Litost
From The Book Of Laughter & Forgetting by Milan Kundera:
Litost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.
Take an instance from the student’s childhood. His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in an old, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher’s voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost.
What then is litost?
Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love’s magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming.
Love’s absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.
Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.
Litost works like a two-stroke engine. Torment is followed by the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one’s partner look as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the slapped woman cries. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love going.
Since revenge can never equal its true motive, it must put forward false reasons. Litost is, therefore, always accompanied by a pathetic hypocrisy.
Posted: August 9th, 2003 under Reading & Writing.
Comments: 6
Comments
Comment from Nicho
Time: 17 December 2006, 23:34
I’m pleased to see that someone has taken the time to quote the great Milan Kundera. The topic of Litost has only recently been made available to me through a conversation with a good friend over Kundera’s book. For Americans, and I suppose most of the world, as Milan suggests, the word litost has been lost. Ironic, no? However, once one understands the word, even in a sophomoric sense, and how its concepts play into one’s life, much is gained.
Comment from inés
Time: 12 June 2007, 10:47
loved the book. loved milan and loved the concept of litost. trying to evolve from a to b…
Pingback from I’m not sure whether I lied or not at hasanhujairi[dot]com
Time: 3 January 2009, 02:35
[...] is my way of consoling myself for what those victimised in Gaza are going through, and for the litost (ah, the joys of borrowing words from other tongues to make up for gaps in the English language) [...]
Pingback from #009 – An entry. Or post. Or blog. Or… Well, you get it « The Man Who Folded Himself
Time: 16 March 2009, 04:21
[...] misery”. In fact, I’m not going to bother elaborating on that definition. Here, go to this excerpt from Milan Kundera’s most excellent book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and then try to [...]
Comment from Lara
Time: 1 October 2009, 03:47
A similar word to litost, is saudades, a portuguese word that is also very hard to translate. A longing, a deep sadness, an unexplained, or misunderstood, desire for the past, or a place etc. But it is not nostalgia. It is something else.
Pingback from milk « unreal
Time: 1 October 2009, 04:34
[...] gently in the open window. I was quite overwhelmed by a feeling of what I can only insist was litost, a word I learned several years before I ever knew saudades. Anyway, a week or so later, I had [...]
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