The Canadian-American Review of Hungarian Studies - Vol. 4 ... - EPA

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The groaning of the slaves on Egypt's sandWould not have reached to such a height as this;And, save for that, how godlike was their work!And did not once in Athens worthily,The sovereign people, when it sacrificedA great man, well beloved, the State to saveFrom peril might else have threatened it.If we from such a height all things can viewAnd tears and idle doubt mar not our sight?The objection to all this is not that it is light years away from whatMadach wrote, or that it makes unintelligible what in the original iseminently clear, but that the whole thing is conceived in that peculiarpidgin English that Victorian orientalists reserved for "Englishing" theCode of Hammurabi. The first requirement, therefore, of a viableEnglish version is that it stay true to the state of the English language ofthe translator's own day. This is such a truism that I need waste no timeelaborating on it.But what, for purposes of verse translation, is the state of English in1977? We are still very much in that age whose American spokesmanmade the hero of his A Farewell tu Arms remark about the "official"vocabulary of World War I: "I was always embarrassed by the wordssacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain.... There weremany words you could not stand to hear . . . such as glory, honor,courage or hallow. . . ." Hemingway's tight-lipped embarrassment stillprevails in Anglo-American literature. Such an anti-romantic, antirhetoricalattitude stands in contrast to the state of the Hungarianlanguage, not just in Madach's day, but even as late as the 1920's. Ananecdote about Babits, dating from the 1920's, makes the point. Whenasked what Hungarian poem he considered the most beautiful, Babitsreplied, "Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind,' in Arpad Toth's translation."Whether true or apocryphal, the anecdote indicates that the kindof emotional rapture, romantic intensity, and large-scaled rhetoricalpathos that characterizes much of Shelley could still find a receptiveaudience in post-World War I Hungary. How much the more so, then,in the 1860's, when not only in Hungary but elsewhere, too — one thinksof the "serious" passages of Dickens the oversized rhetorical gesturewas an accepted part of literary convention.Of the three major personae in The Tragedy, it is of course Luciferwho is the least subject to the symptoms of this rhetorical convention. 1say "of course" because Lucifer, the embodiment of critical rationalism,
employs the tone and vocabulary either of a philosophical realist, orthose of a mordant cynic, whose chief illusion is that he is superior to allillusions. Nor is the language of Eve particularly troublesome. Deeplyinvolved as she is in the life of the emotions, Eve is too busy living, as itwere, to give vent to what we would consider exalted sentiment. It isAdam, surely, who sets the translator the greatest challenge. Createdalmost for the sole purpose of being always disappointed, Adam is less aliving character than an animated allegorical function, whose hopesraised,hopes-dashed attitudes pervade The Tragedy. Adam's verystance, therefore, is that of an inveterate idealist, a romantic optimist,who moves from age to age, from one social order to another, alwaysseeking the perfect institutionalization of human brotherhood, andalways meeting disenchantment. Appropriately enough, his language isfilled with words like "pure," "sacred," "noble," "exalted," "radiant,"etc. — in brief, all the glittering verbal counters of the storehouse ofnineteenth-century rhetoric. The cumulative effect of such terms andexpressions is a tendency one that a translator must somehow copewith to endow Adam with a naivete and a kind of predictable twodimensionalitythat work against his being what Madach intended himto be (and what in the Hungarian he surely is): the spokesman for whatis best in all of us, the spokesman with whom all of us identify. For atranslator to edit such Shelleyesque language out of Adam's lines wouldbe to destroy the very essence of the figure. Accordingly, 1 have tried, asbest 1 could, to retain the sum and substance of such verbal gestures, butto tone them down wherever I found it possible to do so.In general, I set myself one major overarching goal: to convey theimpact of the original by following closely Madach's own dramaticcadences, hoping thereby to achieve an English approximation of theliving voices of my Hungarian model. To this end, I have relied onwhatever opportunities are afforded by blank verse — the basic meter ofMadach's original Hungarian — to match the English version to the•i I- • *Hungarian one. Too, I have relied on blank verse to give the translationa degree of elevation and a sense of remoteness that I consider theacceptable modern equivalent of Madach's own archaic eloquence.Since much of The Tragedy takes the form of dialogue, I thought it bestto render such passages in a realistic, indeed, at times colloquial style,using lightly stressed verse, as free as possible from the declamatory —trying thereby to reproduce the easy movement of the original And,finally, I decided, for better or worse, to render into rhyme only a smallpart of the lines that rhyme in the Hungarian The Tragedy of Manhas 4,1 14 lines, of which a little more than 600 are rhymed — primarily
Page 1 and 2: Canadian-American Review of Hungari
Page 9 and 10: the best possible settlers who woul
Page 11 and 12: than a decade later they were follo
Page 13 and 14: Sociologists have yet to explain sa
Page 15: fifteen minutes, and spent the rest
Page 18 and 19: from the "Canadian poetry" of Icela
Page 20 and 21: garian community of Western Canada,
Page 22 and 23: lowed translations from other, more
Page 24 and 25: which took place in the pages of th
Page 27 and 28: from teaching in 1968, Kirkconnell
Page 29 and 30: Magyar poets and writers to the rea
Page 31 and 32: tive of his helpful attitude and un
Page 33: 33. Kirkconnell, A Slice of Canada,
Page 38 and 39: ecause most such lines are imbedded
Page 40 and 41: ;Two spheres contend with one anoth
Page 42 and 43: matched it to this feeble hurdy-gur
Page 44 and 45: NOTES1. The only full-length study
Page 46 and 47: terest in Hungarian literature, has
Page 48 and 49: limitations of Bowring and others:
Page 50 and 51: Jones' Five Hungarian WritersJ 4 Su
Page 53 and 54: REVIEW ARTICLEHungarian Poetry in E
Page 55 and 56: ooks written in English. A table of
Page 57 and 58: passive, or into noun phrases in En
Page 59 and 60: REVIEW ARTICLEHungarian Religious P
Page 61 and 62: magas és a mély magánhangzójú
Page 63 and 64: SPECIAL SECTIONToldiAn Epic Poem (1
Page 65 and 66: CANTO ONE"He lifted, with one hand,
Page 67 and 68: "Who should be squire of this whole
Page 69 and 70: What meant this hubbub in a widow's
Page 71 and 72: "Lad, here's your share! Don't say
Page 73 and 74: The heavy stone flies on: where wil
Page 75 and 76: The homes of moorhen, plover, gull
Page 77 and 78: Perhaps I'll shed my blood, some no
Page 79 and 80: CANTO FIVENicholas went wandering a
Page 81 and 82: Her tongue was like a coulter in th
Page 83 and 84: Rosemary pots mourned on its window
Page 85 and 86: Such were her words. No more would
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As if a nest of hornets rose to sti
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Upon an isle, by a Czech's hand the
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REVIEW ARTICLEQuo Vadis Transylvani
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Hungarians in Rumania in terms of t
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down by serious shortcomings in bot
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alanced presentation of the Vienna
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talent enables Wass to depict the s
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Carpathian Federation, and printed
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Now and then, however, this rule de
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temper such an indictment by recogn
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OUR CONTRIBUTORS (continued from pa
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TO THOSE WISHING TO SUBMIT MANUSCRI
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