Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  Gombrowicz lived for thirty-five years in Poland, twenty-three in Argentina, six in France. Yet he could write his books only in Polish, and the characters in his novels are Polish. In 1964, during a stay in Berlin, he is invited to Poland. He hesitates, and in the end, he refuses. His body is buried in Vence, in the south of France.

  Vladimir Nabokov lived in Russia for twenty years, twenty-one in Europe (in England, Germany, and France), twenty years in America, sixteen in Switzerland. He adopted English as his writing language, but American themes a bit less thoroughly; there are many Russian characters in his novels. Yet he was unequivocal and insistent in proclaiming himself an American citizen and writer. His body lies at Montreux, in Switzerland.

  Kazimierz Brandys lived in Poland for sixty-five years, moving to Paris after the Jaruzelski putsch in 1981. He writes only in Polish, on Polish themes, and yet, even though since 1989 there is no longer a political reason to stay abroad, he is not going back to live in Poland (which provides me the pleasure of seeing him from time to time).

  This hasty scan reveals, for one thing, an emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.

  Emigration is hard from the purely personal standpoint as well: people generally think of the pain of nostalgia; but what is worse is the pain of estrangement:

  the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign. We experience that estrangement not vis-a-vis the new country: there, the process is the inverse: what was foreign becomes, little by little, familiar and beloved. The shocking, stupefying form of strangeness occurs not with an unknown woman we are trying to pick up but with a woman who used to belong to us. Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.

  I think often of Gombrowicz in Berlin. Of his refusal to see Poland again. Distrust toward the Communist regime still in power there? I don't think so: Polish Communism was already falling apart, cultivated people were almost all involved in the opposition, and they would have turned Gombrowicz's visit into a triumph. The real reasons for the refusal could only have been existential. And incommunicable. Incommunicable because too intimate. Incommunicable, also, because too wounding for the others. Some things we can only leave unsaid.

  Stravinsky's Home

  Stravinsky's life divides into three parts of roughly equal length: Russia: twenty-seven years; France and French Switzerland: twenty-nine years; America: thirty-two years.

  The farewell to Russia was accomplished in several stages: Stravinsky is initially in France (starting in 1910) as if for a long study trip. These years are incidentally the most Russian in his creative work:

  Petrushka, Zvezdoliki (based on a work of the Russian poet Balmont), Le Sacre du printemps, Pribaoutki, the beginning of Les Noces. Then conies the war, and contacts with Russia become difficult; still, he remains a Russian composer with Renard and Histoire du sol-dat, inspired by the folk poetry of his homeland; only after the Revolution does he realize that his birthplace is lost to him, probably forever: the real emigration begins.

  Emigration: a forced stay abroad for a person who considers his birthplace his only country. But the emigration stretches on and a new loyalty develops, this one to the adopted land; that's when the break occurs. Little by little, Stravinsky abandons Russian themes. He goes on in 1922 to write Mavra (a comic opera based on Pushkin); then, in 1928, Le Baiser de la fee, that recollection of Tchaikovsky; and thereafter, aside from some few marginal exceptions, he never returns to them. When he dies, in 1971, his wife, Vera, complying with his wishes, rejects the Soviet governments proposal to bury him in Russia and has him taken to the Venice cemetery.

  Without a doubt, Stravinsky, like all the others, bore within him the wound of his emigration; without a doubt, his artistic evolution would have taken a different path if he had been able to stay where he was born. In fact, the start of his journey through the history of music coincides roughly with the moment when his native country ceases to exist for him; having understood that no country could replace it, he finds his only homeland in music; this is not just a nice lyrical conceit of mine, I think it in an absolutely concrete way: his only homeland, his only home, was music, all of music by all musicians, the very history of music; there he decided to establish himself, to take root, to live; there he ultimately found his only compatriots, his only intimates, his only neighbors, from Perotin to Webern; it is with them that he began a long conversation, which ended only with his death.

  He did all he could to feel at home there: he lingered in each room of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every piece of the furniture; he went from the music of ancient folklore to Pergolesi, who gave him Pulcinella (1919), to the other Baroque masters, without whom his Apollon Musagete (1928) would be unimaginable, to Tchaikovsky, whose melodies he transcribes in Le Baiser de la fee (1928), to Bach, the godfather of his Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924) and Violin Concerto (1931) and whose Chorale Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch" he arranges (1956), to the jazz he celebrates in Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918), in Piano-Rag Music (1919), in Preludium for Jazz Ensemble (1937), and in Ebony Concerto (1945), to Perotin and other old polyphonists, who inspire his Symphony of Psalms (1930) and especially his admirable Mass (1948), to Monteverdi, whom he studies in 1957, to Gesualdo, whose madrigals he transcribes in 1959, to Hugo Wolf, whose two songs he arranges (1968), and to the twelve-tone system, about which he initially was reserved but in which, eventually, after Schoenbergs death (1951), he recognized yet another room in his home.

  His detractors, the defenders of music conceived as expression of feelings, who grew irate at his unbearably discreet "affective activity" and accused him of "poverty of heart," didn't have heart enough

  themselves to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music.

