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An Experiment in the Reinvention of Hungarian Verse Translation

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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, poli- tics, 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 liter- ary journal Nyugat (West). The first generation of young Nyugat writers were profoundly influenced by French symbolism and, with respect to verse transla- tion, 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 re- sources, 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 princi- ples 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 pop- ular 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 po- ets 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 sig- nificantly raised. The small number of publishing houses, which were exclu- sively 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 trans- lators also rose dramatically at that time. This period saw the birth of the mod- ern Hungarian literary language: its vocabulary was revitalised with newly coined words, and translations contributed to its vigour. Why else would trans- lations 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 be- tween 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 exam- ple, 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 ar- gued 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 trans- lators 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 ed- itor 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.
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