István Rácz
Johnny Grain-o'-Corn, the Hungarian Hero
Sándor Petőfi: John the Valiant - János vitéz. A bilingual edition.
Translated by John Ridland, illustrated by Peter Meller. Budapest, Corvina, 1999, 177 pp.
Sándor Petőfi is one of the first names Hungarians learn as young children. The average child in Hungary will have memorized some lines of his, even some short poems before he or she learns to read or write. One should add straightaway that Petőfi's poetry does not need to be forced down schoolchildren's throats: they almost always learn these poems with pleasure. In nursery schools they enjoy the smooth rhythm, in their early school years they are enchanted by his descriptions of landscapes with their remarkable precision in representing the plants and animals of the Hungarian plain; in their adolescent years they admire his political courage, and once they become adult readers (if they still keep on reading) they discover Petőfi the intellectual poet. Petőfi means all this and much more: although he only lived to be twenty-six, in his short career as a poet and politician he became a national hero, an emblem of Hungarian independence.
The versatility of his poetry is amazing, but John the Valiant (in an earlier translation: Sir John) is one of his central and best known works with a diversity of tones in itself, showing nearly all the virtues Petőfi is known for: the moving expression of love, the representation of innocent eroticism, his power in relating heroism in battles and, not least, brilliantly comic passages replete with humour, sarcasm and irony. It is a children's classic in Hungary, which is re-read and re-discovered by adults (as children's classics usually are).
Petőfi criticism often discusses John the Valiant and A helység kalapácsa (The Hammer of the Village) together. The latter was written a few months earlier than John the Valiant (1844), and is noted as a hilariously funny parody of epics, showing Petőfi's "irreverence" (as George F. Cushing rightfully termed it) at its best. (Adolescent Hungarians, although they may be too irreverent themselves to accept anything put on their reading list, always revere Petőfi for this poem.) It is perhaps not the last mock-heroic epic in world literature, but it is certainly one of the best of its kind.
Whereas in A helység kalapácsa, Petőfi caricatured a mode of writing that he thought was outdated, in John the Valiant he created a new form to replace conventional epics (which were still being written in Central Europe in the first half of the century): the kind of narrative poem that is closer to the Byronic novel in verse than to the classic epic form, but (unlike Childe Harold's Pilgrimage or Don Juan) is deeply rooted in folklore. To put it another way, in John the Valiant Petőfi's ambition was to show that he was able to replace the classic epic, and not only to ridicule it. (This is true even though a subtle analysis of the poem can point out some features that Petőfi must have learnt from Homer, Virgil or Zrínyi, the 17th-century author of a Hungarian national epic.)
Needless to say, John the Valiant is open to a variety of readings. It is a fairy tale with the fiction of a charmingly naive narrator and that of an equally naive audience. One can read it as a sentimental story, as a psychological allegory, as a narrative exemplifying Petőfi's aesthetic idea that beauty must become true (not unlike in John Keats's poetry), and in many more ways, but the basis of understanding this poem is the reader's "suspension of disbelief", a readiness to play the role of the naive listener.
On the surface this means Petőfi's famous "simplicity", a fiction he created in place of the inflated style of romantic epics. This is what most Hungarians even today would accept as a norm, but a feature that most foreign readers notice as something peculiar. George F. Cushing, for example, wrote: "He made poetry look too easy and walked the tightrope between simplicity and banality with remarkable good sense" (The Passionate Outsider, p. 163). Importantly, he added: "It is here that his translators have often failed him."
The question, then, is how a translator can show the values of the text while maintaining Petőfi's "simplicity" of style. The closer the style of a poem is to everyday discourse, the more difficult it is to translate, since the nuances of such texts (not necessarily noticed by the translator) are particularly significant. (To take an example from English as a source language, Philip Larkin is one of the most difficult poets to translate.) Furthermore, Petőfi's poem will largely change its meaning once it appears on the horizon of a different culture. For Hungarians, this text is like their daily bread and butter (I recall once hearing old bricklayers at work quoting some stanzas from it to check whether they still remembered); for a foreign readership this will inevitably be something of an exotic curiosity (which is not to doubt the significance of a good translation).
John Ridland, the translator of John the Valiant (there being only a translation in prose available before) is fully aware of this dilemma, but he also thinks one can make a virtue out of necessity. In the introduction he elucidates on it: "Foreigners, however, may have some advantage. Newcomers to a language or culture may never learn all its nuances as seamlessly as natives, but we can approach its so-called 'Immortal Poems' not as marble monuments but as living speech. They may become fresher poems for us than for native readers, to be read more directly than before they'd been certified as classics."
This is a very healthy starting point for the arduous job of a translator, and Ridland was able to add two more virtues: his insight into the universe Petőfi created in this poem, and his awareness of the horizon of expectation he had to reckon with. The numerous references in the introduction to the classics of British and American verse are metonymies for the interpretive community he must have had in mind when translating Johnny's adventures.
Choosing the names, of course, was the first of the numerous problems the translator has had to face and solve. One possibility would have been to leave them untranslated; after all, they are proper nouns. But if these are telling names, leaving them untouched would not have carried this "telling" quality for the foreign reader. Petőfi's friend, János Arany, for instance, translated Robert Burns's Tom O'Shanter as Kóbor Tamás, and it has worked perfectly for Hungarian readers. Ridland did the reverse: Kukoricza Jancsi became Johnny Grain-o'-Corn. (It is probably not mere chance that Burns's poem is referred to in the introduction, although in a different context.) How careful he was when constructing this name is shown in a footnote added to the introduction, where we are also informed that he deliberately used sometimes Nell or Nelly, sometimes the original Iluska for the heroine, using this latter "to remind Hungarians of her original name ... occasionally when the meter allows". This seems to be more of a problem, for two reasons. First, if this translation is intended for an English-speaking audience, what is the point in thinking of Hungarian readers? (Why should they go to the water-jug if they can go to the fountain?) The second reason concerns meter: despite the translator's intention the name Iluska does not fit the rhythm of the poem, as I will attempt to point out below.
