Ferenc Takács

The Unbought Grace

Literature and Publishing Under Socialism

István Bart: Világirodalom és könyvkiadás a Kádár-korszakban (World Literature and Publishing in the Kádár Era). Budapest, Scholastica, 2000, 150 pp.

 

Most of those who now attempt to describe and assess some aspect or another of the ancien régime of Socialism or Communism in Hungary (approximately 1948-1989) find it difficult to avoid the two usual pitfalls that attend this kind of exercise. One of these is the adoption of a high moral tone: after some show of disinterested inquiry and protestations of objectivity, the aspect in question is roundly condemned as some perverted manifestation of an evil and nefarious intention. The other pitfall involves erring on the side of the intellectual attitude: a sense of superiority is assumed on the part of the observer, who then treats his subject in the manner of the ironist or the satirist, that is, he anatomises it as just another moment in the history of perennial human stupidity. The underlying assumption, in both these approaches, is that the aspect in question is some contingent phenomenon, artificially imposed on the "natural" or "organic" processes of social life, and, as such, it does not possess a raison d'ętre and is totally dysfunctional and useless as far as the "normal" workings of the social organism are concerned. Instead of the sociologist's "understanding", we get what is hardly more than an extended rhetorical flourish: "How evil it was!" or, "How stupid it was!".
Refreshingly, István Bart's recent book on "world literature and publishing in the Kádár era" (as its title has it) successfully resists both of these temptations. In his various capacities as writer, translator, editor and publisher, Bart spent decades in the field he now describes with the kind of objectivity and even-handed fairness I thought would be possible only something like fifty years hence.
What he describes, however, needs some explanation, especially for those who were not part of the Kádár era of the title. "World literature and publishing" here refers to what was an important aspect of kultúrpolitika or "cultural policy", a somewhat mystifying term used to describe the system of political controls certain institutional authorities of the Soviet-style "party-state" exercised over the production and dissemination of "culture". This included control over the organisational framework of the professional area of literary translation as well. Political power, in the form of the "cultural apparatus" of Party and State in Hungary, had the final say in what was translated, published and distributed (and in the print runs allocated) of both the "classics" of the canonical European literary heritage and the works of contemporary "Western" and "Eastern" (that is, Soviet-bloc) authors. Bart's book is partly a chronicle of how this system was originally established (in the early 1950s), how it evolved into the powerful "translation industry" of the Kádár era by the mid-1960s, and how it collapsed, under new kinds of economic pressures and by the urgencies of political change, in the second half of the 1980s.
Throughout, Bart stresses the peculiar nature of this system from the economic point of view. With the nationalisation of all publishing houses in 1949 and the subsequent "reorganisation" of the publishing industry (consolidation and regimentation according to "speciality" publishing, that is, into particular publishers dealing individually in publishing contemporary Hungarian literature, in translating Soviet literature, in bringing out "world classics", etc.) the entire field came under centralised control in the financial sense as well. From then on, funding was entirely divorced from market considerations of profit, efficiency and cost/benefit analysis. Large budgetary sums were earmarked annually for "culture" and preferentially treated publishing projects were lavishly subsidised; print runs and retail prices were tailored to the supposed "ideological importance" and educational usefulness of the book in question. The result was that the more important the book was deemed to be, the more copies were printed and the cheaper the price they were sold at. (As a matter of fact, throughout the period book retail prices were, on the average, kept quite low and this made books affordable for people in lowerincome brackets as well.) Accustomed to the book market of their own countries, Western observers were often struck by what they thought were absurdly low book prices in Hungary. I recall how Professor Frank Kermode was visibly startled when he verified, on a visit to Európa Publishers in Budapest in 1973, that a very handsomely produced "luxury" hardback edition of Dante's collected works in Hungarian translation cost a mere 90 forints, the equivalent of little more than Ł1 at the then current exchange rate. Paperbacks were, of course, much cheaper; for example, the 1973 translation of Philip Roth's When She was Good (a contemporary Western or American novel of average length) was priced at 16 Forints.

This was all part of "planning", the overall ideological or mythological motive behind all forms of political control over the institutions and practices of social life under Communist rule. Just as everywhere else, its exercise was based on a dual premise of "Do"-s and "Don't"-s. On the positive side, there were certain things the translation industry was expected, required or, in specific cases, more or less ordered to do: the translation (and publication) of certain authors or certain kinds of books was mandatory and this was, in fact, more than adequately financed. Bart surveys a number of these "musts" out of which two large categories of publishing projects invite reflection. The first was the high-priority area of the "literatures", whether contemporary or classical, of the Soviet Union and the People's Democracies. Here well-funded official demand produced a veritable glut of translations, the range of which included the exotic and interesting (say, high-standard Hungarian versions of 13th-century Georgian heroic poems and suchlike) as well as the trite and embarrassingly bad products of contemporary true-to-type "Socialist Realism" originating in other countries of the Bloc. Many of these books, low-priced and produced in large numbers, ended up eventually as scrap paper-though, of course, only after a lengthy shelf-life in public libraries (which they spent mostly unread) or after an ideologically decent interval spent in some storehouse of the State Company of Book Distribution (as the operation in charge of this task was called).

