Posts filed under 'hungary'

Translation Tuesday: “The Vanished City Hall” by Zsolt Bajnai

But, well, in the last decades so many beautiful and interesting things have vanished from our midst.

I first read “The Vanished City Hall” one extremely foggy morning, on Mr. Bajnai’s historical blog, as I was just waking up. We had had a series of foggy days, so when I came to the part that mentioned the fog—“With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings”—I began to wonder whether this had actually happened: whether the city hall had been taken away and I simply hadn’t noticed. As I read further, I found more and more hints that this was a satire (for one thing, it was assigned to the blog’s “Szolnok Stories” category), but on my way to work, I bicycled by the city hall just to make sure. By then the fog had lifted, and the domes glistened in the sun. When translating this story, I tried to convey both the rhythm of the language and the bizarre plausibility of the plot. The former required rearrangement of the sentences at times; the latter required colloquial flexibility. I strove to convey not only the events, but the many voices of the many characters, from the anonymous complainant to the “ridiculed local architect-historian.” I enjoyed the time spent with the words and hope that the English translation will reach many readers.

—Diana Senechal, translator

By Monday morning Szolnok’s city hall had disappeared. To wit: on the plot at the corner of Kossuth Square and Táncsics Street, on the flattened, muddy soil, nothing was left but some construction debris and truck tire marks. And the worn metal fence, which had been erected around the building as early as Friday. What had become of the building was anyone’s guess.

“On Friday afternoon we noticed some people putting up a fence around the city hall,” said a resident of the house across Kossuth Square who requested anonymity. “It didn’t even occur to us that something fishy was up. We thought they were re-renovating the building. My wife even said that this was Brussels all over again. She meant that the union must have funded some newfangled idiocy.”

From neighboring Táncsics Street, on Friday afternoon, someone started placing phone calls to various authorities. He called the police, public places, even the city hall, because, according to later hearsay, he was furious that people would operate enormous machines on the weekend in downtown Szolnok. After the fence-builders left, the excavators, conveyed in the same trailer to the site, got down to work. In retrospect, you could deduce that the perpetrators had been playing it safe. Their demolition of the city hall, built in 1884, began from the courtyard. This way, until Sunday evening, locals could sense that something was happening behind this neoclassical building’s street facades only because huge dump trucks turned up in great density, plowing the cobblestone roads not only around Táncsics street, but around the theatre and Verseghy Park.

The police told the caller on Friday afternoon that this case was outside of their purview until blood flowed or a crime was committed. True, they had sent a patrol once or twice to the site because of the noise. It could later be gleaned from the reports that each time they came, they warned the noisemakers to knock it off, and each time they received a promise in return. So after the fourth or fifth call, the Miskolc center no longer forwarded the notices to Szolnok. They later explained that after so many calls they began to suspect a prank.

With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings. Not only that, but it just so happens that this, the city’s main square, is basically deserted except during Advent and a few summer weekends, so hardly anyone heads there on non-workdays. Still more important—and a ridiculed local architect-historian brought this to our attention years ago—is that Szolnok has long been accustomed to weekend demolitions, old buildings disappearing, all sorts of investment projects without any advance announcement or on-site notice. Later it turned out that the perpetrators knew about none of this yet benefited from it. “Probably all of this started with a real estate sale contract that had been switched with another by mistake,” stated the police officer originally in charge of the investigation, who was convinced he had been fired on the go because the facts—forget about how much time he had put into assembling them—seemed so incredible that those with a stake in covering up the case could easily chalk them up to incompetence. “The contract of sale for the apartment building at Kossuth Square 7-8 was carelessly replaced at some time or other with the decades-older contract for number 9, and thus only the transfer of Kossuth Square 9 was valid. This faulty contract then ended up, through an inheritance lawsuit, in the hands of a resourceful local lawyer, who was up to his neck in debt, from which he essentially released himself through the sale of the city hall.” In the former policeman’s seemingly unbelievable report, it appears that, with the sale contract that he had acquired for pennies, the lawyer paid off Serbian creditors, who in turn paid Bulgarian human smugglers with the title to a larger building in the center of an unknown Hungarian city. Later the property, which had never actually been seen by anyone in this succession of deals, and which in the meantime had been described as a “nineteenth-century eclectic office building,” went on paper in a thick dossier to an investor, and from him to an Austrian financial institution as collateral for defaulted loans. Then, during the bank’s year-end balance beautification process, thanks to a recommendation prepared by a Hungarian junior clerk working in Austria and supplemented with photos, topographic identifier, and building history, a Hungarian big businessman became the owner of that basemented, storied, domed building. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria!

