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 two novels as personal, quasi-autobiographical works, both dealing with an exploration of the religious mentality, where core personal tragedy is sublimated. Szerb’s brutal self-dissection relies on form and parallelism but, in contrast to Szabó, is somewhat tempered by his heterodox Catholicism. The novel moves between different perspectives using narrative voice to scrutinise bourgeois conformity and façades. Szabó, however, puts her Protestant guilt ‘out there’ for all to examine, and is far more puritanical and judgemental, to the extent that the text is over-charged, and occasionally vulgar. There are very few shades of grace here.

Both texts condense the whole novel in the first chapter, which we read and discussed in the original, draft and final translation. Particular challenges for the translator included the ubiquitous még and már, the numerous roles played by is, rhythm and syntax, and rhetoric. 

Regarding faithfulness, and the translation of Hungarian literature, while an older generation of Hungarians in the West see it as their duty to ‘protect’ Hungarian literature from translation, and publishers continue to observe a form of cautious parochialism, successful translations have ‘lifted’ the literal text and made it accessible to an international audience. Here, sales figures speak for themselves.

It was a great pleasure to welcome Len as a guest speaker again, and we are delighted that students (in particular BA finalists) had the opportunity to discuss theory and practice of translating Hungarian literature with one of the most celebrated translators in the UK today. 

Vol. II, 1910

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 exhibition, and a number of important archive resources being made available online, from audio recordings of Nyugat authors reading their works, texts and graphics, to personal correspondence.

Our contribution was intended as a reflection on Hungarian literature, culture and translation at Nyugat’s centenary. To this end, we invited speakers and guests to a roundtable discussion at the University College London Wilkins Refectory, to discuss the anniversary and broader questions of Hungary’s contentious relationship to ‘the West’, over coffee and Hungarian patisserie.

Following a welcome from Dr Daniel Abondolo in the chair, Tim Wilkinson, translator (Imre Kertész, Péter Zilahy, a number of academic monographs on history and culture) and essayist, opened the roundtable. Noting that Nyugat was by no means a representative cross-section of Hungarian literature at the time, Tim introduced the notion of the literary canon in order to address its scope and validity. If a major writer such as Dezső Szomory had dropped out of Hungarian literary life, then the construction of the canon should be the subject of critical attention. Tim then presented figures from the Nyugat era and from the past fifteen years, on the number of translations of Hungarian literature published, their authors (living or dead) and translators, observing that no great progress had been made in terms of quantity. Although the ‘free adaptations’ of Mór Jókai’s novels had a contemporary equivalent in popular translations of questionable quality, the translator can today choose from a wide range of excellent authors and works. 

Len Rix, translator of Antal Szerb, Magda Szabó, and others, continued with the theme of difficulty in finding and navigating Hungarian literature in translation. He stated his aim as a translator, to acquaint English-speaking readers with Hungarian literature, and then introduced a discussion of the foibles of the publishing industry. Publishers are timid, translators do not receive royalties, and editors might insist on ‘no adverbs’. For Hungarian literature to move from the margins into the mainstream, it needs translations that will catch on, and intelligent marketing expertise. In conclusion, Len rephrased Tim’s observation that the books would then have no difficulty selling themselves.

Dr Zsuzsanna Varga of the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, presented her work in progress: a searchable database of Hungarian Literature in English translation, 1969-2007. The database lists works of fiction, drama, and lyrical poetry, the best known and most widely translated genre of Hungarian literature, and focuses mainly on texts published in the UK and in Hungary. It includes monograph-length translations of Hungarian fiction, individual poets’ volumes, the contents of historical and thematic anthologies of poetry and short fiction, as well as many periodical items. The database included, at the time of Zsuzsa’s presentation, almost 3,500 titles.

Informal discussion broadened out to include Hungary’s view of ‘the West’ as superego, Nyugat as a ‘rainbow coalition’ of writers who didn’t agree on much, translation anthologies, the establishment of an East European film network at Sheffield Hallam University, and a selection of photographs and images from Nyugat.

Márai, Napnyugati őrjárat, 1943

The accompanying exhibition held in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library presented a selection of original journals, first editions and newspapers from the Library’s rich collection. Original and facsimile issues of Nyugat from 1908 to 1939 were on display, together with accompanying notes highlighting the early Secession aesthetic, the breadth of subjects addressed by contributors, and the diverse authors and works discussed in ‘Figyelő’, the reviews section, the austerity and pacifist controversies of First World War issues, as well as personality clashes, and changing editorial styles and staff, such as that imposed by the Second anti-Jewish Law in 1939, towards the end of the journal’s existence. Debates on aesthetics and ethics could be followed in the context of social and political upheavals over the first half of the twentieth century. Visitors could peruse newspapers from the first years of the twentieth century, Nyugat’s peer and rival journals, and a small number of first editions. We highlighted graphics and illustrations throughout, from portrait photographs, caricatures and illustrations, for instance of a ‘modern’ bookshop in England in 1934, to maps, advertisements for shoe cream and personals. The exhibition notes can be viewed or downloaded in pdf format here.

