2023-07-13 04:14:27
Milan Kundera.. Why wasn’t the author of the “joke” read in Cervantes?
In the eighties of the last century, the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984), by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023), became the favorite book for readers of that era, to the point that the novel was classified among the books that must be read, if one wants to be in tune with his era at the time. Indeed, the novel was addressing its era, especially as it follows the lives of a handful of lost characters in the quagmire of the crisis of individualism, within a broader and more comprehensive political reality – the communism of the Soviet era – that gave the novel additional weight.
Few are the articles – if not rare – those that touched later on Kundera’s work in Spain, although the bulk of his fictional works are translated into the language of Cervantes, and in the most prominent publishing houses. It may seem more strange that the Spanish cultural and journalistic community dealt with the news of the Czech writer’s departure from our world, yesterday, Tuesday, at the age of ninety-four, compared to the volume of articles and news that were published regarding him in the Arab press. With the exception of some articles that were issued, which were nothing more than ordinary news announcing the news of his departure and presenting stations in his life, there were no deep analytical articles dealing with the biography of the writer and his novelist importance, as one of the most prominent novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, in addition to being a permanent candidate for Nobel Prize for Literature.
In an interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, Spanish novelist and journalist Javier Santiso says: “The curse of exile may be the reason for this. The Czech writer did not enjoy the same fame in Spain as he did in France, where he chose the path of exile since 1975, when he was expelled. In general, this is not strange in Spain, as the same thing happened with other writers, such as the French Pascal Coignard and the other Frenchman Pierre Michon, both of whom are still alive, despite their importance and the number of their translated books. into Spanish, but they are almost unknown in Spain.It can be explained that the Spanish reader today escapes from large, difficult and profound novels, and this is what distinguished the Czech writer.
Today’s Spanish reader escapes from large and difficult novels
As for the prominent Spanish novelist and journalist, Juan Cruz, he in turn talked regarding the first meeting that took place between Milan Kundera and his Spanish publisher, Beatriz de Cura, founder of the Spanish publishing house “Tuskets”, which published the works of the Czech writer, where he says: “Beatrice went specifically to Paris, and It seemed to her a dream in 1984 to publish, in Cervantes, the works of the Czech writer. Milan, as Beatrice described him to me, Cruz continues, was standing with his wife in the kitchen. His personality was rigid, and suddenly he asked her: What did you read from my books exactly? Beatrice shyly replied that she had read him some pages from the translation of The Joke. Milan left her and went to the salon, confident at that time that she would inevitably be his publisher.
Indeed, the agreement occurred between Beatrice and Kundera, and the Tusquets publishing house translated the bulk of the writer’s work, according to Cruz, but, contrary to what Beatrice expected, she did not have the success she expected. “This usually happens with translation, but this does not negate Kundera being one of the most important novelists of the second half of the twentieth century,” Cruz comments.
The Chilean poet and novelist, residing in Madrid, Rosa Betty, told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that she was one of the first to read the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” when it was translated into Spanish, and she “was introduced to the literary worlds of Kundera through that novel, which was The talk of Chileans, especially the generation to which I belong, but my generation felt very disappointed, following this work, as we expected from the writer novels that deal with the same depth of the topics of love, pain, existence and time that he dealt with in this novel, but we did not find in his later novels the depth Himself”.
All of this raises a lot of questions: Who defines the zeitgeist? Who determines the importance of a writer in a country? Why is a writer read in one country and not in another? Whatever the answers, it must be said that the time we live in is the time of the collapse of the great historical novels, the decline of poetry, and the replacement of the concept of originality with the concept of imitation and imitation. And now, artificial intelligence is writing the future.
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