János Háy’s short prose piece ‘Petőfi híd’ (Petőfi bridge) is one of seven short stories named after Budapest bridges, published together in Házasságon innen és túl (Budapest, Palatinus, 2007). Current BA student Malcolm Lesley translated ‘Petőfi híd’ as part of a finalists’ language project on translation and translation criticism. Reading the original with Malcolm’s translation, we discussed questions of equivalence, the problematic notions of fidelity and transparency, and difficulties specific to the text. To begin with:
Csak a felszín locsogott, minden fület eltömített a hangja.
Malcolm translated Háy’s first sentence last, not least because of the nod to the opening stanzas of Attila József’s 1936 poem ‘A Dunánál’:
A rakodópart alsó kövén ültem,
néztem, hogy úszik el a dinnyehéj.
Alig hallottam, sorsomba merülten,
hogy fecseg a felszín, hallgat a mély.
All further allusions to ’surface din’ in the translated Háy text then had to refer back to the opening sentence.
An old lady, overdressed on a warm spring day - neither her neighbour Mariska nor her children would be able to look after her if she fell ill -, makes her way to the Danube. She engages in a mild bout of competitive morbidity with a woman ten years her junior and, having thought about how the noise might cover her pain, decides to make her way over to Buda. Going at her own inimitable pace, neither fast nor slow, she notices the handiwork of ‘delinquents’ (as they are called on TV), economics students she believes to be bankers, and sociology students she believes to be beggars, while traffic whizzes past. She is unable to see details on the other side of the river until she reaches the top of the Buda steps. Worried about the wind on bridges, she wonders how many people who passed her by, which reminds her of the time she lied to her husband about his terminal cancer. The old lady reaches the steps, takes in the scene, and slowly turns around, ‘like a lorry in a tight space’, to face the Pest side again:
Majd elmesélem, gondolta magában, majd elmesélem a Mariskának, hogy láttam ma Budát.
(Malcolm’s translation: ‘I’ll tell her, she thought to herself, I’ll tell Mariska: today I saw Buda’.)
Discussion concentrated on possible ways to translate the following:
De neki volt még elég ereje, úgyhogy elindult a maga tempójában, azzal a nem hasonlíthatóval, hogy átjusson a túlsó partra. (p. 157)
where the speed at which the old woman walks across the bridge is brought into focus as ‘incomparable’; the proliferation of meg in colloquial speech:
Hanem azt mondta, hogy bízni kell a gyógyulásban, meg csak azok gyógyulnak meg, akik meg akarnak. (p. 161)
and possible English regional translations of ‘Kicsi pénzből élt’, and ‘Most ha több lenne, akkor csak bajt jelentene’. (p. 159)
If we accept that Anglophone cultures tend not to discuss death readily, it was agreed that humour be prominent in the translation, otherwise the casual mortality of the original might threaten to overwhelm the non-Hungarian reader. Discussion also touched upon The Brothers Karamazov versus The Karamazov Brothers, and whether Liverpool is better than Birmingham.