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

poet, saying "because I have done so, from Persian and from Hungarian, and I have been assured that my work has been excellent, that is faithful, and honest, and close and direct, and good in English too, so that it is readable and can afford a reader the feel and sense of the original, in a contemporary American language."

6 What do Hungarian specialists say about the possibility of translating poetry well? The essence of Miklós Vajda's ideas is that a verse-translation is always a compromise, because, as he says, "a poem will necessarily suffer certain losses in the process of translation, even very good translation, and even when, as sometimes happens, the translation is actually a finer poem than its original."

7 Vajda developed an elaborated and logically very well constructed theory before coming to that conclusion. His starting point is the comparison of poetry and music from the point of view of interpretation. He says, "poetry, like music, appears to be totally at the mercy of its interpreters."

8 But while music is always composed in a so-called "international language", where internationally accepted standards exist and help the listeners to determine whether the particular piece of music is valuable and represents great art or not, poetry through translation is vulnerable because of the multiple barriers of the target language. It is, therefore, always bound to suffer. "Poetry is not written for the purpose of translation", says Vajda, and he is perfectly right. We can only agree with his next statement as well, which says, "It will suffer even more in the case of poetry from minor languages, like Hungarian, being translated into major ones, because such work has no significant traditions."

9 The theory of literary translation is a young discipline. We Hungarians are lucky to have not only excellent verse translators but theorists as well. Most of the practising translators and the theorists are the same persons, which is a good thing. Árpád Göncz, as an excellent contemporary translator and theorist, describes an interesting phenomenon which most of our good verse translators have been influenced by in the past, even if they did not express it. Göncz says, "For what has turned dry for the speaker of the native language is still colour, picture for the translator and because he is following it to its roots, its origins, he digs out its equivalent from a deeper layer of his mother tongue, making his translation a bit more colourful spontaneously."

10 György Somlyó says that "our verse translation made by our best poets, always rises to the level of the original"

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1, but he is sceptical at the same time, asking himself whether we do not imprint the special world of forms and poetic imagination of Hungarian poetry on the foreign poems. 130