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the rules was go these old Turkish caves where they
could play Western music and party. Was there a
literary equivalent of the Turkish cave
BB: I never heard that expression, incidentally,
Turkish cave. There were a lot of coffee shops and
bars.
RPM: But those would be public places, they didn’t
have secret places
BB: Well, I dare say they existed, but I wasn’t aware
of them because I was in an official capacity.
RPM: Oh, you had to be discreet.
BB: Yes.
RPM: You were being followed or watched.
BB: Probably.
RPM: That makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about the
process a bit more. When you get a literal, are there
line breaks in it What resemblance does it bear to the
original manuscript
BB: With respect to line breaks, the line is preserved.
If my version is going to have some line breaks
different from the original, I do that. I never depended
entirely on the literal. In fact, the introduction to the
Nemes Nagy book includes an example of just such a
thing for a short poem: a four-line poem, “Lazarus,” in
the original Hungarian, then the literal, and finally, my
translation.
RPM: The literal reads:
As he sat up slowly, in the region of his left shoulder
a whole life’s every muscle hurt.
His death was torn off, like gauze.
Because to be resurrected is just as difficult.
BB: As I explain in the footnote to that poem, in
Hungarian, the suffix denoting possession attaches to
the thing possessed, so that, for example, the
relationship of life (élat) to muscle (izom in the
nominative) is delayed until the line reaches izma
(muscle in the form clarifying its grammatical position
vis-à-vis élat). Okay, the point is you can’t carry all of
this stuff over — I mean, it’s a different language. So
I used the Translator’s Preface to explain what I was
trying to do in my final version.
RPM: So we went from the literal to:
Slowly as he rose in the region of his left
shoulder
every muscle of his whole life was torture.
His death was flayed from him, torn off as
gauze is torn.
Because it is just that hard, being re-born.
BB: Yes.
RPM: And I love that last line, but how did you come
up with “his life was torture” from “hurt”
BB: All life’s every muscle hurt. Well — his whole
life, every muscle was torture. Incidentally, this is a
closely rhymed poem. It’s epigrammatic, and one of
the things I insisted upon was preserving that quality,
including rhymes.
RPM: So you chose torture to go with shoulder.
BB: Yes, that’s right.
RPM: In the case of someone like Nemes Nagy, you
met her and understood what kind of person she was,
which I’m sure helped you understand the character
and color of her poems. But how would you go about
doing that ordinarily Getting to know what the poet’s
getting at
BB: Close reading is the principal thing.
RPM: So it sounds as if it would be hard to just
translate one poem. Wouldn’t you have to know more
about somebody’s work before you could translate
one poem
BB: Not necessarily. But the more poems of the poet,
the better sense you have of what the poet’s up to.
RPM: Can you make Hungarian syntax be like
English syntax
BB: No.
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