Posted 8:15 PM by laura r.

Ronai on Zweig on Balzac

, continued

Posted 8:13 PM by laura r.
THE COMÉDIE HUMAINE N BRAZIL, continued
Having fled the persecutions of the Nazis in Europe, I had been in Brazil for two years when chance led Maur?cio Rosenblatt, representative in the then-capital of the country of Editora Globo of Porto Alegre, to stay in the same hotel as I in Rio. It did not take us long to become friends. The courageous publishing house, directed by Henrique Bertaso, was on its way up, and its emissary told me their plans for the future, the most fearless of which was a complete edition of the Comédie Humaine. Without a doubt, there already existed Brazilian or Portuguese translations – some good, others bad – of many of the novels and stories of that vast assemblage, but Globo expected to commission new translations of all of them by its corps of competent professionals. Since, because of the war, new publications from the European market were not reaching Brazil, the publisher had decided to occupy its translators with transplanting the classics of the novel, especially those of Balzac, the greatest of all. Various of his novels were already underway.
I listened to this plan with interest, since I was not only a teacher of French, but also a Balzac scholar. In 1930, after research in the library of the Institut de France in Chantilly, I had defended a thesis on the “The youthful works of Honoré de Balzac”, and since then had been reading and rereading the novelist’s works. My knowledge of French life and civilization stemmed in great part from this reading, and thus could avaliar the intellectual enrichment of Brazilian readers, so distant in time and space from the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century.
As a born publisher Rosenblatt realized that he could take advantage of the presence of a Balzacist in Brazil, and asked, pending approval by the publisher, if I wouldn’t want to write a preface for the Comédie Humaine in Portuguese. I willingly agreed, but with the condition that I look over the first translations, as soon as they were completed.
This was not an unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. Not that the versions by the translators from Porto Alegre were of poor quality. They were, on the contrary, of a high level in general. All of the translators – Casemiro Fernandes, Vidal de Oliveira, Ernesto Pelanda, M?rio Quintana, M?rio d. Ferreira Santos, Dorval Serrano – were part of a generation of literary men who had been trained in France and who moved with ease in the Balzacian universe. But they had begun the work without guidelines. Thus it happened that the same character from various novels in the Comédie would appear with either a French or a Portuguese name. The same Parisian street had different appellations. There were crucial differences in orthography (we were in a period of instability as far as spelling was concerned). The translators were using the sources which could be had in Porto Alegre. Now experts knw that Balzac never stopped rewriting his books, even changing their titles; they know that after his death his widow had various of his fragments completed by a subliterate and that these completions were sometimes more extensive than what had been left by the writer. It would be necessary to use sources published after critical editions came into vogue. The lack of initial guidelines led to the possibility of incongruencies in the edition. Standardization was necessary. And besides it was impossible that in a work of this scope some lapses would not creep in despite the competence of the translators. For all these reasons, I proposed a detailed checking of the Portuguese texts against reliable originals.
My arguments were convincing, and the checking was approved. But as I continued my reading I realized that the Brazilian reader would need assistance to understand the thousands of allusions to events and individuals contemporaneous with the writer, whose confessed intent was to be a “historian of social customs” and a “competitor with the Civil Register”. The author’s innovation in mixing real persons with his imaginary creations increased the difficulty, an innovation which must have appealed to the taste for gossip among the Parisians of the day, but could lead to confusion among cariocas and paulistas. Bearing this in mind, footnotes were deemed necessary.
But in the meantime I had perceived that the structural complexity of the Comédie, the numerous overlaps and connections between his various novels and stories risked passing unperceived by the hurried contemporary reader, unless warned, and that the infinity of studies dedicated to Balzac since his death, as well as the parts which had been published of his enormous correspondence, could contribute to a better understanding of his fiction; I then suggested the prefacing of an introduction to each of the 89 parts of the cycle.
And thus, after long consultation, the letter of agreement in which the publisher defined the duties of the organizer was born on March 3, 1944.

