Excerpt:
The Third Partner, The Translators
Scores of translators have introduced Radnoti’s poetry to audiences around the world who are unable to read his poetry in the original Hungarian. There have been a dozen or more translations of significant collections of Radnoti’s poetry published in English, on both sides of the Atlantic. One reviewer of a collection of Radnoti’s poetry published in England correctly observed: “The question [with respect to any new publication of Radnoti's poetry] is how does this volume compare with other published translations of Radnoti?” [viii] Hungarian is like no other language spoken in the modern world except, in some respects, Finnish; it belongs to no known language family like Romance or Germanic or Indo-European. [ix] In addition to this singularity, Hungary has a unique and centuries old poetic tradition, mostly unknown in the West. The use of both melody and rhyme schemes is central to that tradition. In Hungarian grammar, prepositions having numerous vowel sounds occur at the end of sentences, facilitating the use of end and internal rhyming schemes for poets writing in that language. Furthermore, there is a strong tradition of singing centuries old folk ballads, the melodies of which are known to most Hungarians, thus creating what Dr. Ozvath calls “incredible musicality” in the Hungarian poetic tradition. Radnoti’s poetry, regardless of subject matter, is strongly centered in that Hungarian poetic tradition, and accordingly strongly based on meter, melody and rhyme scheme.
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Although Radnoti did write free verse early in his career as a poet, he was a master of the many classic forms of poetry. Turner refers to Radnoti’s “virtuosity with meter,” comparing him as a poet to Mozart as a composer. (Foamy Sky, xliii) Turner confesses that to translate metrically “one must be prepared to give up everything, to sacrifice everything to the meter.” He freely admits that his translations omit and rearrange phrases within each poem, create ambiguity in metaphor, and in some cases strain the use of the English language in order to be faithful to the meter of the original. (Foamy Sky, xliv-xlv) “The chief superstition that we found we must give up was the superstition that ‘free verse’ is an adequate or acceptable way of translating a metered original. And our experience with translation confirmed our growing suspicion that by abandoning metered verse the modernists were abandoning the very heart of poetry itself.” (Foamy Sky, xlvii)
Each approach to translation has its champions...
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“...that measured breath...”
Throughout these poems one encounters a cultured sensibility increasingly forced into what the translators define as the position of a “Christian Stoic,” seeing “his own survival as of secondary importance: he had been called ‘As witness to the truth’.” “I’ve grown so used to this terrible world / That sometimes I am not hurt by it – merely disgusted,” comments the Poet in ‘First Eclogue.’
... Radnoti’s poetry by the anti-traditional bias of one reviewer.
The “measured breath” of formal meter by which the poet teaches us how to know cannot be extirpated. . .by the hostility of a modernist cultural establishment. The lessons we can draw from Radnoti’s life and work suggest a radical transformation in the ways in which poetry is taught today.
We need to abandon the modernist picture of progress as the replacement of outmoded forms by more up-to-date ones better fitted to the spirit of the age.
It was Radnoti’s faithfulness to the old quixotic poetic standards that brought his writings to us out of the grave. [xiv]
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"There's is a good deal to live for, but a man has to go through hell really to find it out." ~Edwin Arlington Robinson
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