The Friday Circle

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 to the first chapter of György Dragomán’s 2005 novel A fehér király, and its English translation by Paul Olchvary, The White King. The texts are available online on Dragomán’s website, in the original and in English translation. The method was (1) to identify in the English text occurrences and uses of have and of, (2) to translate them back to Hungarian (back translation), and then (3) to cross check with the original the words and phrases translated with have and of.

It goes without saying that categories of have and of usage are numerous. To name and illustrate a few, contrasting the English translation with (2) back translation and (3) the original:

Sequence of tenses:

(1) I took the clothes I had put on the back of my chair

(2) Elvettem a ruhákat, amit a szék hátára tettem

(3) Levettem a szék hátáról az este odakészített rukátat

Linking a quantifier to a quantified item (noun) or as part of prepositions:

(1) her usual sort of hug

(2) az ő szokásos ölelése

(3) megölelt, de nem úgy, ahogy máskor

Possession (habeo):

(1) Mother asked if they had a search warrant

(2) Anya megkérdezte, hogy volt-e házkutatási engedélyük

(3) Anya akkor azt kérdezte, hogy van erre parancsuk

This method of comparing back translation with the original highlighted the number and complexity of issues faced by students of Hungarian and translation when dealing with grammatical possession (habeo construction: van (+ possessor-dative) + possessed thing-possessive suffixes; or the possessive structure where there is no true ownership: van + possessor-adessive + possessed thing). 

February 7th, 2009 | Category: Activities, Hungarian studies, Translation | Comments (1)

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.

December 7th, 2008 | Category: Events, Hungarian studies, Literature, Nyugat | Leave a comment

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.

December 2nd, 2008 | Category: Events, Hungarian studies, Literature, Nyugat | Comments (1)

Andrea Talabér recently presented the work of Hungarian historian and Open Society Archives director István Rév, together with articles from Népszabadság covering the official 15 March celebrations of 1967 and 1974. Andrea outlined Rév’s focus on the function of show trials, and the manipulation of personal histories (not to mention historical dates), within the context of a broader discussion of competing historical narratives, and national holidays and official ritual under socialism.

With reference to Rév’s work (in particular, the essays in Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Postcommunism, Stanford CA, 2005), Andrea noted the sheer number of ‘revolutionary’ public holidays in the early 1970s, (re-)burial practices, and archival ‘findings’ produced to rewrite history. Reading the Népszabadság articles (‘Gazdag program a forradalmi ifjúsági napokon’, 1967, and ‘Forradalmár elődeinkez méltóan dolgozunk, harcolunk’, 1974), we discussed the elevation of 1848 and erasure of 1919 from Hungarian Communist chronology, convergent interpretations of 1956 as an anti-Communist revolt, as well as the more general coincidence of rhetorical styles adopted by the Kádár regime and, the subject of a number of our earlier talks, the contemporary Right. 

November 23rd, 2008 | Category: Activities, Culture wars, Current affairs, Hungarian studies | Leave a comment

2006

In her recent talk on the subject of her research in progress (nationalism in Hungarian popular culture), Jenny Rasell addressed a number of matters. Remarking on the sudden proliferation of nationalist symbols, and with reference to recent opinion polls and academic research on xenophobia, antisemitism, racism and homophobia in Hungary, Jenny presented a number of texts taken from various radical-right websites, weblogs and chat forums, as well as the Magyar Gárda oath.

Discussion focussed on symbols in popular culture (crosses, religious and medieval articles, maps, flags and so on), concepts of kinship, the promise to create order out of chaos, and the relationship between the parliamentary and (extra-parliamentary) radical right. We also considered the profile of the radical right, in terms of age, class, educational qualifications, and so on, and examined instances of ‘tough guy’ talk in colloquial Hungarian.

A pdf file of Pál Tamás’s recent research findings on radical right attitudes is available in Hungarian here, or in English.

November 23rd, 2008 | Category: Activities, Culture wars, Current affairs, Hungarian studies | Comments (1)

This term the focus of the discussions is reading and writing. Speakers at the seminars present a text and other participants, from various disciplines, offer their reading and interpretation of the text in question. A practical outcome of the discussions is to offer an insight into the process of writing in the broadest sense: from deciphering manuscripts through academic prose to iambic pentameter. We shall also address the question of how to write a doctoral or master’s thesis, a journal article, or a monograph.

The programme for the remaining five sessions is as follows:

13 November: Jenny Rasell will discuss a few texts taken from websites and blog entries edited by radical right-wing groups as part of her work in progress for her MRes dissertation.

20 November: Andrea Talabér will introduce work by Hungarian historian István Rév and provide an overview of his work.

27 November: Possessed by POSSESSION – Victoria Ford and Eszter Tarsoly will discuss approaches to possession by looking at translation strategies for the preposition of and the verb have.

4 December: Dr Gwen Jones will contrast a selection of Hungarian-language reports on the current financial crisis.

11 December: Mikulás puttony or zsákba macska: the details of the usual Christmas extravaganza, as well as the programme for this last occasion, remain fluid. The Christmas party is likely to take place this evening in the Russell Square/King’s Cross area of central London.

Friday Circle – now on Thursdays!

We meet on Thursdays at 6pm in the ‘Roman Bar’ of the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square.

November 3rd, 2008 | Category: Activities, Hungarian studies | Leave a comment

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 Square.

October 20th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment

We discussed the interwar népi-urbánus vita, with a view to understanding its context, semantics and contemporary articulation. Commonly referred to in English as the dispute between (agrarian) populists and urbanists (or ‘metropolitans’), and undoubtedly a major component of public political discourse since 1989, we began by reaching consensus on what it was not: a clash of two opposing worldviews, one rural and one urban. Rather, it was one cultural response to the economic and political crisis that gripped Europe and North America after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the articulation of two historically-constituted structures of understanding, from which alternative versions of modernisation emerge.

Where népi intellectuals distinguished themselves from ‘epigone’ romantics of the peasant myth, and urbánus ideas of the 1930s evolved from a critique of népi thought, the vita did nothing to clarify or even produce consensus on the terms of debate: nép, polgár, humanizmus, faj, szocializmus, harmadik út (the ‘third way’). All participants were reformist intellectuals hostile to the status quo, to the inequitable distribution of land, and to capitalism, and socialism, as it had been tried and tested in Hungary. We agreed that, as the 1930s wore on, the vita was frequently an exercise in antisemitism by other means, but that the critique of the city held primacy over resentment of Jews.

The interwar népi generation’s failed attempts to collaborate with the Gömbös government, and the various retractions made once the Anti-Jewish Laws came into being, provided a stark contrast with the utilisation of népi and urbánus narratives by contemporary urban élites vying for power. Indeed, the great bedrock of modern Hungarian discord had been appropriated and utilised by the Socialist state from 1948 onwards, and enjoyed a revival from the mid-1980s onwards, in oppositionist circles initially. The ideas of Pierre-André Taguieff and others helped clarify populism as a syncretic form of political speech, a distinctive style of political mobilisation, the very hybrid nature of which allowed the incorporation of Leftist and Rightist ideologies; its conceptual flexibility makes it attractive to both democratic and authoritarian/totalitarian structures. The polarisation of Hungarian politics today is not a straightforward continuation of interwar polemics, revived after ‘hiatus’ of Communism, but perhaps rather the reproduction of a symbolic politics, frequently dislocated from actual social cleavages, which mediates and revises history to suit. If one things has remained constant throughout, though, it is the utter instability of the term polgár. 

October 5th, 2008 | Category: Culture wars, Current affairs, Hungarian studies | Leave a comment

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. 

October 5th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment