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 Thursday 26 March we will have the pleasure of Len Rix’s company once again, for a special seminar on translation in which we will discuss Len’s translations of Magda Szabó’s Az ajtó and Antal Szerb’s Utas és holdvilág. The seminar will take place in room 519 from 5.30 pm at UCL-SSEES. Those interested in [...]
Rochester University’s online magazine of literature in translation, Three Percent, is awarding a prize for the Best Translated Book of 2008. Of the 25 works on the longlist, which includes novels by Marcel Proust, José Saramago, Halldór Laxness, Stefan Zweig and Roberto Bolaño, three are translations from Hungarian, by: Ferenc Karinthy (1921-92), Metropole, translated by George [...]
On 27 November, Eszter Tarsoly and BA finalist Victoria Ford gave a joint presentation on grammatical possession. Hungarian has no genitive and instead uses ‘head marking,’ where the possessed thing (e.g. János háza) is marked, rather than the possessor (John’s house).
Eszter and Victoria presented was a comparative analysis of possessive constructions in English and Hungarian, with reference [...]
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 [...]