“…in accord with his own suggestion, each one of the works included in the Comédie Humaine (conforming to the edition of the Bibliothèque Pléiade, in ten volumes, under the direction of Marcel Bouteron) should be preceded by a note that will have as its aim the following objectives:
1. to “situate” the work within the Comédie Humaine
2. to separate out the real and fictional elements
3. to note the autobiographical events
4. to trace the trajectory, as far as possible, of each work, pointing out its influences and importance
5. to clarify the historical, topographical allusions, etc. that may make comprehension difficult
6. to fix the double chronology of the works: when they were written and to which era they refer
According to the agreement which we here confirm, you will take charge of editing the notas em apreco, which, though without philological pretensions and details which would only be of interest to specialists, will always be according to the then-current state of Balzac studies and will be written in an accessible style with the intention of constituting an instructive and pleasing entry into the work.

In addition to the notes you will supply a bio-bibliographical introduction to the first volume; you will select, from among the best that has been written on Balzac, in France and elsewhere, a sufficient number of essays and articles for introductory studies to the other volumes; you will provide a complete documentation of the iconography (portraits, caricatures, facsimiles – and among these, two unpublished manuscripts of Balzac) sufficient to provide two or more illustrations to accompany each volume; you will quickly review the various translations, principally in respect to the fidelity of the same; you will assist the translators whenever this shall be necessary; you will provide, then, all possible assistance so that the edition of the Comédie Humaine in the Portuguese language shall be the best, or at least among the best that exist, including those in France.”

In spite of its detail, the comprehensive contract did not foresee all the work which the editing would impose on me; nor was I even able to appraise it. Thus, for example, it fell to me to select more translators, since the overburdened translators of Editora Globo, would not enough to manage the job. (We thought, in fact, thecomplete edition would be in the bookstores by 1950, the year of the centenary of Balzac’s death. It was only ready in 1955, and looking back, I think that even that was a miracle). And so various translators recruited in Rio came to be part of the team, among some them some nationally prominent names: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brito Broca, Valdemar Cavalcanti, Lia Correa Dutra, Jo?o Henrique Chaves Lopes, Wilson Lousada, Elza Lima Ribeiro, Joaquim Teixeira Novais. In addition the introductory essays by various scholars discussed in the contract (among them two contributions by my former teachers, Marcel Bouteron and Fernand Bandensperger) would require the work of a third group of translators: Milton Ara?jo, Nora Q.N. da Cunha, Bernardo Gersen, Berenice Xavier, Maur?cio Rosbenblatt, and even myself.
My proposal for the re-establishing of the division into chapters and of the chapter titles which publishers (even the Pléiade) habitually suppressed was accepted; from my point of view this noticeably enlivened the reading of the works. Once the work was ready, I realized the necessity for various special indexes: a “correspondence” between the French and Portuguese titles, a list of translators with the work of each one noted, an index of the introductory essays, another for the illustrations…with volume 17 in hand I was suddenly struck with the magnitude of the task which had been accomplished. And to think that Balzac had created a masterwork of such proportions without a secretary, without collaborators, without card files, without even a typewriter (which had not yet been invented!) In reality, even the labors foreseen in the contract had been inflated beyond what had been imagined: the bio-bibliographical introduction took a volume in itself, and the 17 volumes would total no less than 12000 octavo (15x23 cm) pages with more than 10000 notes. But the publisher gallantly bore this unexpected inflation and produced a work worthy of the highest praise.
I had evidence direct and indirect of the reception of the work and its influence. The bio-bibliographical introduction inspired a comedy drawn from the life of Balzac, and set in Recife, from the writer José Carlos Cavalcanti. As the volumes were published over ten years they kept the name of the novelist before the public and created an atmosphere in which the terms Balzacian, to denote a mature woman, still interested in love, and which gave rise to the popular Carnaval song A Balzquiana by Nassara and W. Baptista. At least three game-show contestants on television quiz shows were quizzed on Balzac. After his death, even in France, Balzac was never so alive.
A novel said to have been dictated by the late Balzac through a medium, Christ awaits you, achieved a surprising popularity. And perhaps I may be permitted to include among the byproducts of this Balzacian renaissance two more books of my authorship: Balzac e a Comédia Humana (Porto Alegre: Editora Globo, 1947, 2d. ed, 1957) and Um romance de Balzac: A Pele de Onagro (Rio de Janeiro: Editora A Noite, 1957).

