Attendance is free, but prior registration is required. To register, or for the conference programme and further information, please visit the conference page at the departmental website.

London-based Hungarian freelance journalist Vali Tóth gave an excellent talk last year concerning contemporary journalism in Hungary and the impact of political transformation and the internet on news media.

Vali contextualised technological and political changes of the past decades, from the late 1970s when there were no direct phone calls between Szeged and Pécs, to the present day, where online news content is generated to attract the highest number of clicks from online visitors.

The Hungarian media landscape was transformed from a patrician Party-dominated system to a multi-party democracy in which influence over the media remained a political priority, and free market pressures discouraged investigative journalism in favour of plagiarism and superficial coverage of economic questions.

We discussed Hungarian media and journalism in a broader post-Communist context, and a few examples Vali provided of changing forms, content, language and presentation.

Mi a hír ma? Hír-e még, ami öt éve az volt? Hogyan alakult át a hírek tartalma és formája a modern technika jóvoltából? Mik a modern magyar sajtónyelv jellegzetességei? Hogyan változtatta meg az internet a magyar média, különösen a hírek nyelvezetét?

Knowledge of Hungarian is advantageous, but not compulsory. The talk will take place from 5.30 pm in Room 519 of UCL-SSEES, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW.

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. 

Speakers include Doina Anghel, László Beke, Mark Boswell, Paolo Cirio, Anthony Downey, Catherine Fraise, Kata Krasznahorkai, Nina Levitt, Łukasz Ronduda, Kädi Talvoja, Raluca Voinea and Franciska Zólyom. 

The seminar takes place from 1.15 – 7.00pm, Friday 27 February 2009, at the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN. For further information, click here (pdf).

The seminar will be accompanied by an issue of Third Text, guest edited by Dr Reuben Fowkes, and including essays by leading theoreticians dealing with the problematic of how to rewrite the art history of Europe after the Cold War to take into account the multiple histories of the countries of Eastern Europe.

The overall winner will be announced on 19 February. 

All three works were translated into German before English. Hungarian authors, living and dead, have enjoyed something of a resurgence on the international literary field, thanks initially to the German reading public’s appetite for twentieth-century Hungarian prose. Kertész, Esterházy and Nádas are all German-speakers, and will supervise their German translations closely, but not necessarily the English. A number of recent well-known publications of Hungarian literature in English were translated from the German translation. The above three publications, however are translated direct from the Hungarian, and assessed by the judging panel according to how the text ‘works’ in English on its own terms, and whether it holds together, as a whole. It’s encouraging to see the (slowly) increasing number of works available in good translation, and the recognition of Hungarian writers for their quality, rather than for being Hungarian. 

UPDATE: The winner in the prose category was Bartis’s Tranquillity (trans. Imre Goldstein), and in the poetry category, Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (trans. Sawako Nakayasu). 

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.