This week, our writers bring you news from Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In Slovakia, this year marks the centenary of the birth of renowned writer Ladislav Grosman, while Pavol Rankov has made history by winning the European Book Prize 2020; in Hungary, acclaimed poet Krisztina Tóth is being targeted after criticising some books on the country’s school curriculum; and in Bulgaria, George Orwell’s works being released to the public domain in 2021 has sparked a plethora of new translations. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-large, reporting from Slovakia and Hungary

The beginning of the year marked 100 years since the birth and forty years since the death of Slovak-born writer Ladislav Grosman. Born in the eastern Slovak town of Humenné on 4 February 1921, he moved to Prague after the war where he made his mark as a writer in the 1960s and, following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, emigrated to Israel where he died on 25 January 1981. Grosman is primarily known for his novel The Shop on Main Street, which he later adapted into a screenplay for the film that won the foreign language Oscar in 1985. His other books, including Nevesta (The Bride) and the 1000-page-long novel Adam remain largely unknown.

With the European Book Prize 2020 for his novel It Happened on the First of September (Or Some Other Time), Pavol Rankov scored a hat trick, becoming the first Slovak recipient of three international prizes (the book won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 and the Polish Angelus Prize in 2011). This time a panel of thirteen journalists from the leading European media chose his book as a “a great contribution to researching the memory and consciousness not only of the people of the Eastern bloc but of all Europe.” Reacting to the news Rankov said: “I view the award as more of a recognition of the French translation than of the original Slovak text, which the jury never held in their hands.” Michel Chasteau’s French translation appeared in 2019, and the book is now also available in English, in Magdalena Mullek’s translation.

Slovakia’s literary scene is unthinkable without the colourful figure of publisher Koloman Kertész Bagala. Since founding his publishing house thirty years ago, Bagala has published 500 books by Slovak writers, organised twenty-five rounds of his short story competition Poviedka, and hundreds of discussions, readings and other events, as well as discovering many new Slovak writers. Bagala, sometimes referred to as the “unguided missile of Slovak literature,” has persevered despite several near-bankruptcies and nervous breakdowns. While some authors moved on to more mainstream houses, many have remained fiercely loyal. They include Balla, a past Asymptote contributor, who immortalised the maverick publisher in his novel Big Love. When his narrator bumps into Bagala in a seedy bar in Rotterdam, he observes: “This man looks perfectly at home wherever he is, as if he belongs wherever he happens to be . . . Dishevelled, unkempt, unshaven, frustrated, on the brink of bankruptcy and madness—but right where he belongs.”

And in the week when we celebrate International Women’s Day, we can’t ignore disturbing news from Slovakia‘s southern neighbour, Hungary: Krisztina Tóth, one of most acclaimed contemporary Hungarian poets and writers (and past Asymptote contributor) has become the target of a vicious media campaign after she criticized some of the books in the country’s school curricula for depicting women as passive and submissive (more information on Hungarian Literature Online). Taken out of context, these were presented as calls for the banning of literary classics and she has been subjected to horrendous harrassment, even having dog excrement pushed through her letter box. In an interview with the Czech writer Dora Kaprálová for the Slovak-Hungarian online journal dunszt.sk, Tóth said: “Power has no sense of humour, authoritarian regimes destroy the sense of playfulness and humour, since they assume a variety of points of view. My weapon is irony. But now my weapon has been destroyed and I am bleeding.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The best in the international literary scene right here at Asymptote

Welcome back for a fresh week of literary news from around the globe, featuring the most exciting developments from Hungary, Norway, Spain and the Caribbean. 

Diána Vonnák, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hungary: 

A major literary event, the 25th International Book Festival was held in Budapest between 19-22 April. The annual festival is not only a feast of newly published Hungarian literature with roundtable discussions, speeches, and meet-ups, but also a hub for translated literature. This year, Serbia was the guest country, with invited authors such as Milovan Danojlić, Laslo Blasković, Dragan Hamović, Igor Marojević, Radoslav Petković, Dragan Velikić, and Vladislava Vojnović. Authors discussed the place of Serbian literature in the broader European context, and their Hungarian translators talked about the translation process.

A highlight of the Festival was guest of honour Daniel Kehlmann’s discussion of his recent book Tyll, a chronicle of the Thirty Years War, featuring the archetypical German trickster Till Eulenspiegel. Kehlmann received the chief award of the Festival, the Budapest Prize, previously awarded to Jorge Semprún, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass, and Michel Houellebecq, among others.

The International Book Festival was not the only place where great news about translated literature could be shared these weeks. The Hungarian Books and Translations Office of the Petőfi Literary Museum announced the list of subventioned books for the first half of 2018. Asymptote contributor and Close Approximations winner Owen Good received support for Krisztina Tóth’s Pixel, soon to be published by Seagull Books. We can also look forward to Peter Sherwood’s translation of The Birds of Verhovina by Ádám Bodor, supported by the same agency.

András Forgách’s No Live Files Remain has just been published by Simon and Schuster in Paul Olchváry’s translation. The book narrates Forgách’s reckoning with his mother’s past as an informant of the Kádár regime. Facing family histories and friendships compromised by agent activities is a peculiar genre in Hungarian literature—and literary traditions of virtually every country that experienced intense state surveillance. No Live Files Remain is a crucial addition to this thread, a mother’s story that could serve as a counterpart of Péter Esterházy’s account of his father in Revised Edition.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Tempodrome by Simona Popescu

"You have as many countries as the languages you speak."

