Five weeks ago, the members of the National Book Critics Circle were asked, "Which work in translation has had the biggest impact on your reading and writing?" This was a tough question for me, as I've read lots of translated works [much of it in a MR conext]. Would it be Borges? Or Bulgakov? Or Kafka? Calvino? Murakami? Zivkovic? I've of course read more translated authors than just these, but this list of writers was certainly influential in some way.
In the end, I settled on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. I wrote up my response and sent it back to the NBCC.[This past week], the NBCC Reads: Spring 2009 list was posted to Critical Mass by James Marcus. It compiles a digest of some 9,000 words sent in by nearly 80 NBCC member critics, former finalists and winners, on their favorite works in translation: Camus, Proust, Thomas Mann, the Bible, etc.. To my surprise, my response about Kundera was quoted about a third of the way through. Eep!
If you're curious, here's the money shot:
Jason Erik Lundberg opted for a different [Kundera] novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. “It combines the fascinating narrative of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with amazing philosophical erudition and trenchant observation,“ he wrote, “and it does this using elements of the fantastic. The novel is also very structured (as are many of Kundera’s texts), so that it feels like a symphony built of disparate parts, but held together by common themes and experiences.“
I have to credit Wilton Barnhardt for introducing me to this novel when he read from the beginning of it during one of his graduate writing workshops. I think I'd read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by that point, but soon after, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting replaced it as my favorite Kundera book.
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