During the PEN World Voices panel "Rewriting Family," Hungarian author György Dragomán mentioned that his wife was a poet and frequently collaborated with translators. Dragomán blew me away with his generous and gracious comments on translation and translators, so I was interested to learn more about his wife and her translation background. Her name, I learned, is Anna T. Szabó. and she has published several books of poetry. Her website is in Hungarian but her author page on HunLit provides some biographical and biographical information in English and German translation (the English page is more comprehensive than the German).
In October 2004, Szabó and other Hungarian poets visited the UK and participated in Converging Lines, a program sponsored by the British Council Arts Group, which teams up writers and translators from the UK with poets from other countries. It works both ways--first the UK writers toured Hungary and later the Hungarian poets came to the UK for reading tours and to participate in translation workshops. Szabó was paired with Clare Pollard, a poet, educator and translator. In creating her translations, Pollard, who doesn't know Hungarian, maintained an ongoing conversation with Szabó. She had a literal translation to work with but the final translation also reflected how she interpreted and incorporated Szabó's comments on variant meanings, word play, sound and structure. The program invited those who attended the public readings to participate in this translation enterprise.
Antony Dunn, who participated in this program, recounts:
We've created a leaflet for every audience member, which contains four literal translations of poems by the Hungarians the very same literal translations that some of the Brits worked from at Lake Balaton. These literal (or plain text) translations contain a range of alternatives, notes and suggestions, to reflect the shades of meaning carried by the Hungarian words or phrases. Some are annotated with details of the rhyme scheme, or the rhythm, or with explanations of the Hungarian colloquialisms employed in the poems. The audience is invited to take these leaflets home and have a go at translation for themselves.
In some ways, it's been rather easier for us, with access to the
poets themselves. To be able to ask, What did you mean, exactly? and
get an answer.
You can download from Dunn's website a pdf file that contains some of the translations put together by the group, including one of Pollard's translations of Szabó's poem "Around the Tree" (from a longer poem "Winter Diary"). It's a fantastic poem--here's the first stanza:
In the ice-storm these cats now mate,
light frozen on their soft, black skins.
They stage their hot, furred winter show,
wild things.
Reading this translation out loud, I'm struck by the cadence and the rhyme between "skins" and "things," as well as the internal rhyme between "soft" and "hot." Also, most of the words are monosyllabic which can't be incidental. A great deal of attention has been given to the sound of this translation, which makes me wonder how its sounds in Hungarian. Hungarian sounds nothing like English so the translation isn't necessarily striving for aural equivalence, but perhaps there is something interesting about the original poem's prosody that the English poem is trying to evoke.
In an on line interview, Szabó, who translates from English to Hungarian, acknowledged that she prefers not to self-translate. "I have tried, but what comes out is not what I had intended." This is an incredible admission and, in a way, contradicts Dunn's comment that having the original authors on hand gave the UK translators an advantage. There is a prevailing assumption (that even translators tend to perpetuate) that original authors always know what their work means. And, frankly, speaking as a translator, I'd rather have a range of meanings and possibilities to work with.
For Szabó, translation is not only a creative exchange (that is more productive when the translator is someone else) but also a way to assess the merits of a work, to go beyond first impressions:
I used to think that mutuality in translation was some sort of a gesture of respect. In fact it is nothing of the kind. It is extremely useful. While you work on the translation you are also in contact with
the author. During these conversations you find your place into their world and their vision, and it becomes much easier to get an understanding of their poetry. When you place yourself in the other's poetic world you really get in tune with them. This can be mutual, which is really a very exciting process. It was during translation that I grew to like Pollard's poems a lot. There were poets I started to translate convinced that they were great, and found out during the translation process that they were not. You come to stumble upon subtle shifts more easily, and find that things which look graceful from the outside may not be all that well put together, after all.
This has happened to me on several occasions. I'll start translating a poem I really like in Hebrew or Spanish and, in the process, certain flaws or missteps are revealed. In this way, translation serves as a mode of critical reading. I'm looking forward to reading more work by Szabó and Dragomán. It's been very exciting to encounter their ideas on writing and translation and to find in them something "mutual."
Links:
Two Poems by Anna Szabó, Translated by David Hill
"Poetry in the NIght" (prose) and "This Day" (poem), Translated by George Szirtes
Poems from "The Labour Ward," Translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri
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