Today’s Translation Tuesday is brought to you by MARGENTO, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova. The lyrical excerpts from Romanian essayist and poet Simona Popescu’s writing explore a mood—memories of the nineties related as if at a remove, stating plainly what the narrator saw, while encapsulating the myriad complications simmering beneath the still surface of the narration. 

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like
to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose one part
of the pattern upon another.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Then everything regroups as if in a hot fog
where things recover among the obscure
plantations of the accidental.”
—Gellu Naum, The Blue Riverbank

“I have no idea of time, and I don’t wish to have”
—Wislawa Szymborska, On the Tower of Babel

In the house of my childhood, somewhere in my parents’ mixed up bookcase, leaning on a couple of books stood a black teddy bear in a white sash ribbon with some red lettering on it saying Grüsse aus Berlin. On other shelves there were other “souvenirs” from Abroad. For instance, a wooden cylinder with a lid in the shape of a Russian church dome, with a rose and the word “Bulgaria” burnt onto it. Inside was a vial of Bulgarian rose perfume. My folks never traveled Abroad. In fact, nobody in our little town ever traveled Abroad. Not even the Saxons and the Hungarians who, judging by the language they spoke, had to have another country somewhere, if push came to shove, right? You have as many countries as the languages you speak, the saying went. The Hungarians and the Saxons were therefore half foreign. But even so, even they never got Abroad—it was only the old people that sometimes went, but they always returned. Nobody needed them and they didn’t need anybody or anything except a quiet life in their homes. Only old people returned. They and the migrating birds.

It was me who had brought the rose perfume home. I was 12 when I went, without my parents, on a trip—well, yes—Abroad. I don’t recall much. It was I think in spring, there was I think a crisp sun, I was on a terrace I think by the sea, somewhere on a cliff, there were breakers I think in front of me, not very close though, I think I never went down the stairs to dip my toes in the sea. In the “vision” conjured by the word “Bulgaria” in which I’m a child a milky light and a bluish expanse approach me. And I’m all alone there, for a second, my back turned on everybody else. And I can hear a roaring wind. (I am back there anytime I want. I’m 12 and then—as I keep adding now—44. I hold an invisible butterfly net in my hand and collect images with it.) READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 21 May 2015: Booker, the Man

This week's literary highlights from across the globe

Happy Friday, Asymptoters! You must be rather cozy living under a rock if you haven’t heard the most explosive news of the week: Hungarian writer (and Asymptote contributor!) László Krasznahorkai has won the prestigious International Man Booker Prize this year. He received 60,000 pounds sterling, but a 15,000-pound prize for his English-language translators is split between George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet (also contributors to both blog and journal). This year’s snag means things are stacked two-for-two with regard to the Man Booker and Asymptote. Two years ago, Lydia Davis earned top honors—and you can see her work in the journal, herself translating from the Dutch in 2013. Furthermore in lit prizes: at Wall Street Journal, an interview with the most recent “Arab Booker”—also known as the International Prize for Arab Fiction—prizewinner: Tunisian novelist and prizwinner Shukri Mabkhout opens up on novelizing the political crises and opening literary doors in the region.   READ MORE…

Proust Questionnaire: Tim Wilkinson

...a "Lydia Davis" questionnaire for Hungarian-language translator Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson (b. 1947) grew up in Sheffield, S. Yorks., but has lived most his adult life in London. He is the primary English translator of Hungarian writer Imre Kertész (titles including Fatelessness, Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, Detective Story, The Pathseeker and Dossier K) and, more recently, Miklós Szentkuthy (Marginalia on Casanova, Towards the One and Only Metaphor), among others, as well as shorter works by a wide range of other contemporary Hungarian-­language authors. Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize for 2005.

Q: How did you learn your foreign language, and how did you begin working as a literary translator?

A: I learned Hungarian “on the hoof,” mainly by moving to Budapest around Easter 1970 and marrying the girl with whom I had by then fallen in love, having made several trips there since 1964. I might add that I sort of picked up German in much the same way (minus the love complications), by taking up a job in Switzerland, 20 years later. Contact with speakers of a language is, for me, the important feature, just as it is with small children… The strictly “literary” translation work only really came about ten years ago, after I had been translating a fairly wide range of non-fiction (mostly with a pronounced historical flavor) as an add-on to my main job (which was in an altogether different field and had little or nothing to do with translation). READ MORE…

Long Day Away

Remembering Szilárd Borbély

I just keep on repeating his name, I call out to him, I call him on the phone, as if he would answer. I have no words. The demons of death had been hovering around Szilárd for a long time. I was afraid of them at times—he certainly was not. He lived with them, but he did not feed them. READ MORE…