Péter Rácz

A House of Their Own

The Translator's House in Balatonfüred

 

In this age of globalisation, a Translators' House is a sign of the times. What is a Translators' House? It's a place where the translator of a poem, play, essay, story or novel written in the local language can go, for some weeks, to work on, finish, and/or polish his/her translation into another language, usually his/her own mother tongue. Not surprisingly, small languages are the most likely to establish Translators' Houses: the one in Amsterdam, dedicated to the translation of Dutch literature into the world languages, is a case in point.
The Hungarian Translators' House is located in Balatonfüred, the oldest resort town along Lake Balaton. Mineral water with medicinal properties was found in Füred in the early 18th century, and people were soon coming to drink the waters, and bathe in them. But it was only about a century later, in what would come to be called Hungary's Age of Reform, that the town became a fullfledged resort, boasting also a summer theatre for holidaymakers' amusement. In 1831, the old wooden structure was replaced by a permanent building; in keeping with the ongoing linguistic revival, it was one of the first theatres in the country where plays and operettas were put on in Hungarian, not German.
The beautifully-restored neo-Classical buildings lining the lakeside promenade—the writer Mór Jókai's villa and the singer Lujza Blaha's house among them—conjure up the bustling cultural life of Balatonfüred in the second half of the 19th century, when artists and writers rubbed shoulders with the financial and political élite all summer long at the theatre, on the beach and at the Yacht Club.
No. 36 Petőfi Sándor Street, which houses the Translators' House, is just a few minutes' walk from the promenade. One of the main streets of old Füred, Petőfi Sándor Street is a busy thoroughfare today. And yet, as one passes through the gate to approach the House, one fancies that the front yard has trees and bushes venerable enough to block out the traffic, and make disappear the hundred years that have elapsed since the house was first built. Above the entrance, one finds the inscription: Lipták Ház. The story of the house is worth telling.
The house had belonged to the Lipták family, being built by the grandparents of Gábor Lipták's wife. Gábor Lipták (1912–1985), who had a degree in agriculture and worked in agricultural marketing until the Second World War, moved to Füred after the war. By that time, his wife's grandmother was living alone in the house, and they went to live with her. When she died, they had the house to themselves.
At least in theory. In practice, they regularly had all their nieces and nephews spend their summer holidays at the house, whose parents, of course, would be there at weekends. By that time, Gábor Lipták, who had always been more comfortable with literature and the arts than his own métier, was writing children's stories and travel guides on the Balaton region. He had made some literary friends, and soon word was out that the Liptáks of Balatonfüred were holding open house. As András Lipták, one of Gábor Lipták's nephews, remembers it: "No one in Hungary who counted in literature or the arts would miss dropping in on Gábor Lipták and his wife at Petőfi Sándor Street if they as much as passed through Balatonfüred, for it was a real literary salon."

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Penetrating the Market: the Last Twenty Years

 

Of all the works of fiction in Hungarian that have appeared since the country's transition to a multi-party democracy in 1989–90, it is two volumes by Imre Kertész and one by Ádám Bodor that have aroused the greatest interest outside the country: specifically Kertész's Kaddish for an Unborn Child, which has now been published in 25 languages, and Liquidation, which came out the year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize (it has gone into 22 languages so far). Bodor's Sinistra körzet (Sinistra District, 1992) has so far reached 14 languages, though not as yet English.
The liveliest interest in Hungarian fiction has come from the German-speaking world, which has seen the publication in German translation of as many as ten works by Kertész, seven by Péter Esterházy, six by László Darvasi, and five each by György Dalos, László F. Földényi and Péter Nádas. As one index of the relative difficulty of penetrating the English-speaking markets, a quick count suggests that whereas 114 Hungarian fiction titles have made it into German since 1990, just 23 reached English (and 24 French, but 29 the relatively small Dutch market). The statistics kept by the Hungarian Translation Fund indicate that globally a total of almost 300 works by 87 Hungarian authors have found places on the shelves of foreign bookstores.
Established by the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1998, the Translation Fund run by the Hungarian Book Foundation gives grants to foreign publishers for translations from Hungarian. In the ten years since it was set up, it has supported the translation of 624 books, more than 500 of which have now appeared in print. The greatest numbers of translations have been (in descending order) into Bulgarian, German, Russian, Slovak and Romanian. As far as authors go they have been for the books of (again in descending order) Sándor Márai, Imre Kertész, Péter Esterházy, Dezső Kosztolányi, Magda Szabó, Ádám Bodor, György Dragomán and Péter Nádas. Among the more exotic languages that have been helped are Bengali (Kertész), Basque (Márai), Galician (Márai and Kosztolányi), Kirghiz (the mid-nineteenth-century poet Sándor Petőfi), Armenian (the poet János Pilinszky), Udmurt (Ervin Lázár) and Hindi (Magda Szabó).

