An Experiment in the Reinvention of Hungarian Verse Translation

Leave Music out of it! An Experiment in the Reinvention of Hungarian Verse Translation

Imre Kőrizs Institute of Hungarian Language and Literature [email protected]

Keywords: 20th century Hungarian literature, canon, translation, Nyugat, politics, meter

Surprising as it may seem, when it comes to questions of form, politics and verse translation are uniquely and inextricably linked. The practice of verse translation in Hungary was shaped in the 20th century by the tenets of the literary journal Nyugat (West). The first generation of young Nyugat writers were profoundly influenced by French symbolism and, with respect to verse translation, they aspired to live up to Verlaine’s demand “De la musique avant toute chose”. This requirement of faithfulness to form has remained unquestioned right up to the present day. Here is the first stanza of the translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, which was completed in 1923 by Árpád Tóth (1886–1928), a representative of the first generation of contributors to Nyugat: „Egyszer egy bús éjféltájon, míg borongtam zsongva, fájón / S furcsa könyvek altatgattak, holt mesékből vén bazár, / Lankadt főm már le-ledobbant, mikor ím valami koppant, / Künn az ajtón mintha roppant halkan roppanna a zár, / »Ven- dég lesz az”, így tünődtem, „azért roppan künn a zár, / Az lesz, más ki lenne már?«„ Szabolcs Várady kindly informed me, that some decades ago, in a con- ference held in Atlanta, Georgia (USA), after having listen to it, the audience eas- ily recognised the original of the poem. In the second half of the last century, the state – while monopolizing resources, including cultural life, in the name of the class struggle – by means of the editorial board of the Európa Publishing House, which played a central role in the publication of world literature, permitted the preservation of the principles of literary translation embodied by Nyugat. From our point of view, the forty years of Communist-oriented cultural policy resulted in three decisive fac- tors: the need for a radical restructuring of the literary canon; the goal of popular education; and the availability of practically endless resources devoted to book publishing. The last of these refers to both financial and human resources, since, for a period of ten years, those writers and poets who were unable to accommodate themselves to writing in the Stalinist spirit (“after 1948, the poets and writers of Újhold [a literary quarterly] were under prohibition, and the

— 339 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac anathema began to expire only in the last fifties, early sixties1), rather than pro- ducing their own works instead devoted themselves to literary translation and children’s literature, which meant that standards in these two genres were significantly raised. The small number of publishing houses, which were exclusively owned by the state, thus published large numbers of books, in huge print runs, and at a low cost. And although Nyugat ceased publication in 1941, and the cultural monopoly exercised by the Európa Publishing House disappeared in 1990 along with the Communist regime, these institutions, along with their staff and followers, enjoyed such enormous prestige that the form-oriented principles of literary translation shaped by Nyugat in the course of 100 years have only been seriously challenged in the last few decades. Translation has always played an important role in Hungarian literature. The first extant Hungarian poem, the 13th-century Old Hungarian Lamentations of Mary (Ómagyar Mária-siralom), is an adaptation of a Latin verse. Since that time, Hungarian translations of foreign works of literature have been regarded as poetry in their own right. Significantly, when Mihály Babits (1883–1941), one of the defining members of the first generation of Nyugat writers and one of the most important Hungarian poets of the first half of the 20th century, was asked to name the most beautiful example of Hungarian poetry, his answer was “Ode to the West Wind – in Árpád Tóth’s translation.”2 Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which creates almost boundless possibilities in terms of rhyme. Of course, when it comes to execution, this makes it rather like doing a back flip on the beam: either it comes automatically, or it’s completely impossible. In Apollinaire’s poem Le Pont Mirabeau, the word Seine is followed by four rhyming words (souvienne, peine, semaines, re- viennent). In Hungarian, however, there a very few meaningful words that rhyme with Szajna (Seine). While there have been many attempts to translate the poem, none of them have been particularly successful. But to go back a step: the last quarter of the 18th century marks a water- shed between old and new Hungarian literature: the number of literary translators also rose dramatically at that time. This period saw the birth of the modern Hungarian literary language: its vocabulary was revitalised with newly coined words, and translations contributed to its vigour. Why else would translations of Latin authors have been produced in a country in which, until 1836, the official language was Latin rather than Hungarian? Of course, at that time

1 ERDŐDY Edit: „»Hároméves irodalom«„, in A magyar irodalom történetei. 1920-tól napjainkig, szerk. SZEGEDY-MASZÁK Mihály és VERES András, (Budapest: Gondolat, 2007) 438. 2 RÁBA György, „A modern magyar műfordítás”, in A magyar irodalom története, VI, főszerk. SŐTÉR István, (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1966) 858.