A reception followed at the SSEES Masaryk Senior Common Room. 

The co-convenors, Dr Gwen Jones and Eszter Tarsoly, would like to extend warm thanks to all those who took part, in particular SSEES library staff who suggested and organized the exhibition, and Jenny Rasell, for her assistance and enthusiasm on the day.

Nyugat, IV, 1911, 3

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.

Nyugat poster, Mihály Bíró, 1911

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 literature, translation and culture, as well as broader notions of ‘the West’, to which students and friends of Hungarian and Central East European Studies are invited to take part.

Texts and visuals from Nyugat will be presented, and discussion will take place in an informal atmosphere. Keynote speakers and discussants include Dr Zsuzsa Varga, University of Glasgow, who will give a paper on the reception of western literature in Nyugat; Len Rix, noted for his popular translations of Antal Szerb and Magda Szabó; Tim Wilkinson, essayist and translator of, among others, Imre Kertész and Péter Zilahy; as well as scholars from UCL-SSEES. The event will be chaired by Dr Daniel Abondolo, Senior Lecturer in Hungarian Literature at SSEES, and is convened by Dr Gwen Jones and Eszter Tarsoly.

The poster comes from the National Széchenyi Library’s Nyugat centenary website.

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 Square.

Magda Szabó, 1917-2007

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 is male or female. Translators from Hungarian can also fall into a switch reference trap: a switch reference is a clarification of which third person is being referred to. In a conversation between a man and a woman, for instance, a sudden reference to ‘a férfi’ should be translated as ‘he’, not ‘the man’.

Disznótor brings Virginia Woolf to mind, in terms of the purposely difficult text in which everything is shown and nothing is told. The density of the text is partly due to the novel’s structure: events over the course of one day are narrated by means of seventeen characters’ separate interior monologues. The 1965 translation by Kathleen Szasz, Night of the Pig-killing, tackles the problem of whether and how to translate given names in a rather uneven way, by assigning ‘equivalents’ that range from the acceptable (Sándor becomes Alex, Geréné is Mrs Gere) to the frankly weird (János becomes Jonas, Anti becomes Tóni, and Imre becomes, inexplicably, Péter). Where reference tracking occurs at a much later stage in the original, however, the translator clarifies identity and gender as early as possible; moreover, the identities of the narrator and subject are frequently, and, one assumes, deliberately unknown. Szabó very occasionally assists the reader by highlighting emphasis one would pick up from speech:

Paula felhívta az iskolában, bejelentette, hogy valami gyűlés van, tovább bent kell maradnia. Ha éhes, kérje el Andreától a vacsoráját, és Szalayt okvetlenül meg kell hívni a disznótorra, ő szóljon neki.

The translator must use his/her knowledge of the entire text, not to mention his/her wits, to clarify who has to stay late, and who is hungry, whereas who should invite Szalay to the pig-killing is marked by the author.

Paula telephoned him at school, saying she had to attend some sort of meeting and would have to stay late. If he got hungry he could ask Andrea to give him his dinner. Yes, Szalay had still to be invited to the pig-killing, he had better speak to him.

From the opening lines of the chapter entitled ‘Sándor’, the translator pads out the sparse text and provides no less than three masculine personal pronouns for a sentence that contains none in the original:

Délutános volt, de felkelt jókor, nem szeretett heverni.

He worked the afternoon shift but he got up early, because he didn’t like to idle in bed.

An English-language translation will require reference tracking by means of personal pronouns, but also references to events alluded to elsewhere in the text. Szabó can switch the subject from sentence to sentence:

Hát sose lesz már nyugalom odabenn? Először hol sír, hol nevet a néni, aztán ajtócsapkodás, szaladgálás, beveszi magát a fürdőbe, hányik. Kiment a hátsó szobába, hogy ne hallja a hangot, nem mintha ő is felémelyednék tőle, csak hát jó az ilyet még hallani sem.

Will she never be quiet in there? First the old woman laughs and cries, then doors slam, running footsteps sound, and she shuts herself up in the bathroom and vomits. Mrs Gere drew back into the inner room so as not to hear her; not that it affected her in any way.

It is up to the translator how much s/he leaves the reader in the dark, to do the work themselves. Disznótor, a goldmine of stylised ambiguity, and a challenge to the most ambitious translator, is, at present, best enjoyed in the original. 

- 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 pose many an enjoyable problem for the translator. This excerpt is from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929):

While we were talking about it, plain-clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with.

Translated into Hungarian almost fifty years later by László Szíjgyártó as Véres aratás (diluting ‘red’ into ‘bloody’ harvest), the relevant passage reads as follows:

Még erről beszélgettünk, amikor két civil ruhás zsaru behozta a vörös képű fickót, akiben megakadt a Suttogónak szánt golyóm.

The translator’s way of dealing with a subject who had stopped a bullet intended for someone else was rather neat. Elements of the poetic came into play elsewhere:

If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn’t armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.

The translator makes best of use of the tools available, and will stretch the language where s/he can:

Fogadni mertem volna, hogy ha csak ugyan az én emberem, akkor nincs nála fegyver. Ezért aztán habozás nélkül a csúszós mellékutca közepén rohantam előre, belelesve, belefülelve, beleszimatolva a sötétségbe.

