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

modern national literary language in the first part of the 19

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h century, and to fulfil that task they needed translations of great English, French and German masters. They had to enrich their poetry with translations, but the first reason was to create a suitable language for literature in general, and for the theatre and national drama in particular. It was not by chance that under the influence of A.W. Schlegel a Shakespeare cult started in Hungary, for example. The difference in interests in verse translation between minor and major nations is disappearing in our time. Edwin Morgan saw it in 1967 when writing, "I see the translation of poetry as a gradually developing art which still has a long way to go."

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3 In that development the theory of literary translation has an important role, as both Edwin Morgan and Anton Popovic emphasise.

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4 Though the disadvantages of small nations are diminishing, there is still much to be done. That is why Iván Boldizsár says, "translation has been largely a oneway-street: the small nations hasten to translate all that is worthwhile of the great nations' literature into their own language, but not vice versa."

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5 At the same time, there are more and more men of letters in the Western countries who recognise the needs of small nations' poetry. David Daiches (Great Britain) says, for example, "I fully appreciate the problem of small nations... and I realise how unfair it is that they translate into their languages from the major languages of Europe while excellent work of their own is not translated out of the languages of small nations into those of the larger, and as a consequence mush fine literary work remains largely unknown."'

6 At the same time more and more Hungarian poems have been translated into Russian, German, French and English. As for the English translations, the editors of the New Hungarian Quarterly, with the help of English poets like Edwin Morgan, William Jay Smith, Daniel Hoffman, Donald Davie and others, do much in spreading Hungarian poetry in English abroad and, in addition, at a rather high level. The collaboration of British and American poets, and Hungarian makers of good rough translations, has proved useful, though we have to admit that it is a forced solution. As Miklós Vajda states, "A good rough translation is a close, literal, prose version of a poem in another language - another, additional necessary evil in a complex transaction that is itself a necessary evil, arising out of our linguistic diversity."

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7 Calling to our mind Vajda's essay entitled The Price of VerseTranslation we will remember "the first necessary evil" in his theory, which is translation from the original. But we cannot demand that poets of major nations learn our language, therefore the use of rough translations is the only solution. 132