their - The University of Texas at Dallas

RPM: So what do you do
BB: Use my own language. I use the resources of
English, which are very different from the resources
of Hungarian.
RPM: But you obviously have some tactic for making
those resources resemble the intent of the poet.
BB: I don’t want it to sound like a translation. And
there are too many characteristics of Hungarian poetry
and the Hungarian language to try to replicate them in
English. Hungarian poetry is quantitative, for
example.
RPM: Explain — I don’t know what that means.
BB: The length of syllables is important and is
regularized. There are long and short syllables. We
have an enormous range of quantity: tit is one
syllable, squelch is another. Those are two syllables
with hundreds of varieties in between. That length
resource, which a poet in English has, is not a
resource of Hungarian. On the other hand, they have
all kinds of possibilities that we do not have. For
example, rhymes come very easily in Hungarian, in
part because the language is suffixal; it’s an
agglutinative language, all kinds of signals are in the
suffixes of words. So it would be difficult to write
without rhyming in Hungarian. English, especially in
this, in the twentieth century, would sound archaic if
you overdid the rhymes. I guess the best example in
my own translations is a longish poem, a 400-line
poem, by the Hungarian poet Mihály Babits, called
“The Book of Jonah.” It’s in rhymed couplets. I
decided early on that I was not going to rhyme that
poem. It was the narrative that I wanted to come
through, and I didn’t want it impeded, I didn’t want it
to sound archaic in English.
RPM: And was it your impression that in Hungarian it
was a modern or an experimental poem
BB: It was done in, I think, the 1940s, something like
that. It’s not that it was so experimental. It was very
relevant and incidentally, in its own way, very
political. Let me try to put this in context. There is of
course free verse being written in Hungarian today,
and there has been for several decades. But not as
much as there has been in English. Because a poet
would have to abandon the immensely rich
possibilities that Hungarian offers. And there weren’t
many poets who wanted to do that. Plus it required a
totally different concept of lineation, of how a poem
flows, and that came late to Hungarians. Today there’s
a great deal of free verse being written.
RPM: When a poet like Ottó Orbán does something
that seems to be inspired by Walt Whitman, how does
that look in Hungarian In translation, some of his
poems look like he’s been inspired by Whitman.
BB: Orbán had all kinds of facilities. I mean,
Whitman was indeed a kind of influence on him. So
was Robert Lowell, so was Allen Ginsberg.
RPM: That all goes back to Whitman.
BB: Orbán wrote sonnets, wonderful sonnets.
RPM: In Hungarian, would these poems that you’ve
translated in The Journey of Barbarus still have a lot
of attention to form
BB: Yes. In some sonnets I’ve got second and fourth
lines rhyming, and I don’t at the moment know
exactly what the Hungarian was, but it was formal.
Maybe there were two rhymes in each stanza rather
than one. There were a lot of rhymes in here, but
there’s no way out of it. I mean that suffixal endings,
including plural endings, are more limited in number
than our endings in English.
RPM: You can rhyme just by doing the plurals
BB: Not quite. But making a plural requires an entire
syllable, as does a third-person verb ending.
Incidentally, there is no differentiation in Hungarian
between he, she, or it in a verb ending.
RPM: So in the title of Imre Oravecz’s book When
You Became She, how does that work
BB: Oh, well, that [laughs] — The title of that book in
Hungarian translates as September 1972, which my
publisher rightly said would not be attractive to an
American audience. And he suggested When You
Became She, which is what Oravecz was getting at,
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