— 340 — An Experiment in the Reinvention of Verse Translation the only people interested in the works of Horace were those who were able to read him in the original. Thus the motivation for translations was initially, to some extent, l’art pour l’art, just as today literary works might be translated into Esperanto or Latin, merely to demonstrate the robustness and capability of the language. (And of course just for the fun of it…) One of the characteristics of Hungarian is the significant difference between long and short vowel sounds. In Italian, for example, differences in stress sometimes play a role in creating differences in meaning: canóne (big dog), cánone (axiom, law, service charge). In Hungarian, however, the stress always falls at the beginning of a word, so does not affect the word’s meaning. Where there is a difference in meaning, it is conveyed by the length of the vowel sound: bor (wine) and bór (boron), or olajtó (oil slick) and ólajtó (hutch door). The same principle applies in Greek and Latin, which makes Hungarian the perfect language for translating classical metric verse. Go into any shop in Hungary, and at the cash desk you will see a notice informing those who require a personal VAT invoice that they need to request one in advance: “Áfás számla igényét, kérjük, előre jelezze”. The sentence is a perfect hexameter. If it’s this easy, you might be forgiven for thinking that ancient works of literature written in classical verse form would always have been translated into Hungarian using the original meter. But that’s not the case. By the second half of the 19th century, national romanticism and folk-influenced verse forms had become almost equally dominant, and, other than these, poetry was at most written in some kind of blank iambics. At the same time, classical verse forms went out of fashion. Thus, in the second half of the 19th century, Ancient Greek and Latin poetry were translated into rhyming verse.3 (Hexameters, for example, were translated into rhyming lines, like some kind of Hungarian alexan- drine, in which each line was made up of twelve syllables divided by a caesura.) Literary translators of this school thus rendered not only the words of their source text into Hungarian, but even the verse form itself.4 Today, such an ap- proach appears hopelessly old-fashioned and amusing, although in the second half of the 19th century it was as modern as gas lighting. Significantly, even the renowned German classical philologist Ulrich von Willamowitz-Möllendorf argued in favour of the translation of form. He claimed, for example, that it would be inappropriate to translate French classical drama into German alexandrines, since, although French and German alexandrines are similar in structure, they are significantly different contextually. (See also the debate of Babits and the

3 SZILÁGYI János György, „Catullus noster”, Antik Tanulmányok, 25(1988) 2. sz. 236–242. 4 POLGÁR Anikó, Catullus noster, Catullus-olvasatok a 20. századi magyar költészetben, (Pozsony: Kal- ligram Kiadó, 2003) 48–84.

— 341 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac young Károly Kerényi, especially the former’s note to his paper “Translating Dante” – Dante fordítása.)5 In any case, by the beginning of the 20th century, ancient verse forms had become so unfashionable in Hungary that one of the most famous literary translators of the day, Antal Radó (1862–1944), posed the following question in his 1909 book “The Art of Translation” (A fordítás művészete): “Would any poet writing today really choose the Alcaic stanza in an effort to move their readers?” And, with equal gusto, he provided an answer to his own question: “Of course not!”6 However, Radó was unaware of one important poem: that same year saw the publication of Mihály Babits’s first volume, which I mentioned earlier, “Leaves from Iris’s Wreath” (Levelek Írisz korszorújából), in which the opening poem, In Horatium, was indeed written in Alcaic stanzas. Babits was one of Hun- gary’s most important poets, and from 1929 until his death in 1940, he was editor in chief of Nyugat. Interestingly, what can be regarded as a revolutionary literary innovation was, in fact, nothing other than a virtuoso poet resurrecting an ancient verse form after a gap of around 70 years. Many of the important poets who belonged to the first generation of Nyu- gat writers were also among the most important translators of literature. Their aim was to render the rhyme, meter and verse form of their source text as ac- curately as possible, sometimes even at the expense of accuracy in terms of content. One of the greatest achievements in Hungarian literary translation is Mihály Babits’s translation of the Divina Commedia. Exploiting the unique prop- erties of the Hungarian language, he renders the hendecasyllablic lines, which are based on word stress, using a verse form based on syllable length – that is, in place of the stressed iambus he uses the metric iambus, while reproducing Dante’s terzina using the original rhyme scheme. The translation, produced between 1913 and 1923, is now 100 years old and remained unchallenged until very recently, its place in the canon being apparently unassailable. In any case, the world of Hungarian literary translation seems exception- ally conservative. On one occasion, when I was discussing Shakespeare’s Mid- summer Night’s Dream during an Italian-themed presentation, I asked a friend of mine how you say “Let me play the lion too” in Italian. She didn’t know. Or rather, her reply was that there are many different and equally acceptable translations of the line. In Hungarian, however, the version of this line – among

