The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Farewell Waltz by Milan Kundera
Paul Maliszewski

Milan Kundera. Farewell Waltz. Trans. Aaron Asher. Harper Collins, 1998. 278 pp. Paper: $12.50.

Published originally as The Farewell Party in 1976, Farewell Waltz joins other recent new translations overseen by Milan Kundera of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The novel is, at heart, a farce, with the characters thrown into every combination of discomfort and embarrassment, but the disarmingly bright face of this farce masks Kundera’s existential concerns. Where a conventional farce might look to a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and quickly slammed doors to flummox the characters and eventually reveal their weaknesses and frailties, in Kundera’s novel the stakes of the farce are higher: several characters’ lives are imperiled and no one emerges unaltered by their fateful plotlines.
Like Vladimir Nabokov before him, Kundera cannot seem to help himself to a little touching up here and there when translating. Kundera’s translation is never fussy and shows no evidence of imposing the style of his recent short novels, written in French, on a book that is more intricately plotted and stylistically floppy eared. In all aspects the translation serves the work well. The writing in Farewell Waltz is sharper, the word choice nearly always more exact and economical. The earlier book’s health-resort town setting becomes, simply, “the spa.” The “childless women” in the opening paragraph of the earlier book become the more precise “women unable to bear children.” Isolated and taken out of context these examples may seem nitpicky, but accumulated over the entire text they begin to cloud the clarity of Kundera’s writing.
Late in the novel, with Kundera drawing together all of the threads of this dark comedy, the narrator parenthetically projects the dim future of one of the characters. The earlier translation characterizes him as “an uncomprehending Cain, a courier of disaster.” Neither is right. The character has not, like Cain, killed his brother. Neither is he uncomprehending exactly. In the new translation, the character is a leper who brings disasters on loved ones, wandering, Kundera writes, “like a mailman of misfortune.” That single phrase brings many of the book’s themes together, combining as it does the banal and bureaucratic with the philosophical, the mythical, and the fate stricken. [Paul Maliszewski]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Farewell Waltz by Milan Kundera Paul Maliszewski Milan Kundera. Farewell Waltz. Trans. Aaron Asher. Harper Collins, 1998. 278 pp. Paper: $12.50. Published originally as The Farewell Party in 1976, Farewell Waltz joins other recent new translations overseen by Milan Kundera of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The novel is, at heart, a farce, with the characters thrown into every combination of discomfort and embarrassment, but the disarmingly bright face of this farce masks Kundera’s existential concerns. Where a conventional farce might look to a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and quickly slammed doors to flummox the characters and eventually reveal their weaknesses and frailties, in Kundera’s novel the stakes of the farce are higher: several characters’ lives are imperiled and no one emerges unaltered by their fateful plotlines. Like Vladimir Nabokov before him, Kundera cannot seem to help himself to a little touching up here and there when translating. Kundera’s translation is never fussy and shows no evidence of imposing the style of his recent short novels, written in French, on a book that is more intricately plotted and stylistically floppy eared. In all aspects the translation serves the work well. The writing in Farewell Waltz is sharper, the word choice nearly always more exact and economical. The earlier book’s health-resort town setting becomes, simply, “the spa.” The “childless women” in the opening paragraph of the earlier book become the more precise “women unable to bear children.” Isolated and taken out of context these examples may seem nitpicky, but accumulated over the entire text they begin to cloud the clarity of Kundera’s writing. Late in the novel, with Kundera drawing together all of the threads of this dark comedy, the narrator parenthetically projects the dim future of one of the characters. The earlier translation characterizes him as “an uncomprehending Cain, a courier of disaster.” Neither is right. The character has not, like Cain, killed his brother. Neither is he uncomprehending exactly. In the new translation, the character is a leper who brings disasters on loved ones, wandering, Kundera writes, “like a mailman of misfortune.” That single phrase brings many of the book’s themes together, combining as it does the banal and bureaucratic with the philosophical, the mythical, and the fate stricken. [Paul Maliszewski]

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