Similarly, Ross Macdonald’s 1956 novel The Barbarous Coast, translated in 1990 as A barbár part by Károly Ross, throws up a number of cultural references which may require explanation, or be ignored:

We climbed the steps to Mrs Lamb’s back porch, and I knocked on the rusty screen door. A heavy-bodied old woman in a wrapper opened the inside door. She had a pleasantly ugly bulldog face and a hennaed head, brash orange in the sun. An anti-wrinkle patch between her eyebrows gave her an air of calm eccentricity.

Ross translates:

Fölmentünk Mrs Lamb hátsó verandájára, s bekopogtam a rozsdásodó zsaluajtón. Egy pongyolát viselő, termetes, idős asszony nyitotta ki a belső ajtót. Kellemesen csúnya a buldogarca s vörösre festett haja volt, amely inkább narancsszínűnek látszott a napsütésben. A szemöldöke között lévő ráncosdás elleni tapasz egyfajta szolid különcséget kölcsönzött az arcának.

In translation, metaphor may become simile. The Barbarous Coast again:

He lay exhausted by his incredible leap from nowhere into the sun.

Úgy hevert, mint aki kimerített a hatalmas ugrás a semmiből a fénybe.

Excerpts from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) revealed a combination of experimentation with straightforward error:

The moment Marla is out the door, Tyler appears back in the room. Fast as a magic trick. My parents did this magic act for five years.

From Attila Varró’s 2000 translation Harcosok klubja:

Amint Maria kiteszi a lábát, Tyler felbukkan a konyhaajtóban. A Nagy Illuzionista. Akár az apám, életem első hat évében.

Aside from the choices all translators must make, and which are open to discussion, error usually comes about, we concluded, when the translator is tired. 

We ended the discussion looking at György Dragomán’s masterful 2005 translation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953). To wit:

Nor was the key the kind of key of which an impression could be taken, in wax, or plaster, or putty, or butter, and the reason for that was this, that possession of the key could not be obtained, not even for a moment.

A kulcs nem olyan fajta volt, amiről lenyomatot lehetett volna venni, viasszal, gipsszel, gittel, vagy vajjal, és ez azért volt így, mert a kulcsot még egy pillanatra sem lehetett megszerezni.

Dragomán is writing his doctoral thesis on Watt, so I leave it to him to discuss its narrative paradox, the virus of nothingness:

Form and content are not easily separated, each can and must be explained away in terms of the other, but the circularity of the argument will be closer to the insane attitude of endless investigation celebrated in the novel than to the ordinary world of logic and reason.

The full article is available in English; the Hungarian afterword to his translation is here. 

‘T’ is the prototype Central European small town, and the site of an ensuing farce. It never becomes clear who the bones belonged to, or how they ended up under the house. In this excerpt the town’s mayor explains the intricacies of post-communist identity to the narrator, who has been offered (threatened with?) honorary citizenship of T.:

 — Mi nem vagyunk azok – mondta. – Akik azok voltak, ma már nem azok. Nagyot fordult a világ – mondta – kereke. Én azelőtt is az voltam. Most is az vagyok, de a mostani azom nem ugyanaz az az, ami a régi azom volt. Azelőtt mi ellenségként állhattunk volna szemben egymással, de most ez megfordult. Most barátok vagyunk, segítünk egymásnak és egymáson. Közös a vektorunk – mondta még. – Az azunk többé nem ugyanaz az az. Tudja, én  másvalaki voltam tegnap, noha ugyanaz vagyok, az orrom például nem lesz se nagyobb, se kisebb, de ez mind nem számít.

Grendel, Tömegsír, second edition, 2006, p. 21

Both the mayor’s confusion, and translation difficulty, hinge on ‘az’; no one English word would work for each and every instance of ‘az’ (the, that, them, those). Rather, the translator would have to render the mayor’s difficulty in expressing his muddled thoughts into nonsense, and somehow replicate linguistic clumsiness for the play on ‘az’. For instance, ‘az azunk nem ugyanaz az az’ could be ‘we are not the we that we were’. However, it is the meaning of ‘az’ to which the speaker refers that has changed (the signified), not him or his surroundings, but it is the word ‘az’, the signifier, that remains constant in the text. In other words, it is not ugyanaz az az!

Other translation difficulties include: splitting ‘világ’ and ‘kereke’ with ‘mondta’; ’segíteni egymást’ and ‘egymáson’; and ‘közös a vektorunk’, which only means something to the speaker. I am particularly fond the throwaway ‘de ez mind nem számít’ at the end, the one and only instance of ‘ez’, but beautifully characteristic of someone who doesn’t really know what they are talking about.  Ultimately, the text is so deeply embedded in Hungarian that any attempt to lift it out would ‘kill the patient’ in the process.

I would be interested to check against the Slovak translation, Masový hrob.

A good Hungarian-language article on Grendel’s prose works is Sándor Olasz, ‘A megtörténtek paródiája. Grendel Lajos regényei’, in Új Forrás.

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.