  But that's no surprise: no one is more insensitive than sentimental folk. Remember: "Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling."

  PART FOUR. A Sentence

  In "The Castrating Shadow of Saint Carta," I quoted one of those Kafka sentences that seem to concentrate all the originality of his novelistic poetry: the sentence in the third chapter of The Castle where Kafka describes the coition of K. and Frieda. To show precisely the specific beauty of Kafka's art, instead of using the existing French translations I decided to improvise my own most faithful possible translation. The differences between a Kafka sentence and its reflections in the mirror of translations have now brought me to the following remarks:

  Translations

  Let's review the translations. The first is by Alexandre Vialatte, from 1938:

  "Hours passed there, hours of mingled breaths, of

  Literal English versions of the three published French translations of Kafka's sentence are given here with the aim of enabling monolingual readers to understand the authors argument. These are followed by the German original with an exact English translation. For Vialatte, David, and Lortholarys translations, as well as the author's own translation into French, see the end of this part (pp. 119-120). (Translator.)

  heartbeats in common, hours in which K. never ceased to experience the sensation that he was getting lost, that he had thrust in so far that no being before him had gone such a long way; abroad, in a country where even the air had none of the elements of his native air, where one must suffocate from exile and where all one could do, amid insane enticements, was to c
ontinue walking, continue getting lost."

  It was recognized that Vialatte was a little too free with Kafka's text; that is why the publisher, Gallimard, decided to correct his translations for the 1976 publication of Kafka's novels in the Pleiade series. But Vialattes heirs opposed this; and so an unprecedented solution was arrived at: Kafka s novels were published in Vialattes faulty version, while the editor, Claude David, published his own corrections of the translation at the back of the book in the form of an amazing number of notes, such that, in order to reconstruct in his mind a "good" translation, the reader must constantly turn the pages to look at the notes. The combination of Vialattes translation with the corrections in the back of the book actually constitutes a second French translation, which for simplicity's sake I'll simply refer to as "David":

  "Hours passed there, hours of mingled breaths, of merged heartbeats, hours in which K. never ceased to experience the sensation that he was going astray, that he was thrusting farther than anyone ever had before him; he was in a foreign country, where even the very air no longer had anything in common with the air of his native country; the foreignness of this country choked him, and yet, among its mad enticements, one could only walk still farther, go still more astray."

  Bernard Lortholary deserves great credit for having been radically dissatisfied with the existing translations and for retranslating Kafka's novels. His translation of The Castle dates from 1984:

  "There hours passed, hours of mingled breathing, of hearts beating together, hours in which K. had the constant feeling of going astray, or of having advanced farther than any man into foreign lands, where the air itself had not a single element one could find in the air of one's native country, where one could only suffocate from the force of foreignness, yet without the power to do otherwise, in the midst of these absurd enticements, than to continue and go further astray."

  Here now, the sentence in the original German:

  "Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems, gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden, in denen K. immerfort das Gefuhl hatte, er verirre sich oder er sei so weit in der Fremde, wie vor ihm noch kein Mensch, einer Fremde, in der selbst die Luft keinen Bestandteil der Heimatluft habe, in der man vor Fremdheit ersticken miisse und in deren unsinnigen Verlockungen man dock nichts tun konne als weiter gehen, weiter sich verirren."

  Of which this is an exact translation:

  "There hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours in which K. continually had the feeling that he was going astray, or that he was farther inside the strange world than any person before him, in a strange world where the very air had in it no element of his native air, where one must suffocate from strangeness and where, in the midst of absurd enticements, one could do nothing but keep going, keep going astray.'"

  Metaphor

  The entire sentence is one long metaphor. Nothing requires more exactness from a translator than the translation of a metaphor. That is where we glimpse the core of an authors poetic originality. Vialatte's first error occurs with the verb "s'enfoncer" ("thrust" or "drive into"): "il s'etait enfonce si loin" ("he had thrust in so far"). In Kafka, K. doesn't thrust, he "is." The word "s'enfoncer" deforms the metaphor: it ties it too visually to real action (a man who makes love does thrust or drive) and thus deprives the metaphor of its level of abstraction (the existential nature of Kafka's metaphor does not seek to evoke- physically or visually-the act of love). David, in correcting Vialatte, keeps the same verb: "s'enfon-cer." And even Lortholary (the most faithful) avoids the verb "to be," replacing it with "s'avancer dans" ("advance into").

  In Kafka, while making love K. is "in der Fremde" ("in a strange place"); Kafka uses the word "Fremde" twice and then a third time in its derivative "Fremdheit" ("strangeness"): in the air of strange places, one suffocates from strangeness. All three translators are bothered by this threefold repetition: this is why Vialatte uses the word only once and instead of "strangeness" uses another word: "where one must suffocate from exile." But Kafka never mentions exile. Exile and strangeness are different notions. While making love, K. is not driven away from some home of his, not banished (and so not to be pitied); he is where he is by his own will, he is there because he has dared to be there. The word "exile" gives the metaphor an aura of martyrdom, of suffering-sentimentalizes and melodra-matizes it.