Translator’s Note: Though the Balzac edition had not been republished as of the time that
R?nai wrote the above, it has since been republished in its entirety by Editora Globo, and is available as of this writing.

Posted 8:09 PM by laura r.
TRAITORS
It is clear that, as with any reproduction, the work, especially the literary work, loses something in being brought into a language different from that in which it was conceived; in pure poetry, almost everything is lost; and if not, the translator creates his own poetry on top of the original, which continues to be a loss. This is a limitation of the art, and not of the artisan. There is no denying, however, that, just as in any field of endeavor, there are good and bad professionals, and that in Brazil the latter predominate. But there are serious reasons for this.

Our publishing industry, especially in the literary field, is almost exclusively devoted to licensing foreign authors; it has no need for the Brazilian writer, and would happily dispense with him, if it could. Like all the rest of Brazilian commerce and industry, it exists for short-term gain, which never created great work, nor famous names. Within this framework, however, one would hope that the translator would be the absolute master of the situation, since the publishers make their living from the sweat of the translator’s brow.

A sad misconception. Here, more than in any other part of the civilized world, the translator is the poor relation of literature. The translator receives wretched fees, and must definitively alienate the fruit of his labor – the translation is sold, irrevocably, with abusive contracts which dispossess children, grandchildren, and all other descendents. He can scarcely be a professional, and live from his vocation. Hence there is a proliferation of those who translate in their spare time: journalists, lawyers, diplomats, and whoever has spent some time in a foreign country; hence, also, the poor quality of the translations.

It is not only the publisher, however, who is treading the professional translator underfoot. In Brazil, absurdly enough, the press has set itself up in judgement in the matter of the language and literary taste, as if the writer or translator should adhere to the newspapers’ style manuals. If the translation seems good to the gentlemen of the press, who rarely are qualified to judge, nothing is said about it; the justification for this is that the translator has done nothing more than his duty, as if translating a literary work were like working on an assembly line. If it doesn’t seem good, the simple newspaper reporters, who are barely able to do copy editing, roll on the floor when they discover, or think they have discovered (generally the latter) a slip in an otherwise good piece of work.

In reality, it would be ideal if the translator were a writer as well, at least in the case of literary works, but how many would be ready to live as a professional with such meager returns? This does not mean that non-writers – that is, authors of their own works, fiction, poetry, essays – are not good translators. One of the best translators working today, Donaldson Garschagen, has never published, to my knowledge, a volume or piece of any sort. Others, equally good, are at the most original writers on rare occasions, or simply have whims in that direction. Be this as it may, at least in this case the ideal is fulfilled, since the good translators are writers.

The first requirement for being a translator is not, as it may seem at first glance, the mastery of the language from which one is translating, but of one’s own. One who does not know how to express his own thoughts in writing will have difficulty in confronting the much more difficult task of expressing those of others. One could push this statement even further with an example. Until today, one of the best, perhaps the best, of Goethe’s Faust into Portuguese is that of Antônio Feliciano de Castilho. Well then, it is said that the good Visconde de Castilho simply did not know German. How did he do it? He asked a German living in Portugal to translate the words, preferably adapting the syntax, and only then set to work on the sprawl that the man had created .

In most of our poor translations, this is precisely the problem: not infidelity to the original, but the badly edited Portuguese. For this reason excrescences such as “ele levou sua m?o à sua cabeça e alisou seus cabelos” (a typically English construction – Portuguese would not require the possessive) abound; the unnecessary repetition of the name of the character or of “he” or “she” innumerable times in the same paragraph (the Portuguese verb not requiring the use of the pronoun); or “a mulher Americana, o homem velho, o homem branco”, holdovers from an original where the adjective cannot stand alone as it does in Portuguese. After a hundred years of the cinema, many translators – including or especially those working in films – have still not figured out that Attention!
in the military does not mean “Atenç?o!” (pay attention!) but “Sentido!” (stand at attention!)


It is errors of this sort, and not those which are really serious, which attract attention, since the supposed critic in the newspaper is unlikely to have the possibility (either from an intellectual or material point of view) to be able to compare the translation with the original. And here we have the really important question: what is a bad translation? Is it one which is poorly written, with little irritating errors, or one which is actually poorly done? Because the translator really can be a traitor, and many are, presenting impeccable texts, which nonetheless are serious betrayals of the original texts.