5 BABITS Mihály, Esszék, tanulmányok, 1, kiad. BELIA György, Babits Mihály művei (Budapest: Szép- irodalmi Kiadó, 1978) 811–814. 6 RADÓ Antal, A fordítás művészete, (Budapest: Franklin-társulat, 1909) 95.

— 342 — An Experiment in the Reinvention of Verse Translation many others – that appears in the translation by János Arany, who is widely regarded as the greatest poet of the 19th century, has become a part of the Hun- garian language, as “Ide nekem az oroszlánt is!” Babits’s translation of the Divine Comedy is equally canonical. In the last 100 years, however, various new translations have emerged, including one in prose, although, tellingly, the latter, otherwise very good translation, was done not by a literary figure but by a doctor of theology and remains almost entirely unknown.7 The following example was given by Ádám Nádasdy, modern translator of Divine Comedy, in a radio show. “Apri la bocca”: these words are to be found in Paradise, canto 27, line 64: It’s a very simple sentence: an Italian dentist might use the exact same words today to ask a regular patient to open their mouth. Babits, however, translated the sentence as follows: “ajkat tárva szólalj” (“utter with lips unsealed”). Each of the three words in this sentence is refined – in fact, even if you replace the words with everyday synonyms (“speak with an open mouth”, the sentence still sounds extremely mannered. When Nádasdy (1947) produced a new translation of the Divine Comedy8 100 years after Babits, his rendering of the same source text was “nyisd ki a szád” (“open your mouth”). Babits and his contemporaries thus adhered to the specific demands of fi- delity to form and content, while regarding the style and syntactical structure of a text as less determinative.9 In practice, this is how poetry continues to be translated right up to the present day, and nothing has changed in the last 100 years: the greatest possible faithfulness to form, with the greatest possible accuracy in terms of content. The rules of verse translation have apparently been laid down once and for all, and the task of translators in any era is to follow those rules even more faithfully than their predecessors. Until very recently, and perhaps even today, poets who are at the same time translators of literature have formed a majority in the world of Hungarian literature. As I mentioned earlier, Hungarian verse translations are, in themselves, works of poetry. What is more interesting is the fact that, while literature and poetry have undergone various revolutionary changes in the last 100 years, such that the poetry being written today is entirely different from that written a century ago, the principles and practices of literary translation have remained virtually unchanged.

7 DANTE Alighieri, Isteni színjáték, ford. SZABADI Sándor, (Budapest, Püski Kiadó, 2004) 8 DANTE Alighieri, Isteni színjáték, ford. NÁDASDY Ádám, (Budapest, Magvető Kiadó, 2016) 9 RÁBA György, A szép hűtlenek (Babits, Kosztolányi, Tóth Árpád műfordításai), Irodalomtörténeti könyvtár 23, (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1969)

