László Lator

My Life as Editor

 

Since my knowledge of Russian left much to be desired, I have no idea why I was placed in the Russian section; perhaps they thought I'd learn the ropes in time. There were first-class editors working there, English, French, German language editors, all kinds, the poet István Vas for example, and many other persons of note, several of whom were recently released political prisoners, like Béla Szász, a key figure in the notorious Rajk trial, who later wrote a brilliant book about his years in prison, subsequently translated into several languages. Our manager, Ferenc Rákos, a loyal apparatchik recently returned from exile in Moscow and the Gulag, was a lawyer by profession, who had been known to write Geothe instead of Goethe, and believed him to be a native of Weimar. Once, in an address to a conference or meeting, he began: "Dear comrades, dear Comrade Rákos" (this last being himself). That became a legend. But there was not an ounce of malice in him. Whenever we ran into each other in the corridor, he would always ask me very kindly, speaking with a slightly foreign-sounding accent, "Well, and what are you working on now, my friend?", and when I told him what author's book I was working on, he always said the same thing in reply, "Ah, he is a great master of style, that one." In 1956 the revolutionary committee of the publishing house "divested him of his office and power"; and it must be said to his credit that he did not grasp the opportunity to regain his post after the suppression of the revolution.
Of course, the Russian translations were a constant headache to me, I had to work like a dog, looking up words in the dictionary all day as I tried to correct the mostly trashy Soviet novels. The translators were generally party officials returned from exile in Moscow, politicians' wives; as my co-editor Judit (later to become my wife) used to say, they had forgotten Hungarian, but had not learned Russian. To make matters worse, they were always offended, became indignant, sometimes even complained, when they saw their edited manuscripts. Getting a really good book to edit was always a piece of unexpected good luck, Alexei Tolstoy, for example, or Serafimov; even then my happiness was never complete, since I could not choose my translators, at best I could laugh at their blunders. Yet even then there were three or four really good translators from Russian, among them the writer, poet and philosopher Victor Határ, who left the prison world he had well and truly experienced as soon as he had the chance, that is in 1956, and would not have continued translating for Európa from London-where he lives to this day-even if he had been allowed to do so. And of course there was the wonderful poet Lajos Áprily, excellent, authentic translator of Pushkin's Onegin, and of Turgenev. Our manager did accomplish one major feat: in 1953 he launched a Russian Classics series, and in the steady stream of cheerlessly mediocre Soviet Russian books there suddenly surfaced the great 19th century classics and, at long last, in outstandingly good translations. True, due to the Soviet anathema, Dostoevsky had to wait until the revolution of fifty-six to appear again in print. It seems incredible today that Dostoevsky was once a banned writer, who was hardly ever mentioned. You could major in Russian at university without ever hearing his name. Not a word was spoken about the vilified, imprisoned, executed writers of the 20th century either; they could not be published until much later. My wife, Judit Pór (who graduated in Russian) and I edited the first, poorly translated volume of poems by Yesenin, and I was later given the similarly suspect Blok to translate, thanks to our literary manager of that time: Géza Seres, one of the condemned in the Rajk trial and beaten to within an inch of his life. The book came out shortly after the Revolution, in 1959.

