According to the Russian news agency, TASS 12 cited French media news reports, the famous author Milan Kunde pushed to the world, 94 years old.
Milan Kundertui’s famous works include the stories “Playing Cry” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Life”. He has long been considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he did not win.
A young Kundertui
The literature of the uprooted
Born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, the second largest city in Czechoslovakia, Kunderti was influenced by his father, a musician and pianist, to build pianos and compose music. During his university years, he first built literature and aesthetics in the Art Department of Charles University in the Czech Republic, and then went to the film department of Butug Performance Academy to change the direction and script writing.
In 1968, Kundertui participated in the “Butug Spring” movement, and shortly after the movement was suppressed, he was blacklisted and his works were banned in the Czech Republic. In 1975, he fled to Paris, France. His report on the lives of ordinary Czechs under Soviet occupation, which was achieved in France, laid the foundation for the tone of Kunder’s work of the exile era. After the book was published, the Czech authorities stripped Kunderti of his citizenship and allowed the book to be published.
Crow Record
Translated by Milan Kunder and Wang Dongliang
Shanghai Translation Publishing House 2022
Eleven years after his exile, Kundertui called himself a “French author” for the first time, publishing a book of reviews in French, The Art of the Story, which has since replaced Czech as his first line of writing. In 2019, he regained Czech citizenship.
French literary translator Yu Guangzhong once commented on the relationship between Kundetui’s creative clue and his exile career in a campaign: “Kundertui is an exile author, writing in his mother tongue has to go through a lot of inspections, and after going to France, he tried to write some cartoons in French, and gradually tried to stop a certain separation between himself and his works, to stop a certain level of combing between his previous works and his later works, to exclude some things and leave some things.” I always felt that there was a dissonance in him — that when he came to France he emphasized more his role as a storyteller than as a dissident.”
From the beginning of the Record, the political identity of Kundertui’s stories gradually increased until he survived, but he still thought about political affairs in a broad metaphysical context. Kundertui’s works often place themselves in the story, stop interacting with their own creation, and more in love and politics, crying and thinking, light and heavy.
In 1984, his most powerful work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published, which describes the adversity of the Czechs in the wake of the “Butug Spring”. In 1988, the story was adapted into a film by American director Philip Kaufmann (translated into Chinese as The Love of Butug), and it became a huge hit.
Poster of the movie “The Love of Butug”
Embrace the metaphysical label and decline self-concealment
Milan Kunder pushed the art of storytelling, discerning the relationship between scholarship, philosophy and the art of storytelling. Although his works are quite metaphysical, he does not want to consider himself a metaphysician, or even a writer of philosophical stories. He once said, “I am too afraid of those who teach, to whom art is only a derivative of metaphysical and practical thought.” Stories were known before Freud, class struggle before Marx, and actual phenomenology before phenomenologists. Proust did not know any phenomenologist, and if his phenomenological morphology is so exquisite!”
To him, the story declined any stereotyped thoughts, in the search for survival to overcome metaphysics, metaphysicians to make a break, and the story proposed if. He does not like the philosophy of the story this confession, “I do not read anything proof, just assessment results: what is survival?” What is jealousy, indiscretion, vertigo, weakness, the impulse to love?” The wisdom of the story lies in thinking about the world action as a complex and ambiguous entity, so this is an uncertain wisdom and a relative true wisdom.
The Art of Storytelling
Milan Kunder pushing Dong Qiangyi
Shanghai Translation Publishing House 2022
Milan Kunderti had a brief spell as an astrologer in early 1970, a form of escape from adversity, and his astrological columns were widely read by a wide variety of people at that time. In the story “The Crow Record,” he lets his movements flash and gives away details of his work as an astrologer.
Self-concealance is only that, Kunde push has always declined to show his private career to the big few, and has always held a position of evaluation of the non-reliance of literary advertising. He once explored with the British national Egiu MacEgiu that the events that would dissolve in the upper echelons of officialdom would also flash into private careers, and George Orwell shaped a world in which the power of politics chose the true meaning and the things that should be remembered, while the action story writer, he was interested in other things.
“What interests me is that each of us, knowingly or unknowingly, is transcribing our own history. We choose and shape objects that calm us and make us happy. At the same time wipe out anything that will not bring us contempt.”
Kundetui woman
“Kunde push fever” in China
His works have been translated in China for more than 30 years, and in 1986, translator Jing Kaixuan accidentally lost the English version of “Gathering for a Farewell” and began to translate it. At the same time, another of Kundertui’s works is being translated by author Han Shaosin. In 1987, Jing Kaixuan’s translation of “Gathering for a Farewell” and Han Shaosin’s translation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Life” were published by the author’s publishing house under the sign of “internal reference”.
“The Unacceptable Lightness of Life” flashes a word that Kundtui is most familiar to Chinese readers – Kitsch. Kitsch comes from the German, originally a general term for the objects of low taste, in the story Kundtui described Kitsch: “When the glimpse of children running on the lawn, Kitsch caused two lines of tears: the first line is: glimpse of children running on the grass, how nice; The second line is the way, to be with all mankind, to be moved by the children running on the grass, how wonderful.”
The term Kitsch was first translated as “kitsch” in the 1987 Han Shaosin Translation, and later replaced with “Kitqi” by Jing Kaixuan. Jing Kaixuan explained: “The word Kitsch has the meaning of kitsch in the West, that is, flattery is too little, but Kundtui reinterpreted it, meaning refers to the excessive cost, the excessive ethics.” In fact, his works are to uphold the price of the nobility that people think, against the nobility, against the pride, against the meaning, which is precisely the secular and daily nature of the viewing career.”
In early 1990, China had a “Kunde push fever”. His books with titles such as “Life is elsewhere” and “The unbearable lightness of Life” became popular, and the line “God cries when man considers” became popular. In an interview, Jing Kaixuan showed that Kundetui’s work’s dissolution of heroic views, irony and deconstruction of the search for false meaning projected the social atmosphere of the time.
In a previous campaign, French translator Dong Qiang highly evaluated the effect of Kunde on the Chinese cultural circle: “No author, especially a living author, has ever had such a great effect on the Chinese literary circle, the criticism circle, and the university researchers.”
“The struggle of man and his rights is the struggle of image and memory,” wrote Kundertye in his book Records of Crow. This is also one of his most frequently cited sentences by Chinese readers. Now, the author of the long struggle with memorization, copying images, is gone from us, but we cannot help remembering him.