Miklós Hernádi
Radnóti in English
Foamy Sky. The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti. Selected and translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner. Princeton University Press, 1992.
XLVIII + 128 pp.
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[...]The latest English version of Radnóti's poems, co-translated by Frederick Turner and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, testifies to an understanding use of a third language apart from Hungarian and English, one that earlier attempts partly or wholly lacked. This third language is in fact a code - the code of concordances between two languages and two cultures. It entails an impressive knowledge and full command of areas between Hungarian and Anglo-American, with its passages and fords, bridges and paths, air corridors, mirrored reflections, analogies and verbal interferences and consonances, parallels, rates of exchange and such like. The difficulties are enormous, beginning with finding the right English equivalents for expressions such as "nagyságos asszonyom" (an obsolete middle-class form for addressing ladies) and "szikvíz" (rarely used word for soda water, cca. aerated water) that evoke the same age and the same social background in English as the Hungarian does. And these are still merely linguistic, not poetic, problems. If such words occur in poems, added to them are other riddles concerning the vision, mode, rhythm, etc. of poetic speech that need first to be solved and then reconstructed in English. The goal to achieve is for them to remain riddles in the foreign language as well, riddles that exude tension yet promise a solution that can with some effort be unravelled from the text and will not deteriorate into a pedestrian banality.
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The volume contains a major study on translating Radnóti, as well as notes, by Frederick Turner. To be able to appraise his and Ozsváth's success as translators we first have to understand their approach. "The chief superstition that we found we must give up was the superstition that 'free verse' is an adequate or acceptable way of translating a metered original," he writes. This is a momentous sentence, for it questions - justifiably, I may add - the value of several thousand lines in free verse translations by which major Hungarian poets have previously been presented in foreign languages.
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A justification for Turner's working method of descending, capturing an ur-image and reascending along a different branch, may have come from Radnóti himself, who in his autobiographical prose piece Ikrek hava (Under Gemini) playfully says that his translation of a distich of Tibullus is better than the Latin. "Better", says Turner, "can only mean that it is closer to something that both Radnóti and Tibullus are trying to reach." It can only be the ur-idea embodied in the distich, which the translator might well express better than the poet himself.
We have then an English-language Radnóti here, the cadence, rhyming, poetic diction of which is, as far as it is possible, as much "Hungarian" as it is English. This is possible because its roots reach down to a layer through sensations, perceptions and ideas but as yet - without language. It has been reached by cooing babies, enraptured lovers, women in labour and men facing the execution squad over the millennia - and poets who have articulated it for them and in their name.
Miklós Hernádi
is the author of volumes of essays and a novel, Otto, about the Viennese writer Otto Weininger, also published in German translation by Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt, in 1993.