Another high-priority area, where money seems to have been more usefully spent, was usually described as the "Classics of World Literature". As one of the ideological tenets that motivated kultúrpolitika was the belief in the morally and intellectually educative power of literature, especially of the "progressive literary heritage" of Shakespeare, Goethe, et al., the translation (often re-translation) and publication of this canon was seen as one of the basic tasks of the translation industry. Accordingly, much of what is nowadays described as the Western canon, ranging from Homer to Thomas Mann, was made available in very reasonably priced Hungarian translations of a high standard. Bart singles out the Bibliotheca Classica series of Európa Publishers, a house long specialised in translations and still now the most important player in the field. This was a series of classical Greek and Latin texts, including all major authors from Homer to Plutarch, in modern Hungarian translation, carefully checked and, if needed, edited by experts. There is no chance, Bart notes, that the high literary and scholarly standards of these books will be surpassed by new editions within the next fifty years; neither the expertise nor funds will be available in such concentration in the foreseeable future.
Now, if we turn to the other side of the premise and survey what the "Don't"s produced, we have a story which is sometimes sad, occasionally tragic, often downright bizarre and certainly rich in W. B. Yeats's casual comedy. Part of the reason for that consisted in a strange state of
affairs: this system of effective controls lacked the most effective form of restricting and curbing what was disseminated as literary product, since there was no legally instituted system of open censorship (say, in the form of the Irish Censorship Board of old times, or of the official list of prohibited and banned books in the South Africa of the apartheid period). That is why the exercise of control, as a matter of day-to-day routine, took place through the circulation of technically informal "directives", semi-confidential "position papers", "suggestions" and
"proposals" and through confidential phonecalls. The whole system was based on an elaborate ritual of tacit negotiation and the constant testing of limits: people at the professional end, sub-editors, editors and publishers always tried for more, that is, they kept probing the limits of
official resistance to publishing authors (mainly contemporary writers from "the capitalist West") cultural officialdom (or some section of it) might or might not consider an ideological security risk.
The process involved much give-and-take and, over the years and decades, its workings became less and less restricted. Authors, previously considered taboo, were in time quietly reclassified as more acceptable for translation and publication. Bart quotes a confidential "report" produced for the head of the General Directorate of Publishers (one of the institutionalised controlling authorities) in 1963 which is still very dubious about the advisability of publishing the works of such ideological bogeys of long standing in Soviet Marxism as Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Robert Musil. In telling contrast to the negative and restrictive tenor of this paper, The Trial was published in Nagyvilág, a magazine specializing in translations of contemporary work, in the same year, while Ulysses and The Man Without Qualities appeared in Hungarian translation eventually in 1974 and 1977 respectively. Even Samuel Beckett, the epitome of Western literary "decadence" and "pessimism" for the official cultural line, was translated into Hungarian: Nagyvilág published Waiting for Godot in 1965, a collection of Beckett's plays appeared in 1970, Murphy in 1972, the Trilogy in 1987.
There were, however, two taboos that had to be rather rigidly observed: no pornography was allowed to pass into Hungarian and no reference to the Soviet Union or to any of its components and institutions that could be interpreted as "anti-Soviet" could find its way into
the translated text. But even with respect to these, editors and publishers sometimes found convenient loopholes. As times changed and public attitudes to sex, nudity, obscenity, four-letter words and the like gradually mellowed in Hungary, "pornography" became an elastic, even evanescent concept. "Anti-Sovietism" remained, of course, a notion much less open to flexible interpretation. Still, if editors or publishers thought the book was important enough, they sometimes excised the "problematic" sentence or passage in the spirit of fraus pia. (This happened, famously, to a passage in Günter Grass's Tin Drum dealing with the arrival of the Red Army under General Rokossovsky in Danzig and the havoc they wreaked there.)

This is only a sample of what can be gleaned from the large amount of extremely rich documentary material István Bart presses into the service of his coherent and highly instructive narrative about kultúrpolitika and the translation industry in Kádár's Hungary. The final sense of all this is, incidentally, of paradox. Deeply committed to the belief, both archaic and "Marxist", of the efficacy of the (printed) Word, the Communist rulers of Hungary were convinced of the absolute necessity of exploiting this efficacy, the precious moral and educational power of literature, in building the Future and creating the New Man of this Future. This was, at best, an exaggerated claim for literature, at worst, a naive and self-delusory myth. But in acting on their myth, they quickly realised that, in their attempt to control culture, there must be something to control in the first place. So they embarked on a policy that controlled what it maintained and maintained what it controlled. In other words: it fed the controllers of culture with something they could control while it also fed those who maintained culture in order for its controllers to have something to control. The equally ironical byproduct, the "unbought grace" (pace Edmund Burke) of all this was, Bart wryly notes in his conclusion, easily the greatest and most productive era of literary translation in the history of the country.