Hungarian writer György Dragomán, author of The White King, talks to James Smith about living in a police state, the rhythms of the Hungarian language and the intricate process of translation.
You acknowledge at the end of The White King that you were a great fan of The Last of the Mohicans as a boy. Did this influence the the ‘boy’s own’ nature of Djata’s adventures?
It may well have. Cooper was very popular in my childhood, as well as Karl May, a German writer with many books about the wild west (I don’t think he is much known in the English speaking world, but he was very popular in Hungary and Germany.). So we played games of cowboys and Indians, with great passion and dedication. At one point I had real feathered arrows, an amulet made of bear claw around my neck, and a tomahawk made of tin and wood.
We never had a real tribe though. But we played a lot together, all the kids from the block of flats from our neighbourhood. Our games must have influenced Djata’s adventures, but they were not that violent, violence was more a sort of pretend violence used to establish a pecking order. But still, I had my hand broken in a fight.
Of course, there is more to the book than fights. In fact, I think the most moving chapters are the quieter ones (the time Djata spends with his grandfather; talking to Pickaxe; the incident with the chestnut roll).
It is easy to focus on the fights, but what interested me most while writing, was how inner freedom and the self can be preserved in a society where freedom should not exist. And these quiet moments, even though some of them are quite tense, play a very important role in Djata’s mental development. There are quite a few moments of tenderness in these chapters, we eventually find out that even Pickaxe, one of the most feared and brutal characters in the book is capable of human feelings.
I very much like your portrait of Djata’s mother. She is angry, despairing, alone, but she works hard to bring up her son.
She does her best, under very hard circumstances. She is one of the most complex figures in the book, and the chapters about her relationship to her son were very difficult to write because very little of their relationship comes openly to the surface, but Djata is very much aware of all her moods and feelings, as he focuses on her tiniest gestures and frowns, and tries to understand all the unspoken truth her mother tells him with her every move. I don’t think I could have created her figure without the fierce and determined passion of my own mother.
It seems to me that the violence in the book stems from fear – everyone seems to be scared of someone else. Is that what it was like living behind the Iron Curtain?
There was an overall feeling of insecurity. You could never be sure of your position, and you could never know if you did things right. And there was no way to ask, as even asking could have put you in trouble. So it was a huge guessing game, and this led to much frustration, and also fear. But life was not this extreme, violence was not always this open, nor was fear always present. Life could be lived in a normal way, but under the surface even the most normal looking events were full of absurdity.
How much have things changed? (I remember reading in Anna Funder’s Stasiland that many East Germans preferred living with the certainties of the former regime …)
Fortunately for us all, things changed a lot. We now live in democracies; we have freedom of speech, and a free press. Of course things are far from ideal, as we did not do a very good job of confronting our past (to give you just one example: in Hungary the secret police files are still not open to the general public, even researchers and historians have a limited access).
The ideological background of our political parties are not really reflected in their practices, and the harsh realities of a globalised capitalism have come crashing down on many people, but I don’t think that there is any real sense of nostalgia about the past. A few people might miss the relative security of the state controlled society, but it is definitely not the general feeling.
You moved to Hungary when you were fifteen (in 1988). How much of The White King is based on experience and how much on imagination?
Before we moved I lived in the western part of Romania called Transylvania, as part of the Hungarian minority living there. My life was much less adventurous than Djata’s, our life was different, the state made our life difficult but it did not want to destroy us, as it does with his family. We of course had our troubles, and life was difficult, there were regular blackouts, everything was rationed, and life turned bleaker and bleaker.
Most of the chapters have a core of reality, an image I have seen, an object I owned or longed for, or a rumour I heard. Each chapter has grown out of a core like this, but none of the stories happened in their entirety.
Did you do much research for the book?
No, no research was needed; I just had to go back in the past, and try to remember the smells and sounds and images of my childhood in the most intense way possible. Then I had to find the images and the stories behind the images, and had to find a suitable structure for all the stories to come together.
I am interested in the fact that you are a translator from English into Hungarian, but that someone else translated your book into English. Can you explain how that feels?
I have done my share of translations, so I must tell you that being on the other side of the process was a marvellous feeling. I really appreciate my translator’s work, because I know very well how enormously difficult and challenging translation can be. Sometimes it is even more demanding than writing, as you have to take apart and recreate the original text in a matter of months, while you are subjected to the emotional weight of the text in a condensed way.
For example when I was translating Beckett’s Watt there was a moment when I felt that translation as such should be impossible, you can give all you have got, but it still won’t work. After a few days of utter depression I realized that my problems were not technical, but rather emotional, the despair emanating from the text was coming down on me. So translation made me live through a genuine moment of the beckettian 'I can’t go on, I’ll go on' experience.
This is what translating a powerful text does to you, so I just cannot be grateful enough when people are dedicating months or even years of their lives to bringing my own text to another language.
Of course there are also moments of near epiphany, when you suddenly understand the deep structure of a story, or are granted a revelation of how the writer might have used subtle images for a gradual focus shift, or to create a larger metaphor, which might not be obvious when just reading. Because of this I think translation is a very good way of learning about writing, it grants you an unparalleled understanding of language, structure, functionality and narration.
How did it work practically? Was it difficult not to get too involved?
Paul Olchváry is a brilliant and very dedicated translator; he was very patient in putting up with my attempts for help, we would often discuss certain problematic passages in great detail. As I know how the translation process works, I could relate to his problems, and I tried to do some of the legwork for him, providing him with all the background information the finding of which would have needed quite a lot of research.
I have compiled a large file full of comments, explanations and photos, as well as information about the period, and whenever one of my translators asks me a question I append it to the file. I try to be very accessible to all my translators, I try to answer all their questions and help them any way I can.
The real work is finding the rhythm and the music of the language and recreating the fast moving pace and the style of the original, and in this I cannot be of any help, because for this you need your own mother-tongue. But the English translation was especially important to me; as it belongs to the few languages I speak well enough to have been able to read the translation as it progressed, and seeing my work recreated in English vas very exciting.
I went to a book event at which a translator from Hungarian (Len Rix, who translates Antal Szerb’s novels) was talking about the beauty of the language and its uniqueness. Can you say something about that?
It is a Finno-Ugric language, meaning that apart from Finnish there is no other language resembling it in Europe. And even these two languages are far too distant from one another, so we do not understand a word of each others language, and learning it is not easy at all.
Hungarian is an agglutinating language, this means lots of suffixes, and an almost infinite variation of rhymes, and because of this, the language is very much suited to poetry, we can also use antic metre and stress-based metre, so almost all kinds of poetry can be translated keeping the original form.
And as we are a small language with only ten millions of speakers, translation has a very strong tradition, all of our poets have translated a lot of