultery.
Kundera has written of the author: “this unique being . . . should possess all rights over the thing that emanates exclusively from him.” Law. And “the ultimate example of the supreme concept of author: one who demands the complete realization of his aesthetic wishes.”* Power.
This Romantic view of the author as a supreme being—unique, exclusive, ultimate—is to a great extent responsible both for our copyright laws and for our present-day view of fidelity. It’s such an overwhelming view today that even Kundera, who has spent most of his literary career attacking Romanticism (as responsible, among other things, for the horrors of Communism) and harking back to the Enlightenment (a time when translation was everything he despises), has embraced the concept of the author as godlike and his creation as something set in stone and handed down from on high.
Most people’s belief in fidelity originates in their Romantic view of art, which puts the artist first and the work of art second. “Have you read Kundera?” we say. Or, “He slaved over that sculpture. He nearly starved.” Does that make the sculpture any better? Does it matter at all how the artist lived? Think of all the starving artists who never create anything worthwhile, and the rich ones who do the unimaginable. Swann’s love Odette, in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, was just this sort of Romantic: “As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman that had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one knew, she had lost all interest in that painter.”*
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