Directly after the Revolution, when the publishing house was once more able to reoccupy its offices on the third floor of the ruined, bullet-riddled New York Palace on Lenin Boulevard (until then we used to meet here and there, usually in a flat in the central district, weighing our chances, the possibility of another world war, pondering whether some of the Hungarian intelligentsia would be carried off to Siberia-at that time this did not seem impossible-and sometimes even got paid, though I no longer remember where this happened), ideas just poured out of the experienced editors of the Európa Publishing House. I'm not sure whether the General Directorate of Publishers, the superior authority brought into existence for this very purpose, was back in operation by then, but at all events the publication of world literature was not considered as crucial as the publication of Hungarian literature. For the time being, in the middle of the reprisals, they did not have the time to pay close attention to what was happening. Every year, the publishing plans, the paper requirements and the printing capacity necessary for the following year were submitted for approval to the Directorate-in reality a bureau of censorship. Every manuscript sent to the printers was accompanied by two detailed, analytical-explanatory reports, and the Directorate permitted or prohibited the publication of the book on the basis of these. The nature of the decision depended on the ideological direction-highly variable-the wind was blowing from. Books that were publishable but still contained some questionable points were read by ideological gurus whose names were printed on the inside title page as "specialist" or "expert" readers. The authors popular between the two World Wars and classified as harmful and dangerous after the year of change were now published in succession, such as Somerset Maugham, Gide, the existentialist, "life-alien" Sartre and Camus (though György Lukács had settled accounts with them in a separate book not long before), the "traitor" Malraux and the "decadent" Alain-Fournier. In the iron-handed fifties, the publication of "products of degradation" of the "putrescent bourgeoisie", such as works by Baudelaire or Rimbaud, the "formalist" Apollinaire, to say nothing of the "darkly reactionary", even "fascist" T.S. Eliot, or Georg Trakl, was unimaginable. What is even more difficult to imagine today is that Flaubert was blacklisted as well (Madame Bovary did not reappear until 1958, in the Classics of World Literature series), and even Zola: naturalism, pre-eminently owing to the good offices of György Lukács, was like a red rag to a bull, just like "mystical German romanticism, forever looking back into the past". A condition for the publication of these works was the addition of an ideologically appropriate foreword or postscript by a Marxist critic-a sort of antitoxin-and if this was the price that had to be paid, it was worth it.

My favourite was the well-presented, paperback White Series which we called Pléiade among ourselves, as it was, in a small way, an imitation of Gallimard's Pléiade series. Prose and poetry were published alternately, Turgenev and Gogol, Flaubert and Anatole France, Machiavelli and Boccaccio, Dante and Petrarch. For the most part it was I who edited the volumes of poetry, turning to the best translators and scholars. Our next brainwave was the launching of national anthologies. Thus, we published the classic French poets in three volumes. The cream of Hungarian poets, young and old, set to work on those poems which had not yet been translated, the unflaggingly industrious László Kálnoky, Sándor Weöres, György Rónay each translated almost an entire volume. Finding translators to do the work was easy, the fifties, the years of enforced silence were still very close: the best Hungarian lyricists, so long without the means of subsistence, were happy and willing to translate foreign poets into Hungarian, especially the great ones, those that were especially dear to them, and thus brought into being a whole new literature of translation, which has since become a matchless treasure of Hungarian literature. Not much earlier they had had to grapple with execrable Soviet poetry, and now they were offered wonderful French, English and German poems to work on. The French anthology ran into three editions in two years and sold in numbers that seem incredibly large today. French writers, poets, publishers turned the pages in wonder: they did not have a complete collection of the kind. But at that time (the first edition of the Classics of World Literature came out in 1962) the publishing house wanted to insure itself against any kind of attack. Every series, every larger undertaking had its own editing committee, in which politically "strong" people were given a place beside the scholars; for example the four-volume complete annotated Hungarian Shakespeare. This was both a necessity, and a precaution. For the most part, the people who provided political security simply pocketed their fees and did not do a stroke of work. But in case of trouble or scandal, the finger could be pointed at them, and they would ward off the thunderbolts. I put together a Russian anthology for our "Pléiade" series as well, which came to two volumes. I had no trouble with the nineteenth century, most of the classics had already been translated, but I was on shaky ground when I came to the twentieth. All we knew of the twentieth-century poets were their names, we knew that those who bore them had been imprisoned, taken to camps, obliterated from literary memory. Under Stalin it had been dangerous just to pronounce those names; it was impossible to get hold of their poems. One or two, formerly branded poets did appear in print, for example Pasternak or Zabolotsky; others, like Mandelshtam if I remember right, had a couple of poems published in newspapers, periodicals, but we knew his poems primarily from hearing them recited, especially by Vinokurov, the most important representative of the Soviet new wave, who knew the entire oeuvre of his ill-fated predecessor by heart, and recited the poems everywhere, in the street, in coffee-houses, in our offices (banned poems had been spread this way, from mouth to mouth, in Russia as early as the 19th century) especially to Judit because I, hearing them spoken out loud, only half understood them. But there were some people in the editorial office who knew this underground domain of Russian poetry, and we were able to procure Western, particularly American editions.