Ádám Makkai
"Idiomatic-Adaptive" vs. "Literal-Traditional" Translation
Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Translated and Adapted from the Original Hungarian with Preface and Notes by Iain MacLeod. Illustrations by János Kass. Canongate Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 1993, case bound, 189 pp., £14.99.
For the last hundred years or so there have been literary rumours emanating from Hungary about a philosophical dramatic poem called The Tragedy of Man (1860) that those who knew it compared to, and in many instances extolled above, Goethe's Faust and Milton's Paradise Lost.
Since it was written in a language not accessible to literati in the West, its first credentials appeared through Hungarian scholars writing for foreign publications who could be suspected of partiality toward their fellow countryman, Imre Madách (1823-64). Early translations of the work itself could, alas, only confirm the scale of the dramatic poem, and not its true literary-philosophical merit. For this is a case where "poetry" and "philosophy" are inextricably interwoven.
This is an odd situation indeed, since the work has actually been translated into over forty languages and into several more than once (the German translation by János Mohácsi, revised by Géza Engl, rings by far the closest) and into English almost ten times.
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" Only now has a translator arisen", writes Christopher Rush in the London Literary Review,2 "who has proven himself equal to the task... MacLeod has succeeded where others have failed. The result is a triumph of literary resurrection. I know of no superlatives to applaud his achievement." Rush places Madách's work among the greatest oeuvres of world literature, but in one respect he places it in a class of its own. "Its poetry consists, above all else, of pure thought...The present translation reads to the contemporary ear like an original itself."
In that final phrase by Rush there could have lurked a slight suspicion - just how much of MacLeod's work was actual translation, how much of it was in fact adaptation? And given the alleged translator's Scottish name, has he tricked his readers with a latter-day Ossian? Those of us who knew the original could tell that the Canongate publication was genuine, confirmed by George Gömöri's review in the Times Literary Supplement saying that Iain MacLeod has rendered a great Hungarian classic into flowing and imaginative English verse. Additional glowing reviews appeared in The Times, The Irish News, The Scotsman, and The Observer; among Hungarian reviewers I would like to mention Mátyás Sárközi and István Tótfalusi who hailed the translation as a great achievement in Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature) and Magyar Napló (Hungarian Record), respectively.
Among the English translations George Szirtes's attracted attention on account of his growing reputation as a poet and a translator of modern poetry. I have to emphasize the word "modern", since Szirtes was brought up and educated in England and has only recently relearned his native Hungarian. He was eight years old when the family left in 1956 - enough to converse with family members or give an informal TV interview, but posing problems when confronted with a piece of the Tragedy's lexical and semantic complexity.
It is a painfully difficult task to compare the two best translations of The Tragedy of Man, that of Szirtes and of MacLeod, for the simple reason that the two translators had very different aims. The Corvina publication by Szirtes (1988) presents a traditional translation (by the way the illustrations by Mihály Zichy are 19th century brass-cuts), the Canongate publication of 1993 by MacLeod states that here we have a translation-adaptation.[...]
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[...] The Hungarian goes: Mondottam ember, küzdj, és bízva bízzál. Szirtes's translation:
THE LORD: Man, I have spoken: strive on, trust, have faith!
MacLeod's rewritten punch-line:
THE LORD: I've told you, Man: have faith and do your best.
Here is a case of ingenuity outwitting itself. The line literally means "I spake [old fashioned past tense], Man, fight [or strive, as the two coincide in Hungarian] and trust a-trusting [or trustingly trust.]" There is something special about the Lord's Hebraic reduplication bízva bízzál, "trustingly trust", which, at least for me, rings true for an awesome Jehovah. Szirtes negotiates the reduplication by using both trust and faith. Szirtes's Man, I have spoken is somehow more "godly" than MacLeod's I've told you, Man. In fact, I've told you, Man, could be a conversation between two hippies in a Chicago street. But this is not the problem. The problem is with MacLeod's words do your best. Have faith, yes, but do your best? Who is talking to whom? Here the ingenious MacLeod, who has managed in a large number of places actually to improve Madách's own diction, slides into (a) hippie slang, and (b) a schoolmaster's insipid admonition to a school child.[...]
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Ádám Makkai
a Hungarian-born poet and translator, is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author, in addition to numerous works on linguistics, of three collections of poems, all in Hungarian.
