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Kunstat nestles in a fold of undulating countryside that marks the eastern edge of the Bohemian-Moravian Uplands. Overlooking its broad main street, stands the old house where Ludvik Kundera has lived for over a quarter of a century. Entering the house soon draws the visitor into a world of tea-infusions and dada, two life-long Kundera passions recently marked by published volumes on the subjects. Conversation too in all likelihood turns eventually to Frantisek Halas, whom Kundera first met in Kunstat and who lies buried in the nearby cemetery. But, equally, Kundera's readiness to talk of past associations with Hans Arp, Alfred Kubin, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Huchel and others tells of an early desire for involvement on the wider front of european cultural development in the twentieth century. In his youth, Kundera's own studies were perforce terminated with the closing of Czech universities following the German Occupation. Born in the spring of 1920 in Brno, he was in his third semester. But an interest in literature and the theatre was already aroused and his first verse appeared in Mladd kultura before the war. He had also embarked upon what was to be a life-long affaire de coeur with the art of translation - his first venture, a schoolboy attempt to produce a Czech version of poems from Heine's Buch der Lieder. Both Czech and German were spoken in the home (his father was Czech, his mother half-Austrian, half-Hungarian) and the house was well stocked with books. The beginnings of linguistic and cultural interaction were in place.

The following year after the assassination of Heydrich, Kundera was sent to a forced-labour camp in Berlin-Spandau, but diphtheria left him so seriously ill that he was allowed to return in 1944 to Brno. During and after convalescence, he still continued translating from the German, pursuing his quest for linguistic/cultural affinities in the literature of the current oppressors in tandem with his own writing through the war, despite ever-tighter censorship, of Resistance poetry.1 For Kundera and indeed the Czech people at the time, Halas, together with Seifert and Holan in the van of intellectual resistance, proved a hugely significant inspiration. Halas would remain friend and mentor to the young writer up to his own premature death in 1949. For his part, Kundera has acknowledged that friendship and the importance of Halas in twentieth-century Czech literature ever since - from defending that writer's name against Stalinist denigration in the early Fifties to editing Halas' works in five volumes (1968-1988), as well as in his own numerous writings, including the first ever biography in Czech (Frantisek Halas (1999)).

In June 1946, before Eastern Europeans began to encounter travel restric­tions to the West, Kundera went to Paris. He was seeking possible new books for a Czech publishing house. The French capital, so long a magnet for the artistic avant-garde, was once more beckoning with revived vibrancy. Kundera was in his mid-twenties. Besides a visit to the studio of Francis Picabia, a chance meeting in a cafe with Hans Arp led to an association last­ing two decades to the latter's death. Already by the start of 1944 Kundera had become interested in Arp - and hence in Dada as well as Surrealism, a strong tendency in Prague before the war. Better known as painter, graphic artist and sculptor, Arp was also a poet, and how the bilingual Alsatian approached language particularly intrigued the Moravian. If Halas proved a rich seam of Czech myth and history (the past seen as a moral ideal and bond with the future), generating a national context for Kundera's own writing, Arp was arguably the first living writer/artist Kundera met to provide an interna­tional dimension. Arp would remain his favourite poet.2 What especially attracted Kundera was the sense of lyric humour that Arp instilled in his verse as well as a penchant for striking imagery and word associations that disre­garded grammatical connections and bordered on the absurd - immediately exemplified in Weifit du schwarzt du (1930), a copy of which Karel Teige, a leading Czech avant-garde theoretician of the 1920s and '30s, lent Kundera. Arp's intentions for a poetry that was 'without sense', whereby the alogical becomes the normal, leading to a new consciousness of life, clearly struck a chord with Kundera. The Dada tradition of revolt, first generated for Kundera in those final dark years of Nazi occupation, would resonate further during the communist regime in his sustained interest in the poetry of Arp, Schwitters, Huelsenbeck, Ball and others with its aesthetic and political ori­entation.

The immediate post-war years held much promise. Kundera's interest in Dadaism and Surrealism led him to become a founding member of the neo-surrealist group Ra (1945-49), linking up with the artists Bohdan Lacina, Josef Istler, Vaclav Tikal and Vaclav Zykmund, the writer Zdenek Lorenc and the photographers Vilem Reichmann and Milos Korecek. On the literary front, his 1947 Czech version of the Expressionist Alfred Kubin's Die andere Seite was amongst the first of several translations then beginning to appear in different languages of that 'fantastic novel' (seen by critics as a forerunner to Kafka's tales) which enjoyed a remarkable revival following its original publication in 1908. He undertook the editing of the monthly artists' review Blok and co-edited the culture section of the daily Rovnost and by 1948 had three volumes of verse and two prose collections of his own published.