  Vialatte and David translate the word "gehen" ("aller"-"go") by the word "marcher" ("walk"). When "alter" becomes "marcher," the expressivity of the comparison is increased and the metaphor becomes slightly grotesque (a person making love becomes a "walker"). This grotesque edge isn't bad in principle (I myself am very fond of grotesque metaphors and I am often obliged to defend them against my translators), but the grotesque is surely not what Kafka wanted here.

  The word "Fremde" is the only one in the sentence that cannot tolerate simple literal translation into French. Indeed, in German "Fremde" means not only "a foreign country" but also-more generally, more abstractly-everything that is strange, "a strange reality, a strange world." When "in der Fremde" is translated as "a l'etranger" it is as if Kafka had used the term "Ausland" ("abroad"). The temptation to try for greater semantic exactness by translating the word "Fremde" into a two-word French term thus seems to me understandable; but in each of the actual solutions (Vialatte: "a Fetranger, dans un pays ou" ["abroad, in a country where"]; David: "dans un pays etranger" ["in a foreign country"]; Lortholary: "dans des contrees etrangeres" ["into foreign regions"]), the metaphor again loses the element of abstraction it has in Kafka, and its "touristic" quality is heightened rather than suppressed.

  Metaphor as Phenomenological Definition

  The idea that Kafka disliked metaphors should be corrected; he did dislike metaphors of a certain kind, but he is one of the great creators of the sort of metaphor I call existential or phenomenological. When Verlaine writes: "Hope glimmers like a wisp of straw in the cowshed," it is a superb lyrical flight of fancy. It is, however, unthinkable in Kafka s prose. For Kafka certainly disliked the lyricization of prose in novels.

  Kafka's metaphorical imagination was no less rich than Verlaine s or Rilkes, but it was not lyrical: it was driven exclusively by the wish to decipher, to understand, to grasp the meaning of the characters' actions, the meaning of the situations in which they find themselves.

  Let us recall another scene of coition, the one between Esch and Frau Hentjen in Brochs The Sleepwalkers: "His seeking mouth had found hers, which was now pressed against his like the muzzle of an animal against a pane of glass, and Esch was enraged because she kept her soul imprisoned behind her set teeth, to prevent him from possessing it."

  The words "muzzle of an animal" and "pane of glass" are here not to evoke by comparison a visual image of the scene but to get at the existential situation of Esch, who even during the amorous embrace remains inexplicably separated (as by a pane of glass) from his mistress and unable to get hold of her soul (a prisoner behind set teeth). A situation difficult to catch-or, rather, uncatchable except by a metaphor.

  At the beginning of Chapter Four of The Castle there is the second coition of K. and Frieda; it too is expressed in a single sentence (sentence-metaphor): "She was seeking something and he was seeking something, maddened, grimacing, heads thrusting into each others chests as they sought, and their embraces and their tossing bodies did not make them forget but rather reminded them of the necessity to seek, as dogs desperately paw at the ground they pawed at each others bodies, and, irremediably disappointed, to catch one last pleasure, each would from time to time sweep his tongue broadly across the other's face."

  Just as the key words of the first coition's metaphor were '"strange" and "strangeness," here the key words are "seek" and "paw at." These words do not express a visual image of what is happening but rather express an ineffable existential situation. When David, in his French translation, renders the passage above thus: "as dogs desperately dig their claws into the ground, they dug their nails into each other's body," he not only is being inacc
urate (Kafka speaks neither of claws nor of nails that dig) but is also transferring the metaphor from the existential domain to the domain of visual description; by so doing, he places himself in a different aesthetic from Kafka's.

  (This aesthetic discrepancy is still more evident in the last fragment of the sentence: Kafka says: "each would from time to time sweep his tongue broadly across the other's face"; in David, this precise and neutral observation turns into an expressionist metaphor: "each whipped the other's face with blows of the tongue.")

  Observation on Systematic Synonym izing

  The need to use another word in place of the more obvious, more simple, more neutral one (have-experience; go-walk; sweep-whip) may be called the syn-onymizing reflex-a reflex of nearly all translators. Having a great stock of synonyms is a feature of "good style" virtuosity; if the word "sadness" appears twice in the same paragraph of the original text, the translator, offended by the repetition (considered an attack on obligatory stylistic elegance), will be tempted to translate the second occurrence as "melancholy." But there's more: this need to synonymize is so deeply embedded in the translators soul that he will choose a synonym first off: he'll say "melancholy" if the original text has "sadness" and "sadness" if the original has "melancholy."

  We concede with no irony whatever: the translator's situation is extremely delicate: he must keep faith with the author and at the same time remain himself; what to do? He wants (consciously or unconsciously) to invest the text with his own creativity; as if to give himself heart, he chooses a word that does not obviously betray the author but still arises from his own initiative. I am noticing this right now as I look over the translation of a small text of mine: I write "author," and the translator translates it "writer"; I write "writer," and he translates it "novelist"; I write "novelist," and he translates it "author"; where I say "verse," he says "poetry"; where I say "poetry," he says "poems." Kafka says "go," the translators, "walk." Kafka says "no element," the translators: "none of the