Attila József, who committed suicide at the age of thirty two in 1937, was a great tragic poet, one of the key figures of twentieth century Hungarian, and indeed European, literature. As with many great writers, his art and reputation are so intimately connected that not only has he passionate and active readers in his own language, but a potential readership prepared for his presence by reputation in others. The myth precedes the work: not just the myth of the person but the myth of the work itself. There is, if you like, an Attila József shaped hole in the world waiting to be filled: normally sceptical readers come to the poems in translation expecting to discover a great poet.

The Maynooth based Hungarian scholar Thomas Kabdebo quotes Ted Hughes on the back of his critical biography of József to the effect that even a near-literal translation of József’s poetry is enough to make one feel "the truth of the claim, which Hungarian poets make, that he is one of the most solidly and thoroughly original poet of modern times". But a "near-literal" translation falls far short of the experience of the verse itself as enjoyed by readers of the original. All a near literal version can do is to awaken interest, or draw attention to imagery that may prove attractive or
exciting. This can sometimes happen with prose cribs from the classics or, more often, with prose renderings of narrative or epic verse such as The Iliad or The Odyssey, but even granted this limited success (I’d be interested to know how a mock-epic like Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock fares in Hungarian prose translation), the truth remains that poetry is that form of literature which is least susceptible to paraphrase. In fact, as paraphrase, most poems add up to very little, so it is difficult to see what Hughes might have been excited about or convinced by, unless it were expectation itself, which is, in effect, the old Pavlovian response to the bell that anticipates dinner. In the meantime, readers of the original experience a sense of responsibility. The work is too much for one language. It must get out. The expectation exists. The hole must be filled. Some kind of dinner must actually be served.

The appearance of three recent English language versions of selections from József’s poems -- not to mention a body of work by Edwin Morgan in his Collected Translations -- demonstrates a general awareness of how far the near-literal in itself is doomed to fall short, and witnesses to the keen desire of some to satisfy the expectations that have been raised. It is certainly a beginning. The enterprise requires the work of poets and translators
of a certain substance, and, I must admit, the number and reputation of the trans- lators who have been enticed to attempt at least a verse or two is impressive: Vernon Watkins, Michael Hamburger, Theo Dorgan, Desmond Egan, Brendan Kennelly and Michael Longley, for example, appear in Thomas Kabdebo’s Attila József: Poems and Fragments (I say edited by Kabdebo, as it plainly is, although there is no attribution to him in the text.) These people, being themselves fine poets, have succeeded in producing fine verse as a result. But the problem remains. These are passing fragmentary successes, each of which might do in an anthology of short verse, but few of them have attempted the longer major poems that are so central to József’s poetic achievement, and none of them have produced enough translations to form a single coherent body of work.

There is, nevertheless, an investment of energy, a desire, in some cases a passion, to define and flesh out the poetic figure József makes. And this is all to the good. The translation of Attila József is a major task which, until something unquestionably better comes along (and nothing is unquestionable), entails a group effort. Translation -- certainly the translation of great literature -- always does. Translators do not appropriate their authors, they present them. They do not queer each other’s pitches. Translators are only readers -- albeit maker-readers -- of the texts, and great texts generate many readings, some, no doubt, better than others. But all attention is welcome. It serves the raising of consciousness and in some way, if only by default, clarifies the shape and mass of the author in question. Of course, as many point out, a solitary bad translation can do short term damage if there is no alternative offered, but the publishing activity of the past five years is a useful tribute to the power of József’s poetry. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, poems extend themselves, become more intensely themselves, through translation.

The three recent books naturally cover similar if not identical ground. Most of the major poems appear in all three and invite parallel reading. The earliest of them, Bátki’s Winter Night: Selected Poems of Attila József, is offered to the memory of Allen Ginsberg and begins with an epigraph from Jack Kerouac. This gives us a clue to the literary parentage of the translations, which seek to lodge József’s poems in North American experience, using the particular idiom of 1950s Beat poetry. This is a perfectly valid procedure: it draws from József, formally and in terms of diction, that which might be read into such a context, and presents it to a part of the potential readership. Not that Bátki’s is a thoroughgoing strategy, but the reader can hear echoes of the voices implied in the introduction: Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Gregory Corso, et al. The attempt, in terms of style, is to make József run clear and streetwise, and, at their best, the translations succeed in doing this; clarity and colloquial ease, if I hear the Hungarian right, is part of József’s manner.

