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Translating Endre Ady
__________________________________________________________________________________________ Translating Endre Ady
I believe that the magnitude of a poet directly
relates to the poet’s unpredictability, i.e., when it
is impossible to foresee the next line after reading a
couple of lines or the subject of the next poem after
looking at couple of them. The style of the author,
however, should be easily recognizable. If it is not,
the poem could be an imitation, and if nothing at all
can be predicted, it is simply an abstract painting
using words as color spots.
Endre Ady’s poetry was mathematically analyzed. It
turned out to be highly unpredictable, although Ady
used a set of fixed key words scattered all
around his poems.
Ady created his own poetical world and a new
strikingly fresh language. He
introduced scores of innovations in the architectonics
and rhythm of the verse. He found an intermediate
stage between classic verse and vers libre.
Besides, in my (Soviet) time, many of his poems seemed
written about not Hungary but Russia.
I got interested in Ady when I had learned that he was
the favorite poet of Bela Bartok (1881-1945), my
favorite composer. Bartok, too, created his own
unpredictable but instantly recognizable world.
Together with Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), he left
us a panoramic musical picture of the twentieth
century. Bartok wrote it as a prophet and Shostakovich
did it as a post
factum chronicler. To my ear, the last
symphonies and quartets of Shostakovich clearly echoed
Bartok: the prophesies came true.
Ady was translated in the USSR under ideological
sterility (his brand of patriotism would definitely
reserve him a place in a Soviet prison) and only from
a word-for-word Russian text. Having acquired some
limited knowledge of Hungarian, I looked into the
original. I immediately understood why Ady had not
been given the place he deserved in the world
literature: he was untranslatable. The reasons for
that were some unique properties of the Hungarian
language as well as the ability of Ady to pump such
emotional energy into short words, lines, and either
truncated or stretched out stanzas as if a line had to
shoot a beam like a laser.
Ady used the key words not as much for the content as
for the timbre and atmosphere.There is an apparently
insurmountable obstacle for translating his short
words into much longer Russian ones: bus (bush: sad),
ãðóñò-íûé, kis (kish: little), ìà-ëåíü-êèé, nagy
(nad': great), âå-ëè-êèé, uj (uy: new), íî-âûé, ven
(ven: old), ñòà-ðûé , and , especially, czok (chok:
kiss), ïî-öå-ëóé. That was a real headache, especially
taking to account the habit of the Russian words to
grow long tails of suffixes and endings. It looks like
English could be a more suitable language for
translating Ady.
Ady is usually characterized as symbolist, which
is only partially true because of his passionate
intensity rarely if ever found in the typical
symbolist melancholy. The political overtones of many
of his poems are not typically symbolic either.
Translation of poetry is a curious area of human activity. Kalevala, the epos of Finland, provided the foot for Henry Longfellow’s Hiawatha , and the Russian writer Ivan Bunin translated Hiawatha, as many believe, as “better than the original.” To my younger ears, the Russian translations of Charles Baudelaire sounded better than the original.
Poetic
translations were something like the Internet of the
time.
Several
of my Ady translations were published in a joint
Russian-Hungarian edition. I saw the book for the
first time in the Chita labor camp, where a bookshop
used to came once a year. I bought it and left
as gift to my burglar-poet friend.
I cannot say that I have managed to translate Ady. My
limited knowledge of Hungarian could bring errors. My
translations are not natural enough and even not mad
enough to render the spirit of Ady. Still, somebody
can be more successful. People climb Everest because
they know it exists.
Once I found an Endre Ady web site maintained by
a young Hungarian girl, Katalin Kelemen.
Answering my quesion, she told me that at least some
young people in Hungary knew, read, and loved Ady. To
me it seems amazing because we know how the
school drill can destroy any love of literature. ________________________________________________________________________________ My translations of Ady: http://spirospero.net/ADYRus.html
or http://spirospero.net/EndreAdy.html MAIN PAGE http://spirospero.net
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