Daniel Hoffman

Poetry Not Lost in Translation

Ottó Orbán: The Blood of the Walsungs: Selected Poems. Edited by George Szirtes. Bloodaxe Books & Corvina, 1993, 94 pp. £6.95. * Zsuzsa Rakovszky: New Life. Translated by George Szirtes. Oxford University Press, 1994, 53 pp. £7.99.

[...]

[...] Poems in translation have to be valid in their second language as poems in their own right. Slavish fidelity merely to words produces doggerel; the translator must re-experience the imaginative processes of the poem to find equivalents to the original's form, rhythm, imagery, tone, reflexive language, and other literary conventions.

This process is put to the test in the Blood of the Walsungs, selected poems by Ottó Orbán. The poems have been translated by fifteen hands, among them the American poets William Jay Smith and Jascha Kessler, the British poets Edwin Morgan and Alan Dixon, and half a dozen Hungarian co-translators. The volume is edited by George Szirtes, Hungarian-born, long resident in England, a talented poet in English. Orbán's work, as Mr Szirtes's informative introduction makes clear, falls into three stages and reflects influences as varied as Kosztolányi, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Garcia Lorca, and Attila József as well as Pilinszky and Ginsberg - all these in his early work; later influences include Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Here is the work of a cosmopolitan poet, widely read and receptive to modernist energies of both his own, European, and Anglo-American traditions. Yet, as Szirtes says, "The idiom he speaks is characteristic of Budapest."

Orbán is a prolific poet - sixteen books of verse between 1960 and 1992. Szirtes notes that, "Formally, he is extremely versatile, and has written with some virtuosity in a variety of styles" - thus posing challenges to his corps of translators. His career to date offers three stages: first, declamatory, long-lined unmetered poems; then a period of prose poems; and most recently, unrhymed sonnet-length verse modelled on Robert Lowell's stanzas in History. The lilt, energy, and inventiveness of the first of these styles may be inferred from the opening and closing lines of "Poets":

They stand in the gateway of the century the haunters of the future
with their naive intelligentsia ideas about beauty and society
carving original naturalness into fatal postures
their instincts undermining the postures ina dying world...
............................
they are the witnesses that man was not meant for death
his ashes consumed by grass
but his bones stick up from the earth like swords.

Translated by William Jay Smith and László T. András)

The challenge in the Orbán volume, well met by the editor and his contributors, is to present translations in a recognizably individual style, or in this case, styles. In Zsuzsa Rakovszky's New Life, Mr Szirtes deals with a different challenge: here he himself is the only translator, and the charge is to transform her originality in Hungarian into an equivalently original idiom in English. Fortunately, Mr Szirtes, who does not need the intercession of literary linguists, has given us a tour de force of sympathetic re-creations. Ms Rakovszky, like Mr Orbán, is widely read in contemporary verse in English - Szirtes's introduction tells us that "Temperamentally she draws a little on the confessional tradition of Sylvia Plath (readers might recognize a few echoes of Plath and Emily Dickinson in some earlier poems), but her real affinity lies with Lowell, Jarrell and, for English readers, a poet like Carol Ann Duffy, though she is of a more intellectual cast of mind and presents a more fragile persona than the last." He observes, "The world of her poems is recognizably the world of her readers, a shifting urban landscape of noisy neighbours, malfunctioning television set, shadows on landings, snatched meetings, and dying ideologies [...] (Hers is a) realism [...] only one step from a kind of hallucination driven by desire; there is a process of disintegration evident in both object and setting. Essentially she is working in what remains of the tragic tradition [...] There is, in fact, a clear political element in her poems, but it is one in which politics is not so much a distant issue as the stuff of life, a moral climate that conditions the most personal expectations."

One of Rakovszky's dominant modes is a surrealistic itemization of the things of this world, a disorganized jumble, as in "Translucent Objects: Greenwich Flea Market":

Only the sewing machine is missing. Free association according to the laws
of chance assembles umbrellas, golf clubs,ski-
boots, under the free sky where instead of sauce
a thin grey mass of clouds creeps tremulouly...

and five successive stanzas summon up the vanished owners of such discarded objects;

Cut free of its own past each joins that mess
of organs sprawling on the surgical plate
of history. Our cold eyes weight the price
of strips of broken skin and sagging breasts, too late
for the selective myopia of tenderness.

Daniel Hoffman,

the American poet and retired Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, received the Memorial Medal of Hungarian P.E.N. in 1980 for his translations of Hungarian poets. His most recent book is a novel in verse, Middens of the Tribe, 1995.