The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Precedence trap: the work was first published not in Czech but in French translation. The true first edition of the work is 'L'insoutenable legerete de l'etre' (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), translated from the Czech by Francois Kerel, which appeared ahead of the English within 1984. The first edition in English is the American Harper & Row (New York, 1984, trans. Michael Henry Heim); a UK Faber and Faber edition also appeared (dated 1984), with Harper & Row conventionally taken as the first English-language edition. The Czech original, 'Nesnesitelna lehkost byti,' did not appear in book form until 1985, from 68 Publishers (Sixty-Eight Publishers), Toronto. Three 'firsts' are therefore collected — Gallimard (true first of the work), Harper & Row (first in English), and 68 Publishers (first in the original Czech) — and the French precedes them all.