Ivan Sanders

Out of Old Hungary

Margit Kaffka: Colours and Years. Translated by George F. Cushing. Introduction by Charlotte Franklin. Budapest, Corvina, 1999, 242 pp.

 

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What is it about Kaffka's style that makes it so difficult to recreate in another language? After all, Margit Kaffka was a modern Central European writer par excellence, sensitive, sophisticated, conversant with the latest trends in art and the social sciences, a progressive who could understand people with ideas diametrically opposed to hers, a modern woman with strong intellectual leanings, who as a writer sought to give voice to the full range of human emotions. Perhaps the problem is that her language is at once sensuous and sober, hot and cool, stately and overwrought. Like many Hungarian writers, Kaffka first tried her hand at poetry, and some of these intensely personal, lyrical poems remain an important part of her oeuvre. But she soon realized that poetry for her was too limited-she wanted to paint a broader canvas and depict the world she knew in all its complexity. She switch-ed from poetry to prose, but the intensity, the sheer energy of her poetic language she carried over to the new genre. In both mediums she made language work for her; she twisted and shaped it, coming up with bold compound words, unorthodox noun formations and other verbal innovations. It's this "experimental" aspect of Kaffka's art that Frigyes Karinthy parodied in his classic That's How You Write (1912).
Actually, very little of Kaffka's mature prose sounds mannered or artificial. The heroine of Colours and Years, Magda Pórtelky, chronicles the decline and fall of her class, the provincial gentry, illustrating through her own example the lot of women in that world. Though no writer herself (Magda's character was actually modelled on the author's mother), she does reflect Kaffka's own thoughts about the difficulties of narrating a story and the larger question of truth in fiction-something writers in our own postmodern age are preoccupied with. When, as an old woman, Magda begins to reminisce about her youth, she wonders whether what she regards as her life story might not be "merely a picture of my life, shaped by my present way of thinking". Magda Pórtelky, like the author, is aware of the value of words. She knows that words can enchant and beguile and deceive; just how they do this is what she wants to delve into. Recalling wistfully the more gracious and inhibited times of her youth, Magda writes: "Nowhere have words so many shades of colour and perfume, nowhere so much hidden meaning, than when they spring, briefly and significantly, from a thousand repressed emotions." Words, she concludes at the end of her narrative, are "the greatest human gift".
Magda does tell her story impressionistically-she lingers for pages on a scene, a moment, then skips over long stretches of time; yet her story is complete-the colours are there, and so are the years. Hers is an unfulfilled, though by no means un-examined, life. She is courageous enough to recognize her shortcomings, honest enough to see through her own as well others' self-delusions. Most critics of Kaffka's novel have viewed Magda Pórtelky as a victim of the world of which she is a product. And to an extent she is a victim. Here is a capable, beautiful woman growing up in the late nineteenth century in the sleepy and convention-bound Hungarian provinces, leading the privileged life of the local gentry, though her family and social set are long past their prime. She learns early that for a woman like herself, the only opportunity for any kind of self-realization is through an advantageous marriage. Magda marries twice, but to her misfortune, both husbands prove to be weak, ineffectual men, the second one failing miserably as a provider. As the years wear on, the genteel poverty she has always known turns into humiliating penury. Bitter experience teaches her that in her society a man, no matter how much of a misfit or a ne'er-do-well he may be, will make it, or at least scrape by, much easier than even a highly gifted woman. Yet she retains a measure of dignity to the end. She raises daughters who-we are at the dawn of the twentieth century-become self-supporting career girls in the capital, and see very little of their mother. Magda, as an old woman living alone in her native town, achieves if not happiness then at least a certain serenity.
The choices and opportunities available to Magda may have been meager, but she knows well that she also lacked the will and strength to defy convention. After her first husband dies, she tries her luck in the capital, but after a disappointing stay yields to the impulse to flee back to the mediocrity and fustiness of the place she knows. With a mixture of self-pity and self-knowledge she exclaims, "This was my fate in life: it was only by accident and never of my own volition that any great, critical thing happened to me. I had no courage." Later, when another man will have her, a man she has little respect for, she says yes to his proposal, if only because this will free her from the pitiable state of widowhood:

Once more I felt that the web of fate was being drawn tighter around me. Once again I was enslaved to it. My poor woman's life!. Everything I tried to do with my own human strength collapsed and failed. Maybe it was mainly my own fault; it appeared that I was not suited for struggle and independence. But instead I could only exist through someone else, through a man, whom I desired strongly. Yes, I had to become his wife, a married woman once again, a gentlewoman.

