On embarking on the translations I was aware of the daunting task in front of me. I was especially aware that others had already translated Radnóti’s poems into English, with the most ambitious work being that of Emery George, who published his complete poems in 1980.1 In the past few years I also became aware of the translations of selected poems by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S.J. Marks (Clouded Sky, 1972),2 George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer (Forced March, 2003),3 and Szuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner (Foamy Sky, 1992.)4 There have been others as well. Like many, I was first struck by Radnóti’s dramatic and almost mythic story, that of the 35-year-old poet and Holocaust victim whose final 10 poems are discovered in the pocket of his trench coat when his body was exhumed from a mass grave near Abda Hungary. I had been given a facsimile monograph of these poems, Radnóti Miklós Bori notesz (Bor Notebook of Miklós Radnóti)5 during a trip to Hungary, which was my first exposure to him. Along with the faded poems in his handwriting were photographs of Radnóti and his wife, Fanni, as well as of the remote forest where he had been killed, and the garden in Istenhegy that figures in some of his most famous poems. It was this monograph that set me on my journey to discover more about his work and to reading his poetry in the original Magyar tongue.
My link to Hungary dates from 1948, the year I was born to two Jewish parents, who unlike Radnóti had survived the Holocaust. I lived in Budapest with my parents and spent my summers with my great aunt and uncle, Aurilia and Ignácz Steiner, and their housekeeper, Bertushka, in Kiskunhalas, a small village near the Romanian border. It was an idyllic place with houses with thatched roofs, dirt roads, a profusion of roses, snapdragons and red poppies, and storks migrating from Egypt that raised their young in nests atop the chimneys. All three of my elderly summer guardians had survived the Terezin concentration camp just three years before. My great uncle was the physician for a large area surrounding Kiskunhalas, and I would sometimes see him rushing off into the night clutching his medical bag to board a horse-drawn carriage that had been sent to transport him to a woman in labor or to an emergency at the local hospital.
My bedroom was in the library and I was surrounded by books ranging from surgical texts and medical oddities to much of the canon of Hungarian literature, with a special emphasis on classics and poetry. By the ages of five and six I was reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Jules Verne in Hungarian and also spent many nights with Bertushka as she read to me Hungarian fairytales by candlelight. On other occasions I would listen to my great aunt reciting the poems of Petőfi, Arany, and Ady from memory, as well as poems by other great Hungarian poets. In this manner I was introduced to the riches of my mother tongue. Upon my return to Budapest for the school year, I had another literary mentor, my uncle Dezső, a machinist with a sixth- grade education who lived in the apartment below ours with my aunt, grandmother, and my two cousins. I visited them almost daily and upon arriving home from work, Dezső would invariably launch into a bombastic recitation of some patriotic Hungarian verse from memory, and somehow I was always the targeted audience. The joy on his face at such times could not escape me. It was because of these influences that I vowed at an early age that I would become both a poet and a physician, and I have had the good fortune to become both. I believe that it was the remembered images, sounds, smells and textures of the Hungarian countryside, as well as my learned reverence for language, which came as naturally to my family as breathing, that have served and sustained me on this long journey of translating one of Hungary’s great poets.
In tackling this project I was not seeking to improve on the work of my predecessors or fellow translators. Rather, I set before me the task of translating all the poems so that I could travel the same roads Radnóti had, following his central path as well as veering off with him over digressive roads and explorations. I knew that from the very start I had to make some hierarchical decisions. Would I place poetic coherence and tone ahead of fidelity to meter and rhyme, or could I achieve both? Would I be able to resist the temptation to “improve” on a poem, or would I be sensitive to retaining all its vulnerabilities, thereby affording the reader the opportunity to appreciate both Radnóti’s triumphs and failures? William Weaver also grappled with this dilemma when he wrote the following note to himself when translating the work of the Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda: “[D]o not try to clarify the meaning when Gadda has deliberately made it murky. Translation is not exegesis.”6 And finally, would I remain vigilant so that my own poetic voice would intrude as little as possible, so that the voice that we ultimately hear is as close as possible to that of Radnóti’s. I was haunted throughout by the knowledge that I have picked up many a book of translations of some great poet’s work and have come away wondering why that poet is considered great in his culture, or have come away with the feeling that I was reading something rigid and artificial, and that there was no possibility that what I had heard was the poet’s voice.
