Once when I was little (I think it was sophomore) I came home on April 2nd and told my grandmother who opened the door that I got “two” in arithmetic.
What really stuck in my childish head is no longer intelligible. I didn’t get a double.
“Nothing,” said the grandmother. You will fix it tomorrow.
– Since April 1! I shouted happily.
“Second time today,” he replied. “Or do you think you can lie now all April?”
To be honest, I thought so too. You can lie during the month of April.
Such is the unbearable lightness of being in April.
Looks like I wasn’t the only one smart. A writer lived at that time for a long time, and he once said: “If I were asked what causes the most misunderstandings between me and my readers, I would not hesitate to answer: because of humor.”
A man whose last name we mispronounced in Russian (he is not Milan Kundera, he is Milan Kundera) and the French are already distorting it in their own way, a man taught music by a composer who was forced to wear a yellow star ( Kundera’s father at least hired him as a teacher to his son, others he wanted to express his support to a Jewish friend while already fleeing from him), he himself was later ostracized in his own country, but at a different time and for a long period of time. for a different reason, this man who realized that life is always a cocktail of coldly mixed, sometimes incompatible components, and therefore – it is this person who composes all his texts according to the laws of polyphony, polyphony, and therefore other things. with a whimsical, shifting array of humor.
“We have long understood that the world cannot be changed, that it is impossible to remake, to stop its unfortunate course. There is only one way to resist: not to take this world seriously. But I admit that our jokes have lost their strength … “. That’s what Kundera, born on April 1, says.
… Immediately after the defeat of the Prague Spring he was asked (“I took part in strange dialogues”, as he wrote): “Are you a communist, Mr. Kundera? No, I am a novelist. “Are you a dissident? No, I’m a novelist. “Right or left? – Neither one nor the other. I’m a novelist.”
But for a long time the world didn’t care if you were a novelist or a master of short stories. The world is only interested in what position you take on this or that painful issue. All these love throws are just dry leaves, sunny cobwebs, sparrow feathers. Maybe the world isn’t so wrong after all? The main issue is the background on which all these launches take place. Kundera (do we remember that he had to be “shot” with “y”?), but he was also dissatisfied with the movie based on his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, shot in the USA in 1988, because they are all about life’s inner and outer protagonists, including political ones. their complex events were reduced to just a love triangle.
But here, rather, the constant rigor and the desire to have all the lines connected to each other brought together. The text is the same building: No randomly protruding beams or a missing wall. Especially if he’s a carrier.
By the way, he already has this idea about the building himself, although it is about something else. “The artist should leave an impression as if he had never lived. His private life is not public. In order to build a new house, the house of his novel, the writer must first of all destroy his own house.
But now we are afraid.
Where do we put the teapot? To store food? Track the water meter? Where are we going to lay the blanket? Who are we going to do this for?
My joy for anyone, for anyone.
These heroes will drink tea, make beds, talk politics, fight, talk about love. Our job is to write.
“History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, as light as a feather, like a fluctuating dust, something that will not exist tomorrow.”
Joy from us, only letters will remain. But these letters will not be about us. This is the sole purpose of writing. Even if we talk like we’re talking about ourselves – in fact, there is only a fictional character in our books: we gave him a piece of our life, scraps of biography, but don’t believe us, you read our books when you read them. about us, not us; April 1 – I do not believe anyone, the author has all April – April 1, all year – April 1, all his life.
Therefore, you should never trust the author. “No one can bring another idyll gift. Only an animal can do this, since it has not been banished from paradise. The love between man and dog is idyllic love. No conflict, no heartbreaking scenes, no development in it.
(Kundera seems lucky with dogs. Actually, he isn’t.)
But a real writer doesn’t even believe in himself.
He believes in the blue point of the text only the blue point of the flower (here, the Blue Flower of Novalis works immediately, even if Kundera doesn’t have it in mind), he believes in the blue point of the text. The color chosen is not accidental: it is the color of heaven, the color in which we raise our eyes when we want something, although there is no one to ask – yet we look there and ask.
“… Finally, when the onslaught of this ugliness becomes completely unbearable, he will take a forget-me-not from a florist, a single forget-me-not, a fragile stem with a miniature blue crown will go out with him into the street and hold it in front of him, frantically glaring at him so that he can only see this beautiful blue dot. will see.
I’m sorry that I can’t find translations of Kundera’s poems anywhere – and he wrote them in his youth and youth. He has three or three books of poetry: “Man is a vast garden”, “Last May” and “Monologues”.
And suddenly – I almost gave up on the idea (at least, somewhere this fragile stalk with a blue crown flashed) – I found:
Like a diver diving to the bottom of the sea,
So for poetry with swords
We get to the bottom of the human.
We will only find it there.
But what impresses me here is not the lines (in my opinion, nothing too special), not the luck of finding it, but the name of the translator – Boris Slutsky.
Did Boris Slutsky translate Kundera? And why? Or is it fooling us on the first day of the best month of the year when the world seems frozen in a narrow strip of divine void, the world still bare but already dry? As you know, a day (which is sad), whose laws do not apply to all other days of April.
But now I find the second stanza of this text. No, definitely Slutsky.
From the cut word,
A verse carved from verses
Unable to withstand the blow of evil
And it’s not good for combat.
And then it becomes clear why Slutsky undertook this translation. Who better than him, a front-line soldier, should translate this text.
… April 1 I don’t trust anyone. Of course, not everyone should believe in my joy, but still some have to.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.