Interestingly, in both passages she speaks of inexorable fate, but also of her own lack of strength. Magda toys with the idea of becoming an actress in Budapest. Back home she considers taking a job as a postmistress. She knows deep down, however, that she will never go through with her plans. When a distant, aging cousin tells her that she is marrying a simple peasant who loves and appreciates her, Magda is intrigued, but also appalled. "How can you?" she asks incredulously. "Why, isn't it better for you as things are?"
Kaffka's novel is a devastating account of the disintegration of a social class. One of Magda's brothers, a candidate for the priesthood, ends up in an insane asylum, and the other, an alcoholic army officer, in the gutter. Her second husband becomes a wreck of a man and lingers for years before finally succumbing to his many ailments. But Colours and Years is also an elegy, a tribute to a "hard-bitten little clan of gentry" that

never went where rank, unoccupied lands, alien elegance and important connections were distributed by the alluring patronage of old rival kings and princes setting up new courts. They remained at home here, encircled by the defences of untamed watery marshes, boggy streams and reed-thickets, on this rich little peninsula in the marshlands that was their inheritance; they were little monarchs and they jealously guarded their sovereign status as gentry. This was why they often turned eccentric or secretive, figures of overweening and fierce pride, whose peculiar doings engendered legends deeper in the country.

Though Magda always longs for change, she is also wary of the modern age. After her hometown is destroyed by a fire and is then rebuilt, she comments on the reconstruction:

Very soon an artificial and bogus town was built here with fine straight streets and neat, uniform homes.

Yet Kaffka's heroine is no romantic; she idealizes nothing. What gives substance to her character and credibility to her perceptions is her imagination. Routine introductions, spiritless liaisons, cut and dried exchanges are not for her. "I could be moved only through my imagination," she notes. Which brings us back to her expressive words, the language of the novel, and to the English translation.

George F. Cushing, who died in 1996, had taught Hungarian at London University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies for many years. Throughout his career, both as a scholar and a translator, Professor Cushing helped promote and popularise Hungarian culture in the English-speaking world. He produced excellent English versions of Gyula Illyés's People of the Puszta and his luminous book-length essay, Petőfi. The clarity and precision of Illyés's prose come through admirably in these renderings. But they are works of nonfiction. His translations of belles-lettres are somewhat less successful. We have alluded earlier to the special problems of translating Margit Kaffka, whose language can be both self-consciously modern and quaintly old-fashioned. And she can indeed be wordy and overdescriptive. But there is a sweep and flair to her prose that are largely absent from George Cushing's rather plodding translation. His usages are sometimes either too colloquial or too literary, or simply out of place. Early in the novel, for instance, Cushing uses the word "chatchkis" for régi holmik. This Yiddish-ism, in a non-Jewish milieu, sounds odd, inappropriate. The word "cur" for kutya is also wrong in a modern novel, especially from the mouth of a child. At the same time, "neurotic" for idegbajos is too modern a term to be used by someone around 1900. There are also imprecisions. A minor character's kemény, barna kurucfej cannot possibly be rendered as "his hard, dark royalist (!) head." Neither can zsellérek be "serfs" at a time when there were no longer serfs in Hungary. Naturally, a few examples of mistranslations don't really prove anything. Even the best translators don't always find the mot juste. But it must be said that in Colours and Years George Cushing offers us a faithful, workmanlike, though less than inspired, translation.
Kaffka's life story and family history are also a slice of historical reality, and reveal something about the melting pot that was East Central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On her mother's side Kaffka came from a venerable, though later impoverished "historical" Hungarian family, while her father, Gyula Kaffka, was of Slavic origin with "unknown ancestors," as one of her biographers put it. Her first husband, Bruno Fröhlich, had a German background. That marriage ended in separation. Kaffka then met and married the love of her life, Ervin Bauer, a Jewish-born doctor ten years her junior and the younger brother of the writer Béla Balázs, who would later make a name for himself abroad as a film theoretician. Bauer survived his wife and their little boy, both of whom died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, became a Communist, fled Hungary in 1919, ended up in the Soviet Union and perished there in the early forties, a victim of Stalin's terror.
Margit Kaffka's importance as a writer was recognized early by her-mostly male-fellow modernists who, like her, were associated with the journal Nyugat. She remained important for the next generation, too, whose members were drawn to her regardless of their taste and orientation. The poet Miklós Radnóti, for example, who would later become a victim of the Holocaust, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Kaffka in the early thirties. Well-known populist writers like László Németh and Géza Féja also commented extensively on her work. It would be fair to say, in fact, that modern Hungarian literature would not be what it is if Margit Kaffka had not appeared on the literary scene when she did. ß

 

Ivan Sanders
is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's East Central European Center. He is currently at work on a book on Central European Jewish writers and literature.