I drew much comfort from the reflections of other translators who also struggled with what seem the archetypal, and sometimes insurmountable, challenges of translation. Gregory Rabassa’s statements that “a translation can never equal the original”7 or that “a translation is never finished … and can go on to infinity”8 rang true, for I found myself translating most of the poems five to ten times and even then finding on occasion that what had seemed right several weeks before no longer did. His view of translation as transformation or adaptation that “mak[es] the new metaphor fit the original metaphor”9 was in keeping with my experience of the many elusive elements in translating poetry. His citing Jorge Luis Borges, who said that what he expected of a translator was “not to write what he had said but what he had wanted to say,”10 provided me with some small license to place poetic coherence above other considerations.
In grounding myself I was guided by the following statement by Edgar Allan Poe: “A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites by elevating the soul” (from The Poetic Principle, 1850). That quotation appears beneath his bronze bust in the much-neglected and beautiful outdoor Hall of Fame in the Bronx, New York, on what was once the old campus of New York University, and I committed it to memory 45 years ago at the age of 19. What it has suggested to me is that all successful poems reach a transcendent revelatory moment in which non-linguistic, imagistic and elemental psychological and emotional truths are reached, and that readers recognize these truths when achieved for they resonate in all of us. This, in addition to language, is what makes a poem; language is merely the tool that we use in our efforts to rise to this revelatory moment. I must quote here the remarkable insights of Frederick Turner, one of the translators of Radnóti, as he grapples with the profound idea of the existence of an “ur-language,” one to which all poetry aspires. I believe that he is expressing sentiments similar to those of Poe’s, sentiments that have been at the very foundation of my search to render Radnóti’s poems into English so that an English reader, far removed from Radnóti’s Finno-Ugric (Magyar) tongue, can hear and appreciate his distinctive voice. Below is Turner commenting on the myth of Orpheus, in which the poet travels to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, and on how this myth relates to the translating of the poems of Radnóti:
For the translator the myth holds special gifts. In order to recover the life of the dead poet [Radnóti], the translator must follow him into the land of the dead, must go underground with him and be reborn with him in his apotheosis. Our work as translators is … to find Radnóti’s unburied body and give it fit burial.… To translate is to die to one’s own language as the dead poet had died to his, and to go back to their common source. The poet, [Radnóti], as in [his poem] “Root,” lives underground, nourishing the branches of the flowering tree. Every poem is a flowering branch; to translate is to retrace that branch’s vitality down to its source, to where the other language branches off from the common root, and to follow it up into a new bough of blossoms. The tree of life is the tree of tongues, and under every poem’s words is an ur-language in which it was spoken before the poet himself translated it into Magyar or Latin or English. The “original” has never been written down, and every poem is an approximation of that orphic song which comes from the land of the dead, of the ever-living. Translation is not a correspondence between leaf and leaf, flower and flower, but a descent through the fractal cascades of the twigs, the forked branches, to the root where the original poem issues, and then, by the power of song, ascends along another branch. By the “ur-language” we do not mean some actual prehistoric language, like Indo-European.… The ur-language is the deep language that we share to some extent with other higher animals, the language of childhood, the words that we sometimes speak in dreams and that dissolve when, having awakened, we try to remember them. The world itself speaks a sort of objective poetry.…Rocks, trees, and beasts, come to listen to Orpheus because they want to hear how their own story comes out. The ur-language that they speak is not conscious of itself and does not know its own meaning.11
Although I had already read a substantial number of Radnóti’s poems in the original Hungarian, it was not until I started to translate the poems that I began to more fully understand them, recognize recurrent themes, or appreciate how one poem informed or clarified another. As the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer observed, “Reading is already translation, and translation is translation for the second time.… The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world.”12 John Felstiner, the translator of Paul Celan and Pablo Neruda, similarly notes that “[t]he fullest reading of a poem gets realized moment by moment in the writing of a poem. So translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation.”13
In translating one becomes quickly aware how easy it is to lose the “poetry” when moving from one language to another, for it seems that each language has its own music. By way of example, Margaret Sayers Peden notes, “The rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan or Italianate sonnet … demands almost impossible acrobatics from the English-language translator.”14
