Lucija Mandić
(ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Institute of World Literature SAS)
4 November 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
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https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89321224888?pwd=IvAPrbFdbQME9add5EZIZijqbYQ4is.1
Meeting ID: 893 2122 4888
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The lecture is presented as part of the mobility project Translating Central Europe: Milan Kundera’s Oeuvre Across Languages, Borders, and Political Contexts and the IMPULZ project Translation and Cross-Lingual Stylistic Transfer: Towards a Theory of Language Contact in Literature, both supported by the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
In 1990, Milan Kundera’s novel Nesmrtelnost was published in French as L’Immortalité, translated by a certain Eva Bloch. Kundera repeatedly referred to her as a “close friend,” yet Jan Rubeš, another Czech–French translator, said of her: “Who is this Eva Bloch? I, personally, have translated a dozen books from Czech into French and so know most, if not all, the translators working in the field, but I have never heard the name of Eva Bloch.” Searches in library databases and archival catalogues reveal that Eva Bloch appears exclusively in connection with Kundera’s work, raising legitimate doubts about her existence. Given Kundera’s well-documented involvement in translating and revising his works, several scholars have suggested that L’Immortalité may represent his first attempt at writing directly in French or at self-translation. With the archival evidence that might solve this mystery largely out of reach, computational stylometry might offer another way to search for clues. Stylometry has been successfully applied to authorship attribution in original literary works, but identifying translators comes with its own set of complications. A translation inevitably carries traces of both the original author’s style and that of the translator, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. And what happens when the author is also the translator, or extensively revises the translation? Using the case of Eva Bloch, the lecture will discuss these problems and present a series of stylometric experiments comparing L’Immortalité with Kundera’s original French novels and other French translations of Czech literature, asking what such methods can tell us about translation, self-translation, and multilingual authorship.
Lucija Mandić is a researcher at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies and the Institute of World Literature SAS. Her research focuses on Slovenian and West Slavic literatures, computational literary studies, cultural nationalism, and cultural transfer. She is a member of two research committees of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), focusing on digital comparative literature and language contact in literature. She is a co-editor of a special issue of Primerjalna književnost titled “Big Data, Small Literatures” (2024).