Let me, however, make it plain that Ridland chose well when using anapaestic rhythm to translate Petőfi's alexandrines, and his application of full rhymes in contrast with the predominant assonances of Petőfis stanzas is equally justified. In most lines he has either kept the original number of syllables in the line (12), or has made the line one syllable shorter. In the latter case, the first foot is usually an iamb or a spondee followed by three anapaests. But the form that he deviates from and returns to is the anapaestic tetrameter, such as this: "Like a tent, while he watched the wild thundercloud spout." This is the meter of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib", the exact opposite of Petőfi's falling rhythm, but, amazingly, it works. Not only because this is the "corresponding folk measure" in English (as the introduction tells us), but also because this is a rhythm that suggests excitement and dynamism. (Petőfi also used it in some poems.) This is particularly appropriate in the description of the battle in France and John's adventures in the second half of the narrative, but a quality corresponding to the original is also achieved in the most moving lyrical parts. If one compares the line "Utószor látlak én szivem szép tavasza" with its translation ("It's the last time I'll see you, my heart's only spring"), one will immediately notice that the meter is exactly the opposite: syllables 1, 4, 7 and 10 are stressed in the original; syllables 3, 6, 9 and 12 in the translation. The first is more elegiac, the second carries more anxiety, but is a brilliant recreation of the original.
What makes the translator's decision to use the Hungarian name Iluska weak is that, surprisingly, it is always scanned with a strong stess falling on the second syllable (I'luska). The line "Hey Iluska, fair angel, my soul's only bliss!" fits in the rhythmic pattern I outlined above, but this analogy with the meter of the whole poem distorts what is really Hungarian about this name. (Some further examples are: "And my darling Iluska, I hope that will do"; "Well-Iluska's stepmother, that heartless old bitch"; "In the lap of Iluska, his Nell, his darling". Even English-speaking Hungarians will feel encouraged to put the stress on the second syllable of the name.)
On the whole, the translation is a success: it reads well and has managed to capture the atmosphere created in the original. Only in some minor details does it show that the translator used rough translations (not speaking Hungarian himself); these are mostly some unpoetic lines, which fail to re-create the poetic purity of Petőfi's diction. (This purity is also made more artful at all those places where the translator has used italics to indicate stress. These are either unnecessary or stand instead of a better solution. Petőfi himself never used italics.) A further sign of Ridland's method is the mechanically repeated form used for translating certain words. A case in point is that he always translated "hát" as "well". "Hát" has a great number of meanings, however, expressing hesitation is only one of these, and Petőfi hardly ever used it in this function. Where Petőfi wrote "Hát nekigyürkőzik" in the translation we read "Well, he rolled up his sleeves". The stylistic effect is not exactly the same in the English version. Of course, this is no serious misunderstanding, but it is still revealing that there has to be a comma in English, unlike in Hungarian. The contextual meaning of "hát" in such cases is closer to "then" or "listen" (which does not mean that these words should have been used). Similarly, translating "hogyne" as "why not?" (instead of "of course" or "sure") is misleading.
But one notices such minor details that want further polishing mainly because Ridland has a brilliant feel for using various registers of the English vocabulary. He has taken care to make a distinction between "mostoha" (Nelly's stepmother) and "nevelőanya" (Johnny's foster mother). The first gets a negative connotation; in the lexicon of the poem it actually becomes a synonym for "witch". The translation is rich in idioms recalling the tone of dialects ("You didn't sleep on spotless linen"), and even archaisms are used in the words of the giants. The specific vocabulary of Johnny's voyage home (more specific than it ever could be in Hungarian) increases a feeling of familiarity in an English-speaking audience as well as some punning phrases do, such as: "The griffin was nursing her brood on the shelf: / Then a scheme in John's brain began hatching itself."
The introduction will need revision in a later edition (and hopefully we will not have to wait long to see it). The name Petrovics was Serb (not Slovak); the 1848 revolution "echoed" the revolution in Vienna a few days before (not Caesar's assassination on 15 March) and finally, there was no "uprising" in Hungary in 1989.
These are wrinkles that will be easy to iron out, and they certainly will not affect the overall success of John Ridland's translation, which is matched by Peter Meller's illustrations. These pictures are based on the contrast between black and white, and a number of methods are used to recreate the light-darkness symbolism of the poem. In some cases a black background predominates (particularly in the picture representing Johnny's night in the bandits' house on page 59 and, of course, the one showing the Country of Darkness on page 149), whereas white, as an unframed background in some other piece, makes for an intimate relationship between text and design. Ridland is right in his acknowledgment: these illustrations "deserve reproduction in any future edition or translation", but this fruitful cooperation with an excellent photographer is also to the great credit of the translator. Through his enthusiasm, stamina and talent, there is every hope that John the Valiant will become a children's and adults' classic outside Hungary as well.
István Rácz
teaches British studies at the University of Debrecen. Mainly interested in post-1945 British poetry, he wrote his most recent book (1999) on Philip Larkin.
