Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Károly Szokolay: The problems of translating poetry

What are the criteria of any good verse translation? I think it must be faithful, honest, good in the target language, and afford the reader the feel and sense of the original. The best verse translations have always been faithful in Hungarian even when they seem, at first sight, to be unfaithful to some extent. This reminds me of the title of a book by György Rába on verse translations by Babits, Kosztolányi and Árpád Tóth which says, "The Pretty Unfaithful Ones" (A szép hűtlenek). The question arises: how can even the best poet-translator reflect the feel and sense of the original in another language without falsifying it a bit? It is easy to accept Jascha Kessler's idea of adequate translation of poetry but most translators confess (either to their readers or only to themselves) that they make compromises. Of course much depends on the extent of that compromise. There is somewhere a border between faithfulness of that kind and falsification. The translator falsifies of course, when he passes that particular limit. It is a well-known fact in the Hungarian literature that our great poets from Vörösmarty, Petőfi and Arany in the 19

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h century (think of their Shakespeare-translations!) throughout Babits, Kosztolányi and Árpád Tóth in the first part of the 20

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h century, up to our contemporary poets like Weöres, György Somlyó, László Nagy, Zsuzsa Rab, István Kormos as well as a number of other excellent poet translators, have created many masterpieces of verse translations in our literature. The required standard in this field has been very high since the second half of the last century. That standard was set by János Arany both with his own translations (first and foremost by his Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream) and his theoretical works on the principles of translation. And in spite of such high principles and practical results, our critics and theorists are not satisfied. The higher our standards are, the more the critics require from the translators. And they see the limits, or rather, the barriers of verse translation, at the same time. Of course, any nation will necessarily discover such barriers, depending on traditions of their own verse translation. Poetry suffers more in the case of poetry from minor languages, or, as James Kirkup calls them "minority languages"

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2, like Hungarian, being translated into major ones, because such work has no significant traditions. The lack of such traditions in major languages, like English, French, German or Russian is caused by the fact that they did not need such a high level of translation as minor nations. They had good translations from Greek and Latin, and from one another, but in most cases they were not made by great poets and did not serve such purposes as translations for minor nations. Nations such as the Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Croats and the like had to create their 131