But Kundera and fellow Czechs were also facing the realization that a further readjustment in their thinking was inevitable as the communist thrust gathered momentum in the post-war era. Debate on the direction literature should take vis-a-vis socialist methods and creative freedom had already been pursued in 1946 at the Congress of Czech Writers. After February, 1948 the issue was effectively resolved. Kundera's own party membership and occasional writing of conventional verse (eg. 'Treptow Park') was never sufficient to make the authorities overlook his Dada/Surrealist predilections so clearly distant from the demands of social realism. Their interference 'from above' ensured that his contact with Arp in these years remained intermittent, with some correspondence disappearing altogether. Nevertheless he did edit Host do domu, the monthly journal of the Brno Branch of the Czech Writers Union, in the mid-Fifties and the temporary thaw in cultural-political relations following the death of Stalin enabled Kundera to benefit from a two-month visit in 1954 to East Germany, not least - in terms of his own future theatre activities - from the immediate impact of attending a number of rehearsals by Brecht's Berlin Ensemble of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. His meeting with Brecht in East-Berlin and their subsequent association for the next two years to Brecht's death proved of great and extended significance. Armed with the German dramatist's written authorization, Kundera started translating Brecht's plays in the late-Fifties.3 His versions - some in collaboration with Rudolf Vapenik - of, for example, Baal, Coriolanus, The Good Person ofSezuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, Galileo, Arturo Ui, would all be used for Czech stagings of Brecht's plays. Indeed the staging of Evzen Sokolovsky's production of Arturo Ui (the choice of play with its theme of fascism and war is here relevant) at the State Theatre, Brno in 1959 achieved a breakthrough in the reception of Brecht in Czechoslovakia.

Through that cultural thaw and his interest in German literature, Kundera got to know many East German writers in those years, not least Peter Huchel, now accepted as a truly authentic poetic voice in twentieth-century German letters. But as editor of the prestigious journal Sinn und Form (to which Kundera contributed), Huchel himself had experienced difficulties with thr authorities in the Fifties for not sufficiently toeing the party line. Indeed, ii the early Sixties, he was forced to resign from the editorship and forbidden t< publish. Kundera's poetic rapport with Huchel had already resulted in the publication of his Czech versions of the first two collections of the latter'; verse.4 His own first major play Total Cock-Crow (Totdlni kuropeni) (1961)5 an 'Occupation' play based on life in a wartime labour-camp (therefore redolent of his own experiences) was dedicated to Huchel. It was Kundera's visit and week-long stay in 1963 at Huchel's 'exile' retreat in Wilhelmshorst, with the Stasi car parked outside, that accentuated the solidarity involved, inducing Huchel to write warmly of the Czech as "the only friend in difficult years".6 This conscious act of friendship in turn brought Kundera to the uncomfortable attentions of the cultural functionaries in Prague. Moreover, his monograph of Huchel, commissioned by the Academy of Arts in East Berlin to mark Huchel's 60th birthday and already well advanced, was abruptly dropped. Yet Kundera's action at the time was not a solitary act of defiance. The current struggle by Czechs to get the anxiety-ridden, largely surrealist tales of Prague-born Kafka published in Czech had become a rallying cry for intellectuals in their demand for more freedom of expression.

The Prague Spring merely delayed the hard-line response. Kundera, in common with other Czech writers and artists, enjoyed the brief surge of creative freedom.7 He was able, already in 1966, to undertake trips to Austria, West Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia; was co-founder of the group Q (1967-70); and spent the years 1968-70 as dramaturg at Brno, working in the theatre with the head of drama Milos Hynst - little enough time for the nature of the job, which Kundera likened to a building with four floors, where he felt stuck between the ground and the first! But the suppression following Dubcek's short-lived political experiment brought Kundera's expulsion from the Party in 1970 and barring from publishing. The Seventies and early Eighties proved hard times for him professionally (he chose to stay rather than go into exile like his cousin Milan) and for his family. In 1976 they left Brno for the Moravian countryside and Kunstat. Kundera had no wish to shut himself away in a house of sadness as described in lines by his friend and fellow-poet Jan Skacel. But the joys of those years were few. A mood of withdrawal yet also defiant resolve on Kundera's part underlies such poems as 7 hope' and 7 have decided' with their irony and reflection and use of the first-person singular.

That Brecht's plays ceased to be performed in the Seventies in Czech theatres  was due to the cultural  functionaries' unwillingness  for the translations of Kundera and Vapenfk to be used. Official attempts were even made - in the event, unavailingly - to persuade Brecht's daughter to withdraw her father's original authorization. It was then too, when Kundera was effectively persona non grata in his own land, that his East-German writer-friends displayed their solidarity towards him. Franz Fiihmann made possible the publication in 1978 in Leipzig of Kundera's selection of the Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval's work (to mark the twentieth anniversary of the latter's death). Similarly, Fiihmann was the inspiration in 1974 behind Kundera's editorship of the two-volumed Die Sonnenuhr (The Sundial). The most comprehensive anthology of Czech lyric poetry over eleven centuries in German translation to-date, it was eventually published 1986-87, again by the Reclam Verlag. A new up-dated edition appeared in 1993.