What one wants is for the translator to be working with the writer, concealing his errors and vices – in short, to be co-author, which would be, indeed, the supreme act of treason. Great literature today is ever more restricted to the university ghetto, which its own, rather specific language, full of neologisms. Current “thinkers”, especially the French, have become veritable factories of new words, in the absence of anything new to say. The poor translator, in rendering the linguistic juggling of these texts, is slammed for the reason that the words he uses “are not in the dictionary”. There are even cases in which the reviewer sets himself to correcting non-existent mistakes for this reason. Someone who knows the language will soon see who is at fault; but for the majority of readers, however – and the publishers – the translator is the illiterate.

Another serious problem is the author with a difficult, elevated style, Henry James, for example. It is said that this American snob (naturalized English) could not even express himself directly while speaking, and one of his critics asserts, in his favor, that while in the works of other authors the reader seeks to learn about the character or characters, in James the objective is to discover what he intended to say. It is not surprising that he idolized by the pretentious around the world, the majority of which, self-styled authorities on the master, never manage to discover what he is saying, and draw on all sorts of exotic interpretations for lack of anything better to do. The worst of it is that they cannot even make it out in translation, and put the blame on the translator, who ought to have transformed James into Maugham, in order for them to finally be able to read and understand.

And so it is a tremendous battle, but what can be done? Translation, even if not on the grand scale in which it takes place in Brazil, is indispensable, and many people who only know how to write need to earn a living, even if only a precarious one. And so, as with everything here in Brazil, we must grin and bear it, and pray for better days to come, even those who are not believers. For now, that is what there is for the plundered of the earth, who are always the ones to blame: the traitors.

Posted 8:03 PM by laura r.

The Limits of Poetic Translation

I would prefer to say: part of what makes the poetry is hopelessly lost in the translated poem. We will see, in three concrete examples, what this lost portion consists of. It would be easy to show how poor translations detract from another’s message. I have sought on purpose three excellent translations in which one can get a sense not of the inexpertness of the translators, but the resistance of the material with which they work.

In one of the more important entries in our scant theoretical literature on problems of translations, “A lingua do po, a linguagem do poeta” , Augusto de Campos, in homage to Edward Fitzgerald, presented his particularly felicitous translation of two rubaiyat. In his translation he was attentive not only to the meaning and to the formal qualities of the quatrain, but also to the micro-structure which he discovered. In one of these rubaiyat, built around the word dust (p?), he shows how the correspondences between signified and signifier are made explicit through a strange formal process which atomizes and pulverizes the discourse, so that it uses nothing but monosyllables. Here is the quatrain (no. XXV):

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the dust descend;
Dust into dust, and under dust, to lie;
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and – sans end!


The Brazilian poet, fully aware of the difficulty, gave the following translation of this untranslatable little poem:

“Ah, vem, vivamos mais que a Vida, vem,
Antes que em p? nos deponham também,
P? sobre p?, e sob o p?, pousados,
Sem Cor, sem Sol, sem Som, sem Sonho – sem!”


A recreation rather than a translation, the Portuguese quatrain retained as much as possible of the original: the general meaning, the melancholy inspiration, the rhythm, the system of rhythm, the alliterations, and even the preponderance of monosyllabic words, something made more difficult by the polysyllabic tendency of Portuguese in comparison with English.
I was admiring this prowess and at the same time asking myself how much time, reflection and effort would be needed to produce a version of equal quality for each of the rubaiyat, when I glimpsed a detail unnoted in the acute commentary by the translator. In the English quatrain, in addition to the key-word dust, there is another word that recurs four times. This word, sans, at first sight, resembles the well-known French preposition. However it is a word of some antiquity in English, with the same meaning, but different pronunciation; when Fitzgerald was translating it was certainly an archaism. The intentional intensity with which he uses it in this quatrain must have some special motivation. This would be the similar repetition (also four times) in the famous verse of As you like it (Act II, scene 7) in which Shakespeare describes old age - “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Fitzgerald correctly could have assumed that his readers knew it, so that the Shakespearian resonance, superimposed on his verse, only accentuates the lugubrious, admonitory atmosphere. Which goes to show that poem, beyond their individual existence, are links in a poetic tradition which one must know by heart in order to completely feel them. But the translator, even the best of translators, is powerless in the face of this irreducible residue.