Languages are not equivalent. Some, such as English, are richer than others in word count, while others are richer in sound quality. In trying to achieve an equivalence between languages, Donald Frame notes, the translator often merely makes a text longer.15 At the pre-linguistic, pre-cognitive level of the mind it would seem that even the tone and texture of words as simple and as basic as the Hungarian este (evening) and éjszaka (night) conjure different images in the collective consciousness and collective memories of readers from each culture. When one addresses the differences in syntax between Hungarian and English, one can begin to understand Edward Seidensticker’s statement regarding his translations from the Japanese: “Japanese and English are very different languages. An English sentence hastens to the main point and for the most part lets the qualifications follow after. A Japanese sentence prefers to keep one guessing. The last element in the sentence reveals whether it is positive or negative, declaratory or interrogative.”16
Of more direct relevance is the dilemma of translating Radnóti’s famous eclogues into English; there is an immediate and fundamental challenge that is difficult to overcome. The classic hexameter, a line consisting of six feet, was used in Greek (e.g., Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey) and Latin literature (Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Each foot is generally made up of either two long syllables (spondees) or one long and two short syllables (dactyls) in the first four feet. The fifth foot is generally a dactyl and the last a spondee. Because English is a stress-timed language with vowels and consonants compressed between stressed syllables, writing a poem in hexameter results in a monotonous line that generally reads like bad prose. Although various English poets have attempted to write in classical hexameter, few have succeeded. A laudable exception is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s neglected masterpiece Evangeline, which begins: “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.” Interestingly, among the few languages in which classical hexameter can be used to create lyrical elements, and which are not stress-timed, are ancient Greek, Latin (which in practice tends to be more spondaic), and Hungarian. Clive Wilmer, in his collaborative translation with George Gömöri of selected poems by Radnóti,17 discusses the significance of the hexameter in Radnóti’s poetry.
Radnóti’s use of classical hexameter was in keeping with a long Hungarian tradition of utilizing the form in lyrical practice. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, quoting Ignotus (founder of the influential journal, Nyugat), writes that in the beginning of the nineteenth century, “the Greco-Latin verse forms had become the main vehicle for what the literate Hungarian audience felt was most important to be said.… The prosody of classical Latin poetry, when applied to Hungarian, can produce a rhythm more eloquent and natural than in any other living language.”18
While grappling with the above issues I approached the translation of each poem similarly. The first step was one of deconstruction or literal translation. While generally at that stage the poem itself made little sense as a poem, it did provide me with a list of words approximating the Hungarian words as closely as possible. Then I looked at the shape and structure of the poem and repeatedly reread the poem in Hungarian to understand as fully as possible Radnóti’s poetic intentions and hear the meter and lyrical elements. Then began the second phase: reconstruction. I focused on maintaining the integrity of the number of lines and, as closely as possible, the meaning of each line, although syntactic issues sometimes necessitated that the overall meaning from a single line be maintained by spreading it through more than one line. In this manner each poem went through five to ten drafts, and though frequently a draft had appeared satisfactory at first, when revisited days, weeks, or months later it no longer had the coherence and sense that it had at an earlier reading. It was a persistent phenomenon, this stage in which the mind accepts the psychological, imagistic, and linguistic coherence of the draft by melding the meaning of both the Hungarian and English versions as if the languages were one. I came to refer to this as the “transitional stage,” and tried to be on guard against its lulling presence. At this stage the inchoate frequently appeared coherent, and I have come to think that this reflects a basic neurologic phenomenon having something to do with the most fundamental elements of language. Perhaps it sheds light on Turner’s ideas about the “ur-language” in translation.
The final stage was looking at the poem as a whole and assuring myself that Radnóti’s poetic intentions, poetic coherence, lyricism, and tone had been preserved through the deconstruction, transitional phase, and reconstruction. I am by no means alone in viewing the translation process in the context of an architectural metaphor. Margaret Sayers Peden, in addressing the process of translating a poem by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, notes, “We cannot translate until we ‘do violence’ to the original literary work. We must destroy-deconstruct … before we can reconstruct.”19 There is of course an inherent danger in translating, for there is no guarantee that the reconstruction process will be successful. And so we are left with Robert Frost’s well-known dictum “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” and Paul Celan’s pessimistic remark on his struggle with translating Baudelaire from French into German: “Poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language.”
I have come to hope and trust, however, that when translation is effectively conducted, Edmund Keeley’s observation will hold true that “what constitutes poetry, at least in the individual case, is exactly what survives in translation: that which is so essentially poetic in a given poet’s voice that it can be heard in any translation.”20
—Gabor Barabas