 

 

 

 

Titles and Translators

 

When Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2002 hopes were raised that Hungarian writing would finally break into the English-speaking book market. That did not happen, however. Hungarian literature continues to be underrepresented in English-language markets. In Germany, by contrast, both classical and contemporary Hungarian authors are highly valued and accepted.
It is not that there is any lack of outstanding translators. Starting with Dezső Kosztolányi's Anna Édes, the Budapest-born, but British-raised poet George Szirtes has gone on to publish a series of important novels by Sándor Márai (Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels) and László Krasznahorkai (The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War); he has also translated Gyula Krúdy's short-story collection The Adventures of Sinbad, and co-edited, with Miklós Vajda, the Editor Emeritus of The Hungarian Quarterly, a 450-page anthology of post-war Hungarian prose and poetry (An Island of Sound). Another British translator, Tim Wilkinson, has become known primarily for his translations of Kertész's works (the novels Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Liquidation; the novellas Detective Story and The Pathseeker), as well as important shorter works, Sworn Statement and The Union Jack, which appeared in the HQ. Len Rix, another British translator, has had a resounding success with several works by Antal Szerb (Journey by Moonlight, The Pendragon Legend and Oliver VII), and also a new translation of Magda Szabó's The Door.
Also born in Hungary, but in his case resident in the USA, is John Batki, who has translated the poetry of Attila József, prose works by Géza Ottlik and Iván Mándy, Ernő Szép's The Smell of Humans, an important (and highly ironic) memoir of forced labour in Hungary in the dying months of the Second World War, and the Gyula Krúdy novels Sunflower (re-issued in the NYRB Classics series in 2007) and Ladies Day (published by Corvina in Hungary). Also US-based, Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein are probably most closely associated with their joint work on Péter Nádas's major novel Book of Memories; Sanders was earlier the sole translator of such major works as György Konrád's The City Builder and The Loser and Milán Füst's classic The Story of My Wife, while Goldstein went on to translate Konrád's A Feast in the Garden, Nádas's The End of a Family Story and Love, and Tranquility by Attila Bartis. Judith Sollosy moved in the opposite direction, back from the USA to Hungary, but she has made a name for her work on various novels by Péter Esterházy, including, most recently, Celestial Harmonies.
Prime among a scattering of younger authors who have made it into English translation in the USA and/or UK markets was the 2008 publication of György Dragomán's The White King, which first appeared in Hungarian as recently as 2005 (a translation of one of the chapters was published a year earlier in HQ 174, another chapter appeared in HQ 182). The book was translated by USA-domiciled Paul Olchvary, who also takes the credit for rendering into English Károly Pap's 1938 novel Azarel (Pap died in Buchenwald concentration camp just before it was liberated in early 1945). To date The White King has been translated into 25 languages, making it one of the quickest international take-offs of all Hungarian titles.
Apart from Dragomán's success, 2008 saw the appearance of the aforementioned two Kertész novellas, Péter Zilahy's The Last Window-Giraffe, a volume of Péter Nádas's essays under the title Fire and Knowledge, as well as Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole and a re-issue of Frigyes Karinthy's autobiographical Journey Around My Skull, which first appeared in English in 1939, just two years after the first Hungarian edition.
Having said that, one cannot help wondering why no English-language publisher has picked up on the huge success that has been enjoyed in Hungary by writers such as Pál Závada with Jadviga párnája (Jadviga's Pillow), first published in 1997, or György Spiró, going back as far as Az ikszek (The Xes) of 1981, and as recently as Fogság (Captivity), a stunning historical novel published in 2005.

 

 

Péter Rácz
is a poet and translator whose translations include works by Kierkegaard and Martin Buber. He is president of the Foundation of the Hungarian Translators' House.