Hungarian Studies in London
On Thursday 27 March, we once again had the pleasure of Len Rix’s company, this time discussing his translations of Antal Szerb, Utas és holdvilág, 1937 (Journey by Moonlight, Pushkin, 2000), Magda Szabó, Az ajtó, 1987 (The Door, Vintage, 2005), and his article ‘In Praise of Translation’, recently published in the Hungarian Quarterly.
Len described the [...]
On 11 December 2008, the Friday Circle convened a roundtable discussion and exhibition celebrating the centenary of literary journal Nyugat (West, 1908-41). Anniversary events in Hungary included a year-long exhibition at the Petőfi Literary Museum, numerous talks, lectures and public events, a Nyugat 100 bus that toured the country for six months with a mobile [...]
A small exhibition will accompany the roundtable discussion, ‘Hungary’s ‘West’?: Literature and Culture at the Centenary of Nyugat‘, and will be on display on Thursday 11 December until 5 pm, on the second floor of the SSEES library, 16 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW.
Inspired by the SSEES Library’s rich Nyugat collection, the exhibition presents a [...]
We are delighted to announce the roundtable discussion, ‘Hungary’s ‘West’?: Literature and Culture at the Centenary of Nyugat‘, to be held on Thursday 11 December, 3.00-6.00 pm, in the Old Refectory, Wilkins Building, University College London.
On the occasion of the centenary of the literary periodical Nyugat (’West’, 1908-41), scholars, translators and journalists will discuss Hungarian [...]
The next text to be discussed in the ongoing translation series is an excerpt from Péter Esterházy’s 1995 novel Egy nő, translated into English by Judith Sollosy. The parallel text is here.
We meet at 6pm on Thursdays at the bar commonly referred to as the Roman Bar, on the first floor of the Imperial Hotel on Russell [...]
Madga Szabó’s 1960 novel Disznótor is a remarkable exercise in minimal reference tracking. Reference tracking – who is being referred to – can cause problems for many students (and translators) of Hungarian. Because Hungarian lacks gender-specific personal pronouns and grammatical gender, the student might, for years, encounter trouble deciphering whether the person being spoken about [...]
- Megvan a kés!
- Hol?
- A hátamban.
Jenő Rejtő, Piszkos Fred, a kapitány
We discussed ways in which a literary language might grow through translation, with reference to translations of works of hard-boiled fiction by Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Chuck Palahniuk and others, together with one work of ‘high’ literature. Unsentimental narratives of violence and sleuthing can [...]
As part of our translation series, we discussed an entertaining excerpt from the novel Tömegsír (Mass Grave, Kalligram, 1999) by one of our favourite authors, Lajos Grendel (b. 1948), with a view to thinking about untranslatability. The premise of Tömegsír is simple: following post-1989 property restitution, an academic moves back to his family’s house in a small town [...]
Malcolm Lesley has kindly agreed to make his English translation of János Háy’s short story ‘Petőfi híd’ available to readers of this site. You can read the original here (’Petőfi híd’, in Háy, Házasságon innen és túl, Budapest, Palatinus, 2007, pp. 154-61), and Malcom’s translation is here. Both are pdf files.
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 [...]