Fraternity-Testvériség, 2010 (88. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
2010-10-01 / 4. szám
Küszködtem Viola kegyetlenségével: Mastan immár Mársnak hangassabb versével Fegyvert, s vitézt éneklek, török hatalmát Ki meg merte várni, Szulimán haragját, Ama nagy Szulimánnak hatalmas karját, Az kinek Europa rettegte szablyáját... Beautiful, I thought. Exotic, too. I thought about how it might be written if it had been written in modern Hungarian and how the language had changed. I thought also about how it could sound if expressed in English. Disgusted by translations of the Himnusz and Szózat that took liberties with the meaning to fit some arbitrary rhyme scheme, I had previously translated the two anthems, about a dozen verses in all. I thought now about how one might translate Zrínyi and came up with: I, who once with youthful mind Played with love's sweet verse, Struggled with Viola’s cruelties: Now with Mars' greater poetry Arms, and heroes I sing! The might of the Turks. Him who was willing to undergo Suleiman's wrath— That same Suleiman's mighty arm, He at whose saber Europe trembled... I thought that was quite good—understandable, but still with a hint of the foreign-sounding medieval dialect that so enthralled me in the original. Class wasn’t out yet, so I kept going. Two years later, I finished. I have no idea how or even why. I suppose working on the translation kept me feeling connected to my homeland, but certainly the most definite reason was that my girlfriend spent a good portion of that time travelling abroad, and I needed something to keep me busy. All throughout the process, whenever I had the documents open on my computer, I also had on my screen a picture of my future wife. And now fifteen cantos, some fifteen thousand verses, over Winter 2010 six thousand lines, never before translated, sat in a folder on my computer. And I had no idea what to do with them. So I went to see one of my professors, a doctor of medieval history. Rather than brushing me off as an undergraduate with delusions of talent, she referred me to the editor of CUA Press, my alma mater’s publishing company, and wrote me a letter of recommendation. That was the beginning of another years-long process, this one of revising, advertising, fund-raising, and annotating. The publication date is set for July 2011, and the book will not only be available through CUA Press but also through Amazon, com, accessible to the whole world. The Szigeti Veszedelem is poised to encounter the largest audience in its history. The translation, of course, was an act of God. I certainly had no idea of the magnitude of the task before me, nor any intention of undertaking it that fateful day in Statistics. I do not plan on advancing any further in my career as a translator. I have begun Ph.D. work in Public Policy and Urban Studies. God had a plan for me. Meanwhile, I will always be grateful for the experience: the passages that I skipped, years ago, I was not able to pass over this time. I, too, with youthful mind, struggled with Zrinyi’s cruelties as I tried to make sense of the 17th century poetry. The result was that by necessity, and with the help of many others, I learned the meaning of every single obscure word and phrase in the epic. In rendering it in English, in a sense, I made the text my own. What I discovered in it was far beyond the adventurous tale of selfless heroism that I had read in high school. Zrínyi did indeed write a poem about his great-grandfather’s last stand at Szigetvár. But what a pitiful story it could have been: a man fights for a cause he knows is lost, and in the end, dies. Zrínyi, the war leader, is not fighting a human battle, however, but a greater war against the timeless forces of evil. He is obeying the will of God in the same way as Imre Madách’s Adám; working, trusting, without regard for what his limited human perspective might seem to show him is folly. This is the central theme and the core of the Szigeti Veszedelem: that God’s will is supreme, above question, and above all, good. The poem is a theological treatise wrapped in a story of military conflict. For God uplifts Zrínyi, who is beginning to feel the onset of old age, by giving him the gift of a final glory, choosing to use him, out of all Hungarians or Croa- tians, to inflict the death-blow on Sultan Suleiman. The real conflict is not between Zrínyi and the Sultan, but between that which drives them; for one, selflessness, piety, virtue, and humility; and for the other, power, greed, and ambition. One is willing to humbly submit to his Lord’s will; the other is determined to be the lord of others. Here, again, the book soars into the extraordinary because it is not the Hungarians who are good and the Turks who are evil. There are Turks who have rays of virtue shining through, from a valorous knight who is captured and shares a banquet table with Zrínyi, to the warrior who seeks to honorably fight a duel against one of the Hungarian defenders and is dismayed when his companions treacherously interfere, to the youth with the voice of Orpheus who is tragically killed in the fighting. The Hungarians have allied themselves with the forces of good and the Turks with the forces of evil, but the author avoids the black and white broad-brush stereotypes that abounded in the literature of his contemporaries. To do otherwise would have been to cheapen not only his ancestor’s heroism but also to undercut his own deeply moral message: that there is no nation that has a monopoly on righteousness, and the only true Hungarian or Croatian or Turk is the one who lives humbly, righteously, and faithfully. I hope that this new translation will let that message shine through as crystal-clear as it did four hundred years ago, and that it conveys the same sense of epic adventure and heroism that distracted me from ever learning Statistics. 18