But it is far from all. There is not enough of the best to start with. Further more, József’s society, his own particular circumstances and expectations of verse did not much resemble that of the Beats. The Beat reading establishes a reference point on the far more complex map of József’s poetry but one shouldn’t rely on it. All the more so as the translations often show the strain of trying to accommodate tensions beyond their compass. Take "Summer" for example. For the third of the fourth verses: "Ám egyre több lágy buggya nás. / Vérboý eper a homokon, / bóbiskol, zizzen a kalász. / Vihar gubbaszt a lombokon", Bátki offers: "More and more soft stirrings. / Blood-red berries on the sand. / Ears of wheat nodding and rustling. / A storm is perched above the land".

This has a syntactic clarity (four short individual sentences) and conveys simple images in direct language. It even presents us with a rhyme in lines 2 and 4. (The original has an abab structure.) But the berries and the wheat have lost their pressing lushness, and the wonderfully threatening storm is lightened to sparrow-weight. These are not incidental details -- they constitute the emotional mass and texture of the poem, without which "kaszaél", the scythe-blade of the last line, loses much of its force.

Bátki can give us a welcome element of raciness but he is not a particularly distinguished Beat poet and sometimes loses the very pace the Beats live by. What we do get from him -- at best -- is the sense of a democratic voice, a man talking in a society of equals. The Marxist reader might be satisfied by this. On the other hand, we miss the complexity, the personal turmoil, the pressure that raises the great poems to tragic level.

That texture is often supplied by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner’s versions in The Iron Blue Vault. Turner is a noted American Formalist poet, a contributor to the New Formalist an-thology, Rebel Angels. As with his earlier collaboration with Ozsváth, a selection from Radnóti, he provides a long introductory essay to József’s ars poetica which accompanies Ozsváth’s substantial biographical essay. Turner’s interest in form involves a certain amount of tiresomely grandiloquent mysticism which seems inappropriate to me. A typical sentence such as: "In translating József’s poems with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, some of the greatest miracles occurred when I heard in Zsuzsi’s voice the authentic voice of the Finno-Ugric Altaic shaman", implies a whole set of bigger and smaller miracles and the ability of the American poet to judge the "authenticity" of something of which he is doomed to remain relatively ignorant. It makes me long for Bátki’s simple equations. There is something puffed-up and antithetical to the spirit of József in it. It’s a sign of what might, and sometimes does, go wrong in the translations. To do it credit, however, as with Radnóti, the Mystic Formalist method yields results in precisely the areas neglected by Bátki: poetic
texture, music, echo. Keeping with the same poem, "Summer", the third verse as rendered by Ozsváth/Turner reads:
"Still more, still yet, the welling grows. / Strawberries blood-rich on the loam / drowse in the warm, the eared wheat blows. / Crouched in the boughs, a thunderstorm." For sheer sound as music and emotion this is way beyond Bátki. Certainly there are liberties taken, but liberties may be earned. We can accommodate the tautologous "Still more, still yet" and its echo in "welling grows" because the Keatsian sumptuousness assumes real emotional power. The storm that crouches in Turner is infinitely more threatening than the storm that perches in Bátki. There is a wholesale commitment to romantic density in Turner that corresponds to József’s troubled sensuality. The problem occurs when this has to be cast aside. The plain-spokenness of the last verse ("Ily gyorsan betelik nyaram! / Ördögszekéren jár a szél -- / csattan a menny és megvillan, / elvtársaim: a kaszaél") is wholly missed in "So swift my summer is fulfilled! / On flying witch-balls rides the gale -- / sky claps and flashes, sudden, chilled, / with fairy light from winter’s pale." The first line has taken on some of the grandiloquence of the essay and the last misses the point by a clear mile. Where are the comrades (elvtársaim) and the scythe-blade of the last line? József the man, the political creature whose fate was in the balance, is lost. Instead we have a mystico-romantic sensibility with fairy light. The poem is drunk on its own rhetoric and music and cannot change gear. Bátki’s last verse is at least accurate and human.