— 343 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac It is telling that the enormously popular translations of Villon, published in 1937 by György Faludy (1910–2006), cannot be regarded as faithful in terms of either content or form. The popularity of the translations is doubtless owing to the fact that they perfectly capture the ambience of the age: they speak in the voice of the hit films and chansons of the 1930s. Faludy’s work remains popular today (among readers), although in the intervening years it has become entirely outmoded (in terms of translation), while other translations that were published in the same era, which were faithful in terms of both form and content, have apparently stood the test of time. It can thus be argued that the principles of literary translation followed by the first generation of Nyugat writers were further developed organically by the second and third Nyugat generations in the years leading up to the Second World War, and that it was these principles that ultimately prevailed on the highly competitive literary market (where the competition was certainly not democratic, but aristocratic, or rather meritocratic). Oddly enough, the Communist takeover in 1948 preserved this state of af- fairs for more than 40 years. Certain members of the second and third Nyugat generations nevertheless continued to play an important role in literary life in the one-party-state. (By way of an aside: at the end of the first decade of the 20th century a handful of writings were published in the journal by György Lukács [1885–1971], before he became a communist.) For forty years, during the period known as the dictatorship of the prole- tariat, one of the two biggest publishing houses in the second half of the 20th century (the Szépirodalmi Publishing House) was directed by Endre Illés (1902–1986), who belonged to the second Nyugat generation. A total of 142 of his prose writings and critical reviews were published in the journal, and, ac- cording to one recollection, even in the Communist era, he used to eat peaches with a knife and fork.10 Even before the war, Illés had been the director of a major publishing house, and, after its nationalisation, he continued to have a managerial role in various capacities right up until his death in 1986. One of the most outstanding members of the third Nyugat generation, István Vas (1910–1991), a follower of Babits, was one of the managing editors at the Európa Publishing House, which, after 1956, focused on the publication of world literature. László Lator (1927), who likewise had close ties with the Nyugat poets, was also a managing editor. Another important figure in the publishing house was Szabolcs Várady (1943), himself a follower of Vas during his youth.

10 KŐSZEG Ferenc, „Versailles”, Magyar Narancs, 20(2008) 13. sz. 52.

— 344 — An Experiment in the Reinvention of Verse Translation In summary, the second and third Nyugat generations further elaborated the practice of progressive literary translation that had been shaped by the first generation of Nyugat writers 100 years earlier, which, from its monopolistic position, was then canonised. This took place mainly in the period of consolida- tion that followed the 1956 revolution, although it had already begun earlier. By way of reminder: during the Stalinist period in Hungary, between 1948 and 1957, those great writers who refused to subjugate themselves to the Com- munist state were able to express themselves openly exclusively in the genres of literary translation and children’s literature. In an effort to unite Hungary following the defeat of the 1956 revolution, János Kádár, secretary general of the party, famously declared that “Those who are not against us are with us”, after which the left-wing Nyugat writers, and the members of the next generation, gradually (with few exceptions) found their places within the framework of centralised literary politics – largely because there was basically no place whatsoever outside it. (There were extremely few openly oppositional, dissi- dent writers, like György Petri [1943–2000] in the 1970s and 1980s.) Although the Communist era came to an end almost thirty years ago, two of the old, state-owned publishing companies continue to play a determining role today, while their former editors, who upheld the Nyugat principles of literary translation, retired only around ten years ago. Their influence remains inescapable, and the only reason this is not more noticeable is that, in today’s market conditions, few publishing companies are currently willing to take on the publication of verse translations. The principles of verse translation, shaped 100 years ago and merely per- fected ever since, have only begun to be questioned in recent years. Signifi- cantly, the initiative has come from the world of theatre, where Ádám Nádasdy, who, besides being a poet, is also professor of English phonetics, has stirred up quite a storm with his numerous translations of Shakespeare. Looked at from the perspective of communication, theatre demands a contemporary text that is understandable on first hearing, whereas the classic, 100-year-old translations are simply incomprehensible in many places.11 Nádasdy’s emergence as a revolutionary has been gradual: his Shake- speare translations are in keeping with the old principles – that is, still in a spirit of faithfulness to content and form – although at the same time the vocabulary has been strikingly modernised. However, this still cannot be regarded as a re- pudiation of the earlier principles: after all, if Shakespeare typically used the everyday language of his own age, a faithful translation is one that likewise

11 MINIER Márta, „Tényleg, mint egy jó parodista. Beszélgetés Nádasdy Ádámmal a műfordításról”, Holmi, 13(2001) 1. sz. 31–41., 36.

