[..]

I know there is a tendency in Hungary to posit a kind of antithesis between tight form (or zárt forma) and free verse. The first is associated with traditional or ironic post-modernist verse, the second with modernism. I was recently sent an interesting anthology of American verse called Rebel Angels, which consists of poems—some good, some bad—by people referred to and referring to themselves as the New Formalists, most of whom are not ironic or post-modern in technique. They sent it to me because my own verse is often highly formal with ornate rhyme schemes and, less often, strict metrical patterns. The reasons for this are complex, possibly even unconscious. If I had to sum up my conscious attitude to form it would be to regard it as counterpoint. I listen to Frost's description of the basic unit of verse being the sentence, which I take to be the point, and I pin this out against the complex patterns of stanza structure—counterpoint. In other words, I too like the ghosts of form—form gives me whispers, sentences give me statements. These are personal practices and reflexes. I do, however, enjoy both the power of the end-stopped line as practised by poets like Pope, Marvell, Byron, Auden, Hecht, etc., and the free Biblical run of Blake's prophetic verse as well as Whitman's and Ginsberg's adaptations of it, not to mention Pound or the late Plath. Preferences and practices aside, it seems to me obvious that the poet's choice of form is an integral part of the poem as phenomenon. To translate a strictly formal poet into free verse seems a slightly incomplete enterprise—not because the result is in itself bad poetry as the various translations of Mandelstam into English, or Ted Hughes's versions of Pilinszky and Ovid demonstrate—but because it is missing something worth having. It is also to regard form as decoration rather than structure, and I know, as a formal poet, that form is at least as structural as counterpoint in music.
On the other hand, I also know that like words, idioms and local references, form too changes meaning as it is transferred into another language and literary tradition. Even as I say this I am aware that under these words lurks an argument about the fundamentals of literature—about what kind of writing we recognize as literature, about whether such a category exists as a distinct entity, about the possibility of a kind of poetic language of literary translation arising in a symbiotic relationship with the languages of specific literary traditions, about the common cultural roots of specific literatures—but these are theoretical discussions I cannot enter into here and must leave to another occasion. To compress all this, I am pretty well convinced that slavish reproduction of sound patterns and the dynamics of specific lines and stanzas will not in itself, as a master principle, produce something worth reading. It constitutes what the English idiom so charmingly refers to as a red herring. The English genius has often been referred to as the gift for pragmatic compromise, and that—with all my forty years of English domicile—is what I offer you here as my own working principle, subject to all the usual exceptions. This compromise says that there are certain forms: the sonnet, the ballad, the terza rima, for example, which the poet enters on a highly conscious level. When he does so he must know that he is engaging in negotiation with a range of specific expectations, that he is, in some ways, as I have said elsewhere, kissing the feet of the icon. Many generations have done so before him, hoping for some spiritual or physical benefit, each new set of kisses contributing to the notional potency of the image. Of course there are various kinds of icon and various kinds of sonnet, and, as literature develops, various new strains or mutations of sonnet appear—Lowell's, Berryman's, Orbán's. On this level, I think, it probably helps to render historical forms as historical forms. It is not so much the mechanism of this or that line that guides the voice of the poem but the notion of the whole.
On another level the compromise recognizes that there are poets for whom the sheer verbal ingenuity of a form—Kosztolányi in Hungarian, the late Byron in English, for example—is a highly visible element of the the poem's dynamic and functions as a kind of specific spell. As a translator I want to recognize how far this ingenuity is foregrounded and strive to foreground it in the same way. If the poet draws attention to a complex rhyme scheme or metrical structure which is strictly and ostentatiously adhered to, I think I must do something similar. While the translation continues to be guided by the shape of the whole rather than by local effects, these local effects gain a higher profile. If, on the other hand, a poet uses loose quatrains where the length of lines varies and the place of the rhyme is rather more erratic and improvised, I feel no particular compunction to reproduce the length of each individual line or the precise placing of the rhyme. I strive to understand the condition of the poem and what makes it work. My pedantry is placed at the service of an understanding of that condition.
This is not to say I am necessarily right in proceeding along these lines. I am not talking about common errors here. I make ordinary mistakes often enough, mistakes in interpretation or vocabulary or idiom or context, much as anyone does. But the notion of correctness or rightness is more complicated than this. Ten of us reading the same poem in our own language will supply ten variant readings. Certain matters of interpretation are open to resolution, others, being more personal and associative, are not. Our condition as readers comprises both positions. Being a poet myself I know my intentions in writing a poem are far from clear even to me, even as I write. The various methodologies of criticism are like the various coloured lenses of a spectroscopist. They bring out certain features and obscure others. The power of the poem resides outside the intentions of its writer or of this or that specific reader. Nevertheless, each specific reader assumes the pleasures and responsibilities of reading. Reading across languages and cultures clearly multiplies the possibilities. A translation of a poem is in effect a reading of the poem. As such, I am convinced, it has no ultimate authority. It either persuades or it doesn't. It either functions as a poem or it fails to do so. Each translation deepens the reading of the original. Of course, and here I return my tawdry sexual analogy, we may fall in love with a translation and regard it as our partner for eternity, for life, or for as long as it lasts before a more enticing specimen comes along. That is a subjective matter. My own translations of Hungarian writers are like advertisements in the personal column of the newspaper, in this respect. You know they are there. You could meet them. You might think they are majestic Cleopatras, Queens of the Nile, or you might think they are slightly desperate loners in cheap costume, best avoided. You will not entirely forget that translations are interventions in the public arena too, in however small a corner of it, and that some basic sort of critical consensus will be available and may colour your own reading, which, you will be aware, may in itself be deconstructed, possibly by yourself.

