Xenakis: Prophet of Insensibility
"Purified of Affective Dirt"
When I was a student at the University of Amsterdam in the mid 1990s, and an avid collector of experimental and contemporary music, I was particularly fond of two 20th century composers: Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis. This was before vinyl's long revival had fully taken hold and the only CD recording of Xenakis's monumental Kraanerg was a performance by the Alpha Centauri Ensemble on Etcetera, a Dutch label for contemporary music. In fact it is quite remarkable how many prominent Xenakis works have been released on Dutch music labels like Etcetera, BVHaast, and Donemus.
The red and black artwork of the CD booklet is hard to forget and suits the uncompromising, overwhelming physicality of the recording quite well. Inside the booklet is an excerpt of an essay by Milan Kundera titled "Xenakis, Prophet of Insensibility" which has intrigued me since I first read it - waiting for the tram on the Utrechtsestraat if I recall correctly....
When I revisited the essay recently I started wondering about the "from" part, which seemed to indicate that the actual article is longer than Richard Toop's translation that was included in the booklet. After a little research I discovered that another translation of this essay was collected in a book with collected Kundera essays called "Encounter."
When I retrieved this book from the library two things struck me. When republishing the essay in Encounter, Kundera inserted reflections. But what struck me most was that, in the 2009 collection, Kundera inserted retrospective qualifications directly into the original essay rather than adding a separate introduction or postscript. The interruptions feel awkward, almost like marginalia absorbed into the body of the text. As translations go, the translation of Linda Asher is quite different from Richard Toop's text. More remarkable, however, is that the excerpt in the Etcetera cd booklet is actually longer!
In the “Encounter” book the original French title of the essay and its source is not mentioned but an internet search tells me that Kundera initially published his article “Xenakis, “Xenakis, prophète de l’insensibilité”, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 1981, Stock, Paris.
Kundera was notoriously protective of his definitive bibliography. In his later years, he systematically went back through his older essays and articles, heavily editing, streamlining, and truncating them so that only what he considered his “essential” thoughts survived in authorized volumes like Encounter.
Because Richard Toop translated his version in the late 1980s directly from the un-excised 1981 French source text, the Etcetera CD booklet accidentally preserved a larger portion of the original essay than Kundera’s own authorized 21st-century retrospective collection did. Linda Asher’s translation in Encounter reflects Kundera’s final, heavily manicured, and shorter French draft.
To this day, a complete, unedited English translation of the original 1981 essay outside of specialized academic papers or old out-of-print liner notes remains elusive—making the old red-and-black CD booklet a minor literary treasure.