For all that there is no doubt that most of the time Turner and Ozsváth offer more than Bátki can. Turner is a more accomplished poet, albeit of a specific sort, and his music, though sometimes rather fusty, does catch the force of József’s passion even while realizing it in a different context.

If one takes a major poem like "Night in the Outskirts", both Bátki and Turner have much to offer in the ways I have already described, but neither is as good as either Michael Hamburger in the version he offers in the Argumentum / Cardinal volume, or Edwin Morgan in Morgan’s Collected Translations, published some four years ago. It is a great pity that Morgan’s twenty-five renderings of József never made a book in themselves, because, for all the splendour of the mixed bag offered by his collected work, they are simply another item there, and get a little lost. Neverthe less, Morgan is one of the most gifted translators of the last forty years and I would certainly recommend any English language reader to consult his version beside the others. For lack of a Morgan, the spare, elegant voice of Hamburger’s "Night in the Outskirts" is perhaps the core around which the other translations may arrange themselves. The stronger rhetorical flourish of the Turner / Ozsváth ending is more attractive and probably closer to the spirit of the original, and its richness of detail fills out the leaner narrative provided by Hamburger along the way, but Hamburger’s is the version best able to define the starting point.

Talking of mixed bags, Attila József: Poems and Fragments is precisely that, a bag so mixed the reader must be prepared for several disappointments to each success. Kabdebo (the unattributed editor), Peter Sherwood and John Wilkinson are, for all their intelligence and passion, limited as translators, and their work occupies a considerable portion of the book. The five Longleys are well worth finding (if only there were more), as are the few short Michael Murphys that take minor liberties but compensate for this with freshness. Kennelly’s two lines are no more than a passing gesture. Peter Zollman contributes some formally faithful translations and his "On the Edge of Town" (‘A város peremén’), but for one or two small slips, is a close rival to the Turner version, "On the Edge of the City". The Bátki suffers a few prosaic passages by comparison, but this is a
poem that is worth looking at in all three versions.

For some of the other great poems -- "Mother" for instance, the Edwin Morgan version is by far the best. The "Ode" is rendered equally well by Turner and Morgan and very poorly by Kabdebo. And so on. The reader of this review might, like a good consumer, want to know the comparative value-for-money of this or that translator for this or that poem, but there is a limit to the usefulness of the exercise. One must try to make broader judgments.

I want to recap a little. There is clearly passion involved in the work of translation where a poet of József’s stature is concerned. But the very same stature resists the definition of the definitive translation. The József shaped hole is only partly filled in. In fact, for foreign readers, it remains a rather notional hole. There is nothing of comparable size here: no persuasive shape. None of these books is fully convincing, but they are all helpful as cribs to each other. The ideologies of the Bátki and the Ozsváth / Turner are clearly defined at the beginning, and in such cases chacun son got is the rule. We are not yet in the position that we were in with, say, the J.B. Leishman version of Rilke, which supplied a generation with an introduction and a voice which, however much it might have been modified since by other translators, served very well then and still succeeds in retaining the reader’s affection. None of the versions of József we have so far will quite do that. The hole in József’s case remains largely empty, and, in my view, it is the off-stage Morgan who does most to fill it. József is just too big. His greatness comprises an element of the best of Turner’s lushness and rhetoric and an equally important element of Bátki’s common speech, but it is more than the sum of them. In my ear, József has something of D.H. Lawrence, something of Aragon, something of Desnos and a little of Hart Crane. Keats and Corso can sit in there with the rest of the chorus, but they cannot supply all the parts. None of this helps form a policy in translating, of course. No poet breaks down into constituent parts and great poets still less so. You catch at József as you catch at a strong wind down the city street: power, desire, fresh open air and the smell of damp walls thronging with the music of childhood and loss. The oeuvre is large: every poem is contained in every other poem, including the fragments with which the Kabdebo edited volume ends. Some how one has to swallow him whole or breathe him in. In the meantime we take a sniff and breathe at each other.