TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “The Farewell Party” written by Milan Kundera has been released in the Iranian book market.

Forough Pouriavari has translated the book and Saless Publications has brought it out in 255 pages, Mehr reported.

Also known as “The Farewell Waltz,” the book was first published in 1972. The novel mostly deals with love, hate, and accidents between eight characters who are drawn together in a small spa town in Czechoslovakia in early 1970s.

Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call announcing that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant. She has decided he is the father.

And so, begins a comedy in which, during five madcap days, events unfold with ever-increasing speed. Klima's beautiful, jealous wife; the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend; a fanatical gynecologist; a rich American, at once Don Juan and saint; and an elderly political prisoner who, just before his emigration, is holding a farewell party at the spa, are all drawn into this black comedy.

As usual, Milan Kundera poses serious questions with a blasphemous lightness which makes us understand that the modern world has taken away our right to tragedy.

Like most Kundera's work, “The Farewell Party” is a book of many layers. On the surface, it is a comedy or a burlesque. Still the comedy is just at the top of this story which involves much darker and ambiguous tones. For the book, Milan Kundera was awarded the Mondello Prize in 1979.

Milan Kundera (1929 – 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

Kundera's best-known work is “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country's ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. 

Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.

Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revised the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. His other notable novels include “The Joke” (1967) and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979).

SS/SAB