{"id":7431,"date":"2022-08-16T01:15:49","date_gmt":"2022-08-16T01:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/?p=7431"},"modified":"2022-08-29T10:15:17","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T10:15:17","slug":"borbely2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/borbely2\/","title":{"rendered":"Language is a Graveyard: Szil\u00e1rd Borb\u00e9ly and Literary Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Portrait\"<\/a>
Szil\u00e1rd Borb\u00e9ly (Photo: Lenke Szil\u00e1gyi, courtesy Kalligram Press, Budapest)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Connecting a book with its audiences in another language often means bridging two separate, culturally different worlds. The intricacies of the source and target languages always make the translator\u2019s work even more difficult.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most famous authors preoccupied (to put it mildly) with translation was <\/span>Milan Kundera<\/span><\/a>, a writer who kept rewriting his texts over and over (on translating Kundera, see Woods, 2006). Although under very different circumstances from Borb\u00e9ly, not only in his languages (mosty Czech to French, his second writing language), but also geopolitical reasons in the 1970s and 1980s, Kundera went sofar as to revise and rewrite previously published Czech and French editions of his work, blurring the boundaries between original and translation\u2013\u2013creatively or arrogantly, depending on one<\/span>\u2019s taste.<\/span> The verdict on this extreme exercise of authorial control is ultimately up to the reader.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>

Kafka\u2019s Sohn (In German)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is no foolproof manual for literary translation. There are best practices, but it is decidely an art rather than a science: either one has a feel for it or not. For beginners, handbooks such as <\/span>A Companion to Translation Studies: Companion to Translation Studies<\/span><\/i><\/a> by Berman and Porter (2014) are mightily helpful (just as a review article or introductory text on any new topic can be, says the librarian in me). It\u2019s a great start, especially if readers use the well-curated footnotes to begin exploring the field of translation theory for themselves. The index runs 26 pages (Berman and Porter, 2014, 612-638). The cited authors\u2019 list is impressive: Walter Benjamin, Borges, Derrida, Eco, Foucault, Gadamer, Heidegger, Jakobson, Paul De Man, Wittgenstein, and so on\u2013\u2013names that a young Borb<\/span>\u00e9ly might have just learned in the mid-1980s, reading and discussing their works in Hungarian in one of the famous <\/span>\u201c<\/span>living-room seminars.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These were ad-hoc, grassroot literary groups of like-minded, aspiring poets, writers, and critics, who gathered regularly in a someone\u2019s apartment to <\/span>deconstruct the world as it presented itself to them in Communist Hungary\u2013\u2013with the help of Derrida et al. Borb<\/span>\u00e9ly<\/span>\u2019s published texts indicate that some eventually managed to reconstruct that world as well, capturing the essence of those times and breathing new literary life into them in the present day. Borb<\/span>\u00e9ly recalls that, as a young author, he was <\/span>\u201cinterested in how to use literature in a way that we understand things that are not only literature,\u201d and trying to figure out \u201chow to write in a way that I shouldn\u2019t do things that I couldn\u2019t stomach.\u201d (Borb<\/span>\u00e9ly, 2006<\/span>, p. 853). Not a translator himself, Bo<\/span>rb\u00e9ly benefited tremendously from studying literary theories and criticism to translate past into present. His understanding of what a text is capable to achieve will empower his translators to dissect and reconstruct his writing in any language.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>References<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n