* *

I reread the other day the admirable Poemas Italianos, a posthumous work of Cec?lia Meireles, accompanied by the congenial translation by Edoardo Bizzarri . There I found (no. XXXVII) the poem “Rome” which begins thus:

Roma – rom?, dourada pele de tijolo,
Gr?os rubros e tumidos de ocaso:
compartimentos de seculos
em porfiro, m?rmore, bronze, meticuloso mosaico.
Imperadores, santos, m?rtires, soldados, gente anônima
Em cada nicho, em cada alvéolo da antiguidade .

Obviously her inspiration was unchained by the two sonorous chains Roma – rom?, which in a surreal vision allowed the poet to savor the eternal city in the form and color of a fruit whose segments are identified with a section of time, the century. The comparison persists and continues to unfold throughout the poem.

To the ancient anagram Roma-Amor, with Italian poets cite with the emotion of adepts, Cecilia thus adds another descriptor which is latent in the play on words Roma-rom?, something that only works for Brazilian eyes and ears. But now the poem cannot be transposed into another language. There is no question that the name of the fruit in Italian is beautiful – melagrana, more melodious than the Portuguese rom?. But what of it, if only the Portuguese name can unveil the hidden analogy?
Bizzarri cannot escape this difficulty, since he took on the task of translating all the poems written by Cecilia which were generated by her trip to Italy. I look at the page and read:

Roma – melagrana, pelle dorata di mattone…

But the translator felt the necessity to make full disclosure of the impasse, and in a footnote (the only one in the volume) he clarifies: “Melagrana in Portuguese is rom?: hence, in the original, a juxtaposition which may surprise in Italian makes immediate and phonic sense.”

* * *


I take my third example from the Poemas Escolhidas, Chosen Poems of Henriqueta Lisboa, translated with love and talent by Hélio Veiga da Costa . There I find a poem entitled Rest, whose first strophe has the following invocation:

Shady verandah in the hour of sun.
Laziness sweeter than honey.
Water in a crystal glass
With an indefinite blue reflex
Of sky washed clean with indigo

which corresponds, no doubt, with the maximum fidelity possible to the beginning of the Brazilian text, Repouso. All the elements of the original are translated; the elements of the picture are distributed in the same way through the concise verses; and the translator was able to respect the negative aspect of the original, its absence of verbs. A verb, generally, suggests action, movement; its absence contributes to the impression of total immobility. Nevertheless the original has something more:

Varanda em sombra à hora do Sol,
Preguiça mais doce que o mel.
?gua num copo de crystal
com o vago reflexo azul
do céu lavado de anil.

Why does the Portuguese text give such a sensation of plenitude? Doubtless by means of the curious consonantal “assonances” of the final words of each line, which in addition to all being oxytones, are strong words, of intense poetic content, which gives each of the verses an upwards tendency and breaks the dryly descriptivewith a discrete musicality. The importance of this sonority is clear from the second strophe:

Sobre a mesa flores e p?o.
(Quanta riqueza se contem
numa lareira, num jardim!)
Livros bem guardados e um
Radio em silêncio. Que bom!


The enjambement from the fourth to the fifth verse obeys the intimate demand for symmetry formulated by the reader’s eye. Once more the extremely faithful translation follows the original step by step; but instead of the enjambement there is an uncomfortable interruption, unjustified by any play of sound:

Flowers and bread on the table.
(How much wealth is contained
in a fireplace, in a garden!)
Well kept books and
Silent wireless. How nice!


Persevering with the singular consonance of the ends of each verse, the poet brings her masterwork to a close in concluding each verse with an expressive syllable, and arriving at the final envoi with a more vigorous synonym for the title:

Hora simples, hora feliz,
Nada de novo para n?s.
Na transferência da luz
Como um lago em placidez,
Talvez deslize o anjo da paz.