— 345 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac reflects everyday speech. But Nádasdy has recently introduced a third aspect as well: that of faithfulness to grammar and syntax. This is something that can be achieved only at the expense of faithfulness to form. When a translator en- deavours to render a given content within the framework of a given form, it generally demands a significant transformation in terms of a third aspect – that of grammatical structure and word order. For Nádasdy, faithfulness to content is all important, which is precisely why he translated the Divine Comedy in non- rhyming, iambic blank verse – thereby provoking keen debate.12 It is worth noting that the 72-year-old Nádasdy, who, in terms of the sub- ject matter of his love poetry, is one of Hungary’s few gay poets, does not belong to any particular school of poetry. When I asked him who he first showed his work to when he began writing poetry, he named one of his friends, a critic, and a colleague in the Department of English, also a poet, but one who belongs rather to the Anglo-Saxon lyrical tradition and who has no strong, personal ties to Hungarian tradition. Nádasdy has also translated Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn into non-rhyming iambics: to my mind, the resulting work sounds in Hungarian rather like a cross between Shakespeare and Horace. His most provocative work is his translation of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne, which he renders into prose, entirely aban- doning both rhyme and rhythm.13 Nádasdy can thus be seen as something of a first swallow, although it remains to be seen whether he will make a summer… Recently other, younger, poets have likewise experimented with prose translations of poetry, although this is apparently not the result of careful deliberation, but a matter of sheer necessity. In the last ten to fifteen years, what has happened is that formal re- strictions have become unfashionable (not for the first time in the history of Hungarian poetry), and certain poets do not even know the rules of rhyme and meter. This is all the more apparent if, despite this, they nevertheless attempt to translate using hexameters or alexandrines, for example. Readers of such translations might well have the feeling that they are trying to dance in shack- les. (This metaphor was used by Dezső Kosztolányi [1885–1936] with refer- ence to the translation of poetry in general.) To close, I will read Árpád Tóth’s 1917 translation of Chanson d’automne, followed by the version translated into free verse by Nádasdy in 2018.

12 SÁRKÖZY Péter, „Az új »magyar Dante«. Nádasdy Ádám Isteni Színjáték-fordítása”, Magyar Napló, 29(2017) 4. sz 17–24. 13 NÁDASDY Ádám, „Az ősz hegedűi (Verlaine Őszi dala és magyar fordításai)”, Jelenkor, 61(2018) 3. sz. 273–281.

— 346 — An Experiment in the Reinvention of Verse Translation Ősz húrja zsong, Jajong, busong A tájon, S ont monoton Bút konokon És fájón.

S én csüggeteg, Halvány beteg, Míg éjfél Kong, csak sirok, S elém a sok Tűnt kéj kél.

Óh, múlni már, Ősz! hullni már Eresszél! Mint holt avart, Mit felkavart A rossz szél...

* * *

Az ősz hegedűinek hosszú sóhajai egyhangúan, bágyadtan sebzik a szívemet.

Amikor üt az óra, elfúlva és sápadtan emlékszem a régi napokra, és sírok;

aztán megyek, ahogy elfúj a rossz szél, mely hord ide-oda, mint száraz levelet.

Nádasdy’s experiment can hardly be called successful: I felt obliged to tell him that, while his translation may have something to do with autumn, it has very

— 347 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac little to do with song. Nevertheless, whatever the result, it seems that finally, after 100 years, a first serious challenge has been made to traditional classical Hungarian verse translation.

My major publications on the topic:

Régi magyar műfordítások. Válogatás 1900-ig, szerk. KŐRIZS Imre, (Budapest: Unikornis Kiadó, 2001)

KŐRIZS Imre, „Kortársunk-e Martialis?”, Holmi, 14(2002) 6. sz. 817–824.

KŐRIZS Imre, „Átvitt értelem”, Ókor, 3(2004) 2. sz. 90–92.

KŐRIZS Imre, „Isteni játék”, Műút, 61(2016) 5. (59.) sz. 72–75.

KŐRIZS Imre, „A nyugalom megzavarása”, in Holmi Antológia 1989–2014, szerk. RADNÓTI Sándor, (Bu- dapest: Libri Kiadó, 2017) 402–416.

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