[..]

I should say that I have most often been commissioned to translate particular books or particular writers but in this case I assumed responsibility for myself. I proposed the project to myself and sold the book to Oxford University Press on my own behalf. Why choose Rakovszky? I knew her name from various sources: one of my earliest contacts in Hungary, whom I consider to be one of the greatest of Hungary's twentieth century poets, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, had praised her work to me, as had a number of other friends. I couldn't help but see her name in print, even though I am not an avid subscriber to Hungarian periodicals, nor an academic who spends time in specialized libraries. I simply knew she existed. I had even seen some translations of her poems in English, by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer, in a rather poor anthology of Eastern European poetry, edited by Michael March, Child of Europe, which I reviewed for an English magazine. Her selection in Child of Europe consisted entirely of intense personal love poems: "Snapshot", "Noon", "Evening", "No Longer" and "Summer Solstice". I don't think I would have translated her on the basis of these English texts alone, but the opinion of Nemes Nagy rang in my ears, so I felt obliged to read her in Hungarian. (Before 1984 I hadn't spoken Hungarian in twenty-eight years and even in 1990 the evaluation of a Hungarian poem in itself was a little beyond me—I had in fact to translate a poem into English before I could appreciate it.) Together with Győző Ferencz, I had planned an anthology of modern Hungarian poetry of the Újhold tradition and legacy and he had photocopied some of Rakovszky's early poems for me. Gyoýzoý too had spoken highly of her and clearly regarded her as someone working within the formal tradition, though this was far from obvious in the Child of Europe selection. So I bought or got hold of her books and began working things out for myself. I could see that the early poems owed something to Plath but that they had a political content beyond the personal. The poems were not always easy and at some points I felt they were very difficult indeed, but what was clear was that they did manage to synthesize both personal and public experience at a potent level, that the form provided a kind of intellectual discipline, and that—most importantly—there was something in the sensibility I recognized. Her then most recent volume, Fehér-fekete, owed something to the work of a contemporary English poet, Carol Ann Duffy, whose poems I knew and I admired, though the debt was more in terms of project (a series of dramatic monologues) than in voice. Nevertheless, though I didn't think every poem in Fehér-fekete worked, or would have worked in English, I thought the best poems were not only translatable into contemporary English, but were actually better than their supposed models; that the Rakovszky poems contained more and at a higher level of structure than Duffy's. There was ample evidence of a lived-through, tried and tested intellect, which I think is missing in the English poet. When I went back to the poems in Tovább egy házzal, this impression was confirmed. The poet was enacting experiences I recognized—not just of Hungary or Budapest, not just of social types, but of a modern life whose terms were comprehensible in London or Leeds as much as in Central Europe.

[..]

Naturally, like any translator, I am highly fallible, fully aware that my bad work is very bad indeed, willing and able to defend the defensible but not unto the last ditch which would, I am convinced, be a foolish and vainglorious gesture. It is perfectly possible that Karlsbad should have remained Karlsbad, that "the poor fools" should never have entered the poem, that the bits of fluff that cling like snow in "New Life" should have remained simply bits of fluff, since Rakovszky herself never turned them into snow, that the "fife and drum" might have been replaced by something else. The reader has to judge whether the tonal balance of the Hungarian voice corresponds to the balance in my English version. It is enough to say that I believed in these things at the time in exactly the same way as I believe in any other poem, mine or someone else's, and translation—literary translation at least—is no more a precise science than are the arts of reading and listening.
Reading is, or should be, a matter of excitement. A bad translation of a good poem is a bad poem. An overweening and arrogant translation of a good poem into a different good poem is not a translation. In between these polarities are the varieties of reading, listening, intepreting and making. I want the translations of Zsuzsa Rakovszky's poems to thrill me at the same level as her own exciting poems do. Furthermore, I want them to feed me and enrich me. To make me a better poet. In this respect, translation which can and often does appear to be a hope-less chore, is a pleasure and an education. It is also a kind of love affair with the complementary Other whose shadow you have decided temporarily to become. ß