February 28, 2009

Laughable loves

I brought this book by Milan Kundera to Barcelona called Risibles amours. It can be translated as "laughable loves". I had already read the book before, and it is a pleasure to reread it. There are seven short stories in it. In the first one, there's a great moment where a couple comes into a factory of some sort in order to find a woman. (I'm sparing you the details.) The wife asks her husband to describe the woman to her, but the only thing he can remember is that she was beautiful. He is then pressured into giving out more details about the woman, and so he says she was blond and tall. But the woman, who is terrified to be found, is neither blond nor tall. The man had simply been so impressed by his beauty and so, to him, she was certainly blond and tall.

In another story, there's a great passage I will be attempting to translate:

"It was a situation that was never to be repeated in his life: he had confronted the unimaginable. He had just lived this brief period of his life (this heavenly period) when imagination is not yet saturated by experience, (...) when you know very few things, so that the unimaginable still exists; and if the unimaginable is about to become a reality (...), you start to panic. And he really did panic when, after a few more meetings where he remained irresolute, she started to interrogate him in great detail about his student room, almost begging him to invite her."

Besides that, today my taximan seemed like he was about to cough his lungs out. And the weather is not that great today in Barcelona, but I still hope to get some sun at one point!

2 comments:

  1. firstly, i am super jealous of your current whereabouts. why didn't you pack me?!

    also, a very good translation. i am intrigued. i don't suppose this book is in English anywhere?

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  2. THAT's what i forgot back in... california. did you stop in barcelona last summer?

    it must be somewhere out there in english, as it was originally written in czech. i don't know what would be the actual translation, though.

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