The translator manages the feat of using exactly the same number of syllables as his model: 78. Once more he reproduces all the features of the original, and if he lets pass unobserved the directionality of the verses, which culminate in the supreme symbol of quietude and a celestial panorama, this imperfection could be remedied by exchanging the third verse for the fifth. Even so, the magic of the poem would not be carried over, something mysteriously achieved through acoustic and visual elements belonging to the family tableau, where, in addition to the presence of the man, suggested in a very discreet manner, one can almost hear a buzzing of bees in the final zs. The same bees responsible for the honey evoked at the beginning of the poem:

Artless hour, happy hour,
Nothing new for us.
Maybe the angel of peace glides
On the transparency of the light
Like a lake in calmness.

Posted 7:34 PM by laura r.
SETTLING, continued....
In order to make these episodes a little easier to follow, I will say that, looking back from this point in time, my life can be divided into two more-or-less equal parts, the first of them spent in Europe, and the second in Brazil.
The land of my birth, Hungary, is one of those in which the influence of the Latin language lasted the longest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the language spoken in the Magyar parliament was Latin. For centuries it had been the language of men, especially the men of the ruling class. Latin poetry had a great influence on Hungarian poetry; at the end of the eighteenth century there arose a school of poetry which called itself Latin, and taking advantage of the clear existence of short and long vowels in Hungarian, adopted and developed classical versification. During my day in secondary school the student still had six classes a week of Latin over a period of eight years.
In the beginning the grammar was frightening; even afterwards, later, when they were making us read Caesar, Sallust, Livy and Cicero, I still shared the jaundiced glance cast on Latin by most of my classmates.
The light went on when I managed to scan a hexameter of Virgil by myself. I began to take an almost sensual pleasure in those verses, which, though apparently similar, in reality had an extreme variety in their music; I memorized them, savored them, recited them to myself. Translating Latin poetry was in fact something with a long tradition in Hungary. When, to mark two thousand years of Virgil, a magazine in Budapest commissioned me to write an article on the Aeneid, a quick look in the National Library of Hungary revealed no less than a dozen translations of the poem. If I managed to escape the temptation to add another one to this number, it is because I was captivated by Horace, whose old Sapphic strophes, asclepiads and alcaics paradoxically rejuvenated, in my opinion, the eternal clichés of poetry: the brevity of life, the fear of death, the search for happiness, the complications of love. At first it was for my own pleasure that I tried to translate one of the odes. When I saw it in print, I had to give in to temptation.
From Horace I moved on to the love poets: Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius; then to the Ovid of the Metamorphoses and the Tristes, to the Virgil of the Bucolics, to the Martial of the Epigrams. I let myself be captivated by the decadent lyrics of Pentadius, Tiberianus, Dracontius, without worrying about questions of authenticity. I dreamed for nights on end of the Pervigilium Veneris, despairing before the inimitable laconicism of its short verses, the untranslatable musical of its trochees, the strange sonority of its alliterations, until I managed to catch a glimpse of the translation for the refrain. Among the poets of the hymnarium I got to Prudentius, and among those of the Renaissance Johannes Secundus and some others, who had never been mentioned in class and who were dearer to me precisely because I had discovered them by myself. I stopped at Giovanni Pascoli, our contemporary, that later lover of Latin rhythm.
I used to translate them with an excitement that today I can no longer recapture. Each poem translated was a challenge met. Fifteen years later, saying a forced farewell to Europe, I left a little anthology of my translations of two thousand years of Latin poetry with a publisher. I was already in Rio de Janeiro when the volume came out in Budapest in a bilingual edition.
Now, fifty years later, if I try to reconstruct the process that I adopted in transplanting Latin lyrics into my own tongue, I see how much there was that was unconscious about it. In doing so much reading, I had learned dozens of poems without realizing it, one of which would grab hold of me and not let go. I would recall it before going to sleep, I would murmur it, hear it recited by an imaginary voice. This would go on for weeks sometimes until suddenly the first strophe (or in the cases of Ovid, Tibullus, or Propertius, the first distich) of the translation would come to me, ready and perfect. I had not counted nor measured syllables, nor tried to fill out a sketched-out metrical scheme. With the first verses ready, I could sit down at the table, and in a short time, just a few hours, the complete poem was on the paper, in the first attempt.
I imagine that during that intimate assimilation and transformation of the initial strophe I was not translating words. The manner of speech of the Latin sentence had been diluted, and then condensed in a sort of visible image in which some essential spots could be made out: these were what were reappearing later in that first mental version. Thus in the first ode which I translated:

Vides ut alta set nive candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto

the notions of winter, ice, whiteness, trees scarcely bearing their load of snow were recorded; and as an essential auditory note the magic name of Soracte (translator’s note: an isolated mountain in Latium).

