89 WORDS FOLLOWED BY PRAGUE, A DISAPPEARING POEM

The late Czech writer offers considered thoughts on politics, literature, translation, and other topics.

The two texts included here, “89 Words” and “Prague, a Disappearing Poem,” appeared in 1985 and 1980, respectively, in the now-defunct French leftist journal Le Débat. Leftist, to be sure, but Kundera is rightly soured on “Soviet civilization,” which had oppressed the intellectual and cultural traditions of his homeland; he is equally disenchanted with a West that turned its back on a nation that was once at the center of European life: “After one thousand years of being a Western country, Czechoslovakia became part of the Eastern bloc.” Kundera opens these elegant if often embittered essays with this complaint: When The Joke appeared in a French version, “the translator practically rewrote my novel and changed my style completely,” while his English translator “didn’t know a single word of Czech.” A sympathetic French publisher suggested that Kundera write a personal dictionary of keywords in his work, and that dictionary constitutes “89 Words,” from “Absolute” to “Youth,” and with plenty of stops along the way. At midpoint is Kundera’s metaphysical context of “Lightness”: “As for the idea of the unbearable lightness of being, I find it already in The Joke: ‘I was walking across the dusty cobblestones, and I felt the heavy lightness that weighed down my life.’” Kundera’s sometimes curmudgeonly takes have a certain arch humor to them, as when he insists, in one of several entries concerning the novel, “The novelist owes nothing to anyone, except Cervantes.” A bonus: Kundera’s coinage of “Orgasmocentric.” “Prague” has less lightness: Kundera rightly bemoans the historical fact that Soviet colonization “took place in a country that had never colonized anyone,” imprisoning Czech culture and literature and the Czech people themselves, “suffocating inside their lives.”

Essential for Kundera devotees, and worthy of a place on the shelf next to Milosz and Solzhenitsyn.