Milan Kundera’s critical views and his difficult relationship to translation and translators has been
frequently a subject of heated discussion and debate among translation scholars and experts. While
some show understanding and sympathy for Kundera’s radical attitude and his uncompromising
demand for fidelity, others see in him an author who desperately wants to assert his authority as sole
owner of the text, referring to his interventions in the translation process as expression of an
‘essentialist’ desire or need to control meaning translingually. While demanding utmost loyalty from
translators, Kundera himself takes full liberty when translating his own work, making significant
editions and creating different versions of the same text in different languages. The history of his novel
The Joke is symptomatic of the contradictions pertinent to Kundera’s bilingual practice. In this paper,
I will discuss the problem of translation and the relationship between original and translation in
Kundera’s work. Drawing on the themes of misunderstanding, remembrance and forgetting in The
Joke, it will be argued that Kundera deliberately uses misunderstanding as a special mode of
reading/writing. While apparently seeking to create a ‘definite’ version, Kundera’s rewriting practice
rather erases boundaries and raise serious questions regarding what can be considered a translation and
what is supposed to be an original