My experience in Paris, some time later, where I was lucky enough to spend two years on a fellowship, was quite different. At the suggestion of a colleague from the Department, I tried to translate a few Hungarian poems and stories into French and I noted the intrinsic differences that mean that translating into and out of your native language are two operations which are so different that they have almost nothing in common. When we are translating from a foreign language into our own, the central problem is that of complete comprehension. We seek to penetrate the text in all its details, understand its intentions, situate it within the cultural context of the civilization where it was produced. The Latin poems which I translated had already been analyzed, commented on, translated, quoted by generations on generations of teachers and students; there was nothing opaque about them any longer: it was simply a matter of recreating them in a language which I believed was under my command and would do my will. The matter was nothing but a problem of the inspiration of the moment, of felicitous intuition.
But in translating into French, the problem shifted. This was when I discovered the non-existence of perfect equivalents between this language and my own. The terse French vocabulary, smoothed and pared down by centuries of cultivated use, did not correspond to my Hungarian words, some rustic with a tang of the earth, others very new, newly-fashioned to satisfy urgent necessities. The whole system of derivation was radically different, families of words were made up of different elements, and bore different connotations. For the great majority of words the bilingual dictionaries of the time, tiny and poor, were useless; one needed to look for correspondences in other sources, by means of long investigation. But a more serious difficulty began after the problem of equivalents had been solved. In working with a language that is not our own, no matter how well we may know it, even if we have learned what can be said in it, we lack an intuition for what cannot be said. When we write in our mother tongue, we are constantly forming sentences never forged before with familiar words, but a mysterious instinct eliminates those which are contrary to the unwritten laws of the language. This instinct is what is lacking in our relation to an alien tongue. I immediately was aware of this missing intuition, and from my first translation onwards I relied on the aid of my French friends, Maurice Piha and Jean François-Primo.
When I returned to Budapest, I began to work with a French-language magazine whose purpose was to make Hungary better-known abroad, and over almost ten years I would come to choose and translate a story each month, as well as various articles, and even, now and again, a few poems. This turned out to be a very fruitful activity, since it led me to develop a method for four-hands translating. Each time I felt that the solution adopted was inadequate, I would add one or more other solutions, so that my collaborator could choose between them. When no other solution came to mind, but sensed that what I had attempted was imperfect, I would put a question mark in the margin, or even some commentary. And even thus I needed to be present when my friend and collaborator (François Gachot or Henri Ancel) would read my translation. Thanks to this exercise I, moving from my strangely eastern Finno-Ugric structures, became used to reordering what I was saying according to western patterns.
To give you an idea of this shift I will tell you that in the majority of cultivated languages the affirmation “I have a book” is formulated in a manner similar to that of English: Habeo librum, j’ai un livre, tenho um livro, Ich habe ein Buch, and so forth. One who begins to study Russian will be surprised to learn that in this language the idea is expressed without a verb corresponding to “to have”: U menia kniga (“with me a book”). Well, in Hungarian, the noun goes from being a direct object to being a subject; and what is more, it takes on different endings, similar to verbal conjugation, according to the person who is possessing it, while, for its part, the verb remains unvaried: “Van k?nyvem”, “Van k?nyved”, “Van k?nyve”, “Van k?nyvünk”. One would say that the noun has been conjugated, as if we had said: “There bookam, there bookart, there bookis, there bookare…” This example is perhaps not formulated in exact linguistic language, but will give a sense of the byways of a system of expression which issues a challenge to all the categories of discourse which seem the only ones possible to speakers of Germanic or Romance languages.
more to come