Sunday, July 31, 2005
Milan Kundera's new book: Le Rideau.
Milan Kundera has published a new book in french "Le Rideau. Essai en sept parties" or "The Curtain. Essay in seven parts". I have found out about it from a polish language site dedicated to Kundera and run by Piotr Budnik. where I read an excerpt in polish translated by Marek Bieńczyk and of which I will mention here.
Kundera speaks of World Literature as a single domain of humans expressing themselves in written language. He calls for the view of Literature as an Art Form that does not exclusively belong to nations, countries and languages in which they were written for in that view they are all disconnected and form no common expression. The current view splits the world into many literatures according to the language or nationality of a writer and offers no commons. In his view of World Literature he follows Goethe who is considred a German writer, yet who himself notes his inspiration was Shakespeare, an English writer. Do you see how crazy this gets, all these separations by language and country? Goethe no more belongs to Germans than Shakespeare to English Literature. They are both just Literature, an expression and they are both Language, an expression.
Here are some hurried translations:
Milan Kundera has published a new book in french "Le Rideau. Essai en sept parties" or "The Curtain. Essay in seven parts". I have found out about it from a polish language site dedicated to Kundera and run by Piotr Budnik. where I read an excerpt in polish translated by Marek Bieńczyk and of which I will mention here.
Kundera speaks of World Literature as a single domain of humans expressing themselves in written language. He calls for the view of Literature as an Art Form that does not exclusively belong to nations, countries and languages in which they were written for in that view they are all disconnected and form no common expression. The current view splits the world into many literatures according to the language or nationality of a writer and offers no commons. In his view of World Literature he follows Goethe who is considred a German writer, yet who himself notes his inspiration was Shakespeare, an English writer. Do you see how crazy this gets, all these separations by language and country? Goethe no more belongs to Germans than Shakespeare to English Literature. They are both just Literature, an expression and they are both Language, an expression.
Here are some hurried translations:
"There are two primary contexts into which a work of art can be placed: either as the history of a nation (let's call it a small context), or above the national history of art (let's call it a larger context). Today we are used to regard music in a larger context. To a musicologist a knowledge of a language spoken by Roland de Lass or J.S. Bach is not terribly important, whereas in all the universities of the world novel is studied according to the language it was written in, solely in the small context of national history. Europe has not learned to think of its literature as a historical unity and I will not stop repeating that this is its calamity."
