Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

English-speaking reader will also be treated to
the same level of linguistic bravura as the reader
of the original, which is a tribute to the art and
craft of the translator, George Szirtes. He is a
much acclaimed bilingual poet living in
England, who has translated many books and
poems from Hungarian, including The
Melancholy of Resistance, an earlier novel by
Krasznahorkai (Quartet, 1999). His numerous
awards include a 2005 PEN Translation Fund
Grant to translate War and War.
On the whole, Szirtes is exceptionally true
to the original. He masterfully handles the
challenge of indirect speech, which in English
requires a different treatment of tenses than in
Hungarian, and navigates the minefield of runon
sentences that are not problematic in
Hungarian but are tricky in English. Both of
these tasks require great attention to detail while
following the meandering sentences. Though
some might think that the endless sentences
pose a serious syntactic challenge, in reality the
translation requires much less rearrangement
than one would expect.
Szirtes has witty solutions for potentially
awkward translations. He used “Teflon heart,”
words that occur in English song lyrics, to
translate “Ragaszthatatlan szív” (ungluable
heart) from the lyrics of an actually existing
song Korin hears in Hungary. Instances of
foreign-language phrases within the text are
handled well, either when the foreign language
is English for Hungarians or Hungarian for
Americans. The confusion of the curious form
“lahsmini” and its revelation as “last minute”
(34) is done so smoothly in the translation that it
does not matter that the speakers are Hungarian.
In another instance, on Korin’s arrival in New
York City, the translator has to clarify that for
lack of English, Korin is talking in Hungarian to
the immigration officer, and at the end of his
speech uses two English words: “no
understand.” In his translation, Szirtes puts in
the Hungarian words for this phrase, followed
by “in other words,” and the English translation,
to which he then appends the clause: “adding,
usefully, in English, No understand” (51). The
only element that got lost in translation is the
fact that Korin used a familiar form of address
— a notoriously difficult stylistic level to
convey — in his Hungarian speech to the
American officer, which he most likely would
not have done had the officer been Hungarian.
In a few instances, Szirtes’ minute insertions are
outright elegant: they add to the reader’s
enjoyment but at the same time are thoroughly
in keeping with Krasznahorkai’s style. On p. 50,
for example, instead of the simple “landing in
the New World” of the original, Szirtes uses the
expression “arriving on the terra firma of the
New World.” On p. 40, one finds a paragraph in
which Korin describes his debt to the Greek god
Hermes. The author calls this debt in Hungarian
“one that cannot be unstitched (or disentangled)
any further,” and Szirtes amusingly calls it
“hermetically sealed.” In one puzzling instance,
however, Szirtes renders the perfectly simple
Hungarian phrase “egy pillanat alatt” (in an
instant) as “before you could say Jack
Robinson” (46), even though both the speaker
and the listener are Hungarians and the
conversation takes place in Hungary. I, at least,
found this solution jarring.
Items that need explanations are handled
smoothly. On p. 41, for example, Szirtes adds
“the psychoanalyst” to give a context to the
name “Kerényi.” At other times, such as in the
case of the Hungarian airlines, MALÉV, which
recurs many times in the novel, he lets the name
stand without explanation until its nature
emerges in the course of the story. When
Hungarian words may have multiple meanings
that are appropriate in the context, he may use
two words to translate one, for example,
“restlessness and anxiety” on p. 41 to render the
Hungarian word “nyugtalanság.” Conversely, on
p. 142, when Korin’s host goes on about his
relationship to art, that (in a literal translation)
“he was ordained to it by fate, he was preparing
for it all his life, he was born to do it,” Szirtes
elegantly shortens this to “art was his raison
d’étre.”
Having witnessed this level of ingenuity
and acuity in George Szirtes’ translation, I was
somewhat puzzled by the number of
mistranslations and inaccuracies. Taken
Translation Review 77