Most people still believe in the unique qualities of the author and in the author’s precedence over the translator. However, they see other performers—actors, musicians, directors—as artists. In fact, when there’s a conflict between artists, today’s Romantics even lean toward the performer (the actor over the writer, the musician over the composer). But there is no performer of literature—or so people seem to believe—so there is no conflict and no tendency to favor the translator. Thus a creative translator, even with integrity and competence, can be considered a betrayer, and people will generally side with the author against him — the literary world has certainly not shown any sympathy for Heim. The metaphor of fidelity, which implies that infidelity is bad and should be dealt with, has allowed Kundera to do what he most despises: rewrite the work of artists, ignoring their artistic rights. But then Kundera too does not consider translators artists.
What harm has been done by Kundera’s response to what he considers his translators’ infidelity? Will readers of the new translations and revisions not get to see what makes Kundera special? No, they’ll get all of that, because whatever Kundera thinks, it isn’t words and punctuation that make him special; it isn’t even his tone, except in the most general sense. It’s his images and structures, and only a completely oafish translator or radical revisionist could ruin these; in fact, Kundera’s revisions have probably done more damage than a mediocre translator would have done. No, the true harm is that a highly respected writer has taken a strong public position on translation in which the author has all rights and no obligations, either to the translator or to his readers. The fact that future readers will not be able to buy any English translation of the original Book of Laughter and Forgetting is of no concern to Kundera. Nor does he care to alert readers that they are not reading a translation of the original and that they could find such a translation in or through a local library. When enforced and based on power and betrayal, fidelity is no longer an ethical concept, but rather a means of oppression, suppression, and other unethical behavior.
Kundera’s view of translation is not the only one held by authors, nor is it the typical one, if only because most authors either can’t be bothered or don’t know the foreign language well enough to get
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