The Joke
The Joke
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Paperback ©1993--
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HarperCollins
Annotation: Returning from years in a forced-labor unit, Ludvik Jahn plots to seduce the wife of the man responsible for his exile.
 
Reviews: 1
Catalog Number: #5504867
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright Date: 1993
Edition Date: 2001 Release Date: 01/01/94
Pages: 323 pages
ISBN: 0-06-099505-X
ISBN 13: 978-0-06-099505-8
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 91058349
Dimensions: 21 cm.
Subject Heading:
Irony. Fiction.
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

Shades of the Rocky movies: This is English translation number five of Kundera's 1967 novel. The novel itself is one of the mordant fictions of Kundera's Czech-period—the story of a youthful jape made by a young man, Ludvik Jahn, a joke that escapes all proportions in the unnatural quiet of repression and fear of the tone-deaf state. In an odd way, it may be Kundera's most musical fiction, all about over- and under-tones. But the arrogant meanspiritedness Kundera exhibits here in his foreword about inaccuracies in Michael Henry Heim's 1982 Harper retranslation'' of the first American edition (1969 Coward McCann) amounts to not much more than a literary tantrum:...In good conscience he [Heim] produced the kind of translation that one might call translation-adaptation (adaptation to the taste of the time and of the country for which it is intended, to the taste, in the final analysis, of the translator). Is this the current, normal practice? It's possible. But unacceptable. Unacceptable to me.'' So, Kundera tells us, he set to work on what we're now to take as the definitive version'':On enlarged photocopies of the fourth version, I entered word-for-word translations of my original, either in English or in French, wherever I thought necessary...and soon I realized that...a new, fifth version was taking shape.'' What's this, the Dead Sea Scrolls? Translators, writers, readers, all can be offended by the authorial gracelessness, publishing astigmatism, and general waste of paper this amounts to. Buy someone's first novel instead."

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Kirkus Reviews (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)
Reading Level: 9.0
Interest Level: 9+

"A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it." —John Updike

"It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. Milan Kundera is an artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere, who says that the good (and evil) that issues from men's souls matters much more than the deeds of a State. And he says it with passion, with good humor, and with love." —Salman Rushdie

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, more than a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Milan Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

This edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.


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