Translating Hungarian literary criticism
On Friday 13 June we began discussing problems encountered translating Hungarian literary criticism. The immediate problem we run into is that, as a rule, translation requires reading and understanding. Establishment literary criticism (Spenót, Szerb, etc.) is particularly difficult to translate, but not for lexical or syntactic reasons.
Such criticism ‘presses buttons’ in the original, classifies into generations and ‘isms’, overlooks genre, and tends to confuse the elevated status of the poet with substance. Primarily, it is an exercise in the metalanguage of criticism, in which terms of debate, and the broader semantics, are presumed to be self-evident. In practice, this reinforces the privileged position of art and writing in Hungarian, and produces and reproduces a reliance upon a code that native speakers ‘get’, whether they like it or not. Attempts to translate this code yield opaque, impenetrable nonsense (and this also applies to similar literary histories written in English). The following excerpt from Antal Szerb’s Magyar irodalom történet (1935) on ‘Polgári irodalom’ illustrates this tendency:
A nyugatos orientáció igazi jelentősége az volt, hogy nem volt zsarnokian magyaros orientáció, nem volt teljesen a magyar múlthoz hozzáláncolva, európai szempontú szemléletével megoldotta a hagyományokat, levegőt, teret csinált, hogy egy újfajta magyarság, Ady és Móricz magyarsága mozogni tudjon. Az eredmény, melyet a Nyugat szellemi szabadsága legnagyobb képviselőiben létrehozott, nem abból állt, hogy a magyar irodalom nyugatibb lett, hanem hogy mélyebben és szabadabban magyar lett.
It is assumed here that ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Western’ (largely coterminous with ‘European’) are two discrete entities, between which ‘Hungarian literature’ is able to move. Literature is produced by ‘representatives’ of ‘orientations’. Such representatives can choose to detach themselves from a linear past of production and its attendant conventions (or ‘traditions’), having first created a ’space’ for themselves in which to do so. The quality of being ‘Hungarian’ can be quantified (to paraphrase: Nyugat created a space within which Hungarian literature could be more deeply and freely Hungarian). It remains unclear, however, whether Western or European literature can also be measured in terms of its essential western-ness or European-ness.
It is worth noting here that spatial metaphors of occupation and subjugation have not only survived the twentieth century, but have prospered because of it, to the extent that a great deal of contemporary cultural and public discourse deals in a hegemony of displacement, where things are simply in not in the place they should be. This displacement is, of course, politicised.
Rather than translating ‘polgári irodalom’ as ‘bourgeois literature’, it would be more constructive to explore the multiple referents of all things ‘polgár’. To take an admittedly random and necessarily superficial selection: the fourth volume of Spenót deals with ‘a nemzeti-polgárosult irodalom kibontakozása’ and its inevitable ‘phases’ between 1849 and 1905; the purported antonymy between ‘polgárság’ and ‘parasztság’ was cemented in the murky world of the inter-war népi-urbánus vita; the ‘polgári író’ survived for a while as a suspect creature under state Socialism; and now the term has undergone a serious attempt at appropriation by Fidesz. I won’t even go near ‘magyarság’, but would note that in this text, it appears to mean very little, if the ‘magyarság’ of Ady and Móricz consists of not much more than the fact that they were male native speakers of Hungarian who wrote in Hungarian in the early twentieth century. It was our opinion that, beyond this, they have nothing in common.
None of this means one cannot write about Hungarian literature well in Hungarian or, indeed, in any other language. Far from it. Rather, one should be wary of regurgitating the unhelpful, and boring clichés of the ‘classics’. An exegesis of this code remains unwritten!
With reference to translations of contemporary Hungarian literature, we noted that the big guns (Esterházy, Kertész and Nádas) are, naturally (!), Hungarian writers schooled in German culture. Translations of their works appear in German first, and all three pay close attention to translations of their works into German; translations into English do not appear to be a priority. Translations of Hungarian literature into English via the German are ten a penny. While the number of quality translations directly into English is gradually increasing, it is imperative that the broader circulation of sensible literary criticism, independent of both the Hungarian canon and hastily-applied cultural-studies-speak, accompanies this growth.