Furthermore in the Seventies, Kundera drew on the experience gained during the Nazi Occupation of the tradition of writing and producing clandestinely in times of oppression, in a series of zamisdat publications. A dozen of these small-run bibliophile editions (each little volume comprising half graphic art, half verse from various hands) appeared before visits from the secret police. Occasional pieces of his were printed too under the name of friends who were able to publish and prepared to 'lend' their name. But essentially his own plays and verse, which Huchel, a decade earlier, had encouraged Kundera to spend more time on, as against translating activities, had to stay in the bottom-drawer. Indeed it was to the internal exile of translating that Kundera retreated for his basic spiritual - and financial -survival. The tradition of translating has of course been a marked feature of Czech literary life - the classic attempt of a smaller nation to gain access to a wider cultural world in its desire to reach out for communion of mind and spirit, a means of dialogue. For historical reasons, the German language long provided for Czechs the way into that larger arena in the first instance. Hence the irony of Kundera's conscious decision to continue translating from the German during the war, rather than refuse to use that language. Hence, after the war, the establishing of the (for Kundera) understandable and politically feasible link with East Germany.

Few would have foretold the so rapid crumbling of communism two decades after the Russian invasion. Even in 1987/88 Kundera was writing -with good-natured, yet almost romanticized wishfulness - a short sequence of poems on Memories of places I have never been (a situation rectified in part at least by travel in subsequent years!). In the event, the Velvet Revolution brought his name - quite literally - before the eyes of a wider public, when international TV news programmes flashed on screen scenes of Czech citizens retrieving case files which the state secret police were trying evei then to incinerate in those heady, confused days at the end of 1989. One sucl case file - charred at the edges, but the name of the targeted person stil legible - was held before the camera. It was that of Ludvik Kundera. Publu recognition came too in the shape of literary prizes and civic awards. Ar edition of his works in seventeen volumes started appearing from 1994 undei the imprint of Atlantis, Brno. Alongside his own collected dramatic texts fo) stage, radio and TV, his verse and prose, critical pieces on artistic and literary movements, on individual artists and writers, foreign and Czech, past and present, proliferate. Even so, translations spanning the various genres ovei centuries form the bulk of his output. And although concentrating on German writers from Arp, Boll, Celan, Morgenstern, Weiss, Huchel to Brecht, Trakl, Rilke, Heine, Grabbe, he has also toiled fruitfully in other linguistic fields, including translating the French Apollinaire, Desnos, Eluard, Char. Further, Kundera has displayed the reverse of the coin by helping through his own translations into German to bring to the attention of those readers the poetry of such Czech writers as Biebl, Halas, Hrubin, Nezval.

Kundera's own writings - verse, prose and dramatic pieces - reflect a concern with history. Understandably, the trauma of German Occupation ('Audible fall 1938'), the Second World War (Berlin; Total Cock-Crow} and hopes for peace under the Russians ('Treptow Park'} were recorded -sometimes with straightforward realism, sometimes surrealistically, occasionally conventionally. Reaction to the cultural-political difficulties of the Seventies in particular was often, though not exclusively, accorded sharper, ironic treatment (7 hope'}. It was a time when the absence of tangible signs of hope made Kundera pause to reflect on the problematic nature of the creative artistic process itself ('Loss of the keys'). However, optimism for a brighter future also gains poetic expression following 1989. Yet he is interested in more than just contemporary history. Past history too has lessons to teach, if we are receptive. A major dramatic project of Kundera's, begun in the early Sixties and completed only in 1983, is a play based on one of the so-called consoling writings of the seventeenth-century Moravian educational reformer and bishop Comenius, who wrote his work (it appeared in 1631) in the period when he had found shelter from religious persecution. Kundera's updated version (Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart} similarly mirrors a Pilgrim's Progress, where the young man, beset by various temptations along the way, must seek an understanding of life through observation and experience. In fact, Kundera views history in the widest sense, returning in time to use Slavonic myth as a means of signposting eternal truths ('Hruden'}. Inexorably linked to myth in this context as a source of reflecting - if not revealing - life's mysteries are nature and the seasons, not least winter ('Winter solstice'). But, essentially, Kundera examines the whole field of human relationships to pinpoint human understanding and sympathy through small gestures, happenings in a minor key ('A girl of'very bad repute', ' In memoriam', 'Three juicy pears', 'Shoes, o you shoes!'). Such small things in life - the memory of them even -constitute Kundera's constant poetic search for familiar signs that would form the bulwark of stability in a hostile world. (By the same token, his ready identification with Kunstat and Moravia (Uplands) marks his holding onto a familiar topographical reality as against his expressions of good-humoured romanticized longing for places equally physically real yet for Kundera then still unattainable ('Labrador', 'Memory of Lisbon', 'Memory of New York')). It is a search that remains ongoing - to fix marker buoys in the sea of life ('Between Continents'), which involves continual shifts of spatial and temporal perspectives, and everything conceived, perceived through the eyes of a writer with the artist's concern with angle, line and shape as well as colour.