Links

Two new links have been added to the Links page, which are worth mentioning here:

• Hogymondom.hu, a dictionary of contemporary slang to which readers can contribute. Lots of fun, expect profanity.
• Hungarian Spectrum, an excellent English-language blog on current affairs, written by Éva Balogh, which features intelligent and insightful posts on politics, media and history.

Hungarian Film Festival in London, 26-29 June

The Hungarian Cultural Centre’s first film festival, ‘Check the Gate: Our 21st Century‘ begins today, at the Curzon Mayfair. Coinciding with the centenary of the birth of Hungarian cinema, the festival celebrates the best of contemporary Hungarian cinema, and showcases features by Kornél Mundruczó, Bendek Fliegauf, György Pálfi, Csaba Bollók, Ferenc Török, Diana Groó, and Ágnes Kocsis, as well as short films. Screentalks will give the audience a chance to meet directors, film critics and actors. For more information, check out the HCC website or that of the Curzon.

Nyugat 2008

Readers are invited to help edit a centenary issue of Nyugat, at the Petőfi Literary Museum’s Nyugat100 website:

A Nyugat közleményei alapján összeállítottunk egy műfajonként rendezett tartalomjegyzéket a folyóiratban megjelent művekből, melyek közül mindenki szavazhat a saját maga által legjobbnak tartott 15 versre, 3 elbeszélésre, 1 regényrészletre és 3 cikkre, hogy összeállítsa a maga ízlése szerint legjobbnak tartott folyóirat számot.

If you are unable to read the above, voting for your favourite 15 poems, 3 short stories, 1 excerpt from a novel, and 3 articles from the Nyugat repertory is probably not worthwhile. Voting closes on 30 October, and registration is required here.

Tomorrow, Friday 13 June, we will be discussing translation of texts on Nyugat.

Emeritus Professor László Péter, 1929-2008

Another piece of sad news to convey: Emeritus Professor of Hungarian History László Péter passed away last week in London. László will be missed greatly by all those who studied under and worked with him. A short obituary has been posted on the SSEES website.

Ferenc Fejtő, 1909-2008

A piece of sad news: historian, critic and translator Ferenc Fejtő died today in Paris, aged 98 (Népszabadság/MTI article here). From his autobiography, Budapesttől Párizsig (1986):

Kénytelen voltam hazát cserélni, meg nyelvet is - ha kultúrát nem is teljesen -, és háromszor újrakezdeni az életet, mindig más és más körülmények között.

Egy időben arra gondoltam, hogy emlékirataimnak azt a címet adom: “Elpusztíthatatlan reménység”. Mert azt gondoltam, hogy a remény erősebb nálam. Inkább hitetlen ember vagyok, de … hiszek Istenben. Azt hiszem, meglehetősen tisztán látok, de mégsem adom fel az emberbe vetett reményt …

Nyugat’s centenary

2008 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Nyugat (West, 1908-41), Hungary’s modern literary journal par excellence. Together with the translation workshops, we will be organising a few activities to discuss Hungarian literature and culture at Nyugat’s centenary, with a focus on the constructions, collocations, and location (geopolitical or otherwise) of ‘West’.

Celebratory and commemorative events are regular events in Hungary. A number of websites have been set up to document Nyugat and its centenary, among them the National Széchenyi Library’s 100 Years of Nyugat site, and the Petőfi Literary Museum’s Nyugat100 site.

Translating Háy, ‘Petőfi híd’, 2007

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.

Translation workshops

The programme of the Friday Circle in the third term will focus on the theme of translation, including discussions not only on the (im)possibility of translation, but also on the practice of translating Hungarian into English, and English into Hungarian, although practice and discussion will not be limited to these two languages. We regard all translations as works in progress!

The first text to be discussed is a translation into English of János Háy’s ‘Petőfi híd’ (Petőfi Bridge) by a current final year student, who translated this short prose piece as part of a final year language project on translation and translation criticism. PDF files of the original text and the translation are available on request.

We will circulate the programme of the Friday Circle for the third term as soon as it is ready. Suggestions for texts and/or translations that you would like to discuss are welcome.

Eszter Tarsoly originally sent this notice via e-mail, if you would like to be added to the mailing list, the contact details are at the top of the right-hand column on this page.

The continental unconscious

When I first suggested the idea of a contemporary art exhibition about the “Finno-Ugrian World” my Estonian colleagues were appalled. Why spend time in those remote places, which even specialists describe as “the periphery of the periphery”? Why stir up ethnocentric sentiments among the Estonians? Why revive an agenda of cultural cooperation from the dark Soviet seventies, when Estonian intellectuals became infatuated with Finno-Ugrian mythology and bonded with their faraway kin?

From ‘The continental unconscious‘, an articulate, accessible and thoroughly rewarding article by Anders Kreuger, originally published in A Prior Magazine (16, 2008), and reproduced at Eurozine.com. Anders subtly debunks fanciful linguistic theories, and explores Russia’s uneasy relationship to its aboriginal populations, by means of a topography of the unconscious. He combines his curator’s travelogue-cum-history of Mordvinia, Udmurtia, Mari El and Komi, synonymous for many Russians with Gulag territories but otherwise off the ‘mental map’, with a healthy critique of centralist ‘large-scale production of literature for small peoples’ (and its attendant violence), and of language revivalists’ tendency to be ‘populist and about nothing; carnivalesque, but hardly dialogical’, with an acute awareness of new and old forms of collectivism, occultism, territorial violation, and the long arm of Moscow. Highly recommended.

Talk on C19 land reform

On 29 February, PhD candidate Rob Gray presented the subject of his doctoral thesis, land reform in early nineteenth-century Hungary.

Rob began with an overview of the ideology of reform. Part reaction to economic stagnation and the dreaded nemzethalál (’national death’), part critique of feudal society, reformers sought to revitalise the nobility and, by extension, the country. Here, land reform was key to modernisation plans, which also entailed forms of land redistribution and agricultural capitalisation, together with labour liberalisation. Lord-peasant relations affected almost everything in Hungarian society; changes to the nature of property rights, implied by a more inclusive concept of the nation and a solution to the ‘peasant question’, however, had to be carefully managed from above. For the reform-minded nobility, no less urgent was the fear of revolution from below.

The political changes and economic crisis of the 1830s were read in conjunction with Széchenyi’s Hitel (Credit, 1930), turbulent relations with Vienna, and increased contact with the West through travel, and the circulation of Enlightenment ideas, in particular Bentham’s utilitarianism and the works of Voltaire, translated (probably) by anonymous Jacobins. The word feudális had, necessarily, pejorative connotations, when it was first used in 1791. We concluded that the debates between lawyers over feudalism versus polgári társadalom (bourgeois, civil society) bore certain similarities to the népi-urbánus vita, which occupied the reform generation of the twentieth-century interwar period.

Rob went on to discuss the roles of érdekegyesítés, the widening of the concept of rights, and the concept of kifejlődés, in efforts to convince the nobs of the need for reform; outlined changes to the ways in which property was acquired or inherited; and noted that in 1849, the franchise of eligible men stood at 20% in Hungary, and only 4-5% in England.