Original scientific paper
A Complicated Search for a Familiar Landscape. The Beginnings of Milan Kundera's Literary Work: Translation Activity in the 1940s
Michal Bauer
; University of South Bohemia České Budějovice
Abstract
The study deals with the beginnings of Milan Kundera's literary work, which are connected with his translation activities. The focus is on the period of the second half of the 1940s, when Kundera translated and published several poems from Russian and Ukrainian. The most frequent poets whose poems he translated at that time were Vladimir V. Mayakovsky and Pavlo Tychyna. His translations were mostly very free, he modified them graphically, compositionally, in sound and meaning. Kundera's method of translation was very inventive, his relationship to the translated texts was free, and he treated many of them more as material to be reworked or repoetized. This is most evident in the various versions of the translation of Mayakovsky's poem-song “Возьмем винтовки новые” [We’ll Take New Guns], which receives special attention in the study. For Milan Kundera, these translation activities mean a practical experience of the creative relationship between the text and its interpretation – in the form of translation or re-translation. It is a sonic, rhythmic, constructional and semantic challenge, in which he had to deal with, among other things, his responsibility for the creative act of translation as an artistic and interpretative form, as well as his responsibility towards the authors of the original poems. The multifaceted theme of the creative act would subsequently appear in Kundera's subsequent work until his final books.
Keywords
Czech literature of 20th century; art and totalitarian regime; Milan Kundera; Vladimir V. Mayakovsky
Hrčak ID:
324699
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2024.
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