François Hirsch, translator of Milan Kundera, is dead
François Hirsch, who was notably the translator into French of the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera and the American Cormac McCarthy, died in Carcassonne (Aude) on Tuesday, October 12. Born December 13, 1925, he was 95 years old.
It was thanks to François Hirsch – by his pen name Francois Kérel, until he decided to return to Hirsch, in the years 1980 – that the readers were able to discover in French the “real prose” of Milan Kundera. At least until the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Gallimard, 1984) decides to make French, and no longer Czech, his writing language. From Laughable loves (Gallimard, 1970), François Hirsch becomes “the” official translator of the great writer. For his greatest happiness, that of his work and his readers.
Auto Laughable loves was not Kundera’s first translated book, it had been preceded by Joke (Gallimard, 1968). This novel had certainly made it known to the French public, but in a terribly unfaithful translation, as the writer Alain Finkielkraut was later to reveal to Kundera. The previous translator – that of Joke, so – had almost rewritten his novel! A simple ” blue sky “ became “A periwinkle sky” or “October hoisted a sumptuous bulwark son”. Short, Joke had become a string of flowery metaphors: the complete opposite of Kundarian writing. We dare not imagine the distorted perception we would have had of this prose – wonderfully sober, limpid, deep, precise and sharp as a blade – if François Hirsch had not seized upon it.
Poet
In all his translations, François Hirsch knew how to combine clarity and elegance. Naturally simple and discreet, he was born into a well-off and assimilated Jewish family. But born with a visual impairment which, having handicapped him all his life, perhaps also explained, according to his daughter Catherine Hirsch, “His imagination and his singularity”.
When, in 1942, his father, arrested then sent to Drancy, was deported and gassed to Auschwitz, the young François, his mother and his aunt took refuge in Chambon-sur-Lignon, this village of Justes, in Haute-Loire, where Pastor Trocmé and his entourage saved so many lives. Arrested despite everything by a Gestapo in Puy-en-Velay, François Hirsch is miraculously released. He slips away from death.
Not having been able, because of his sight problems, to participate in the Resistance, he engages in communism, to which he remains faithful until the beginning of the 1960s. Translator but also poet, he establishes relationships of friendship with Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Henri Soupault … After abortive law studies, he embarked on those of languages. At Inalco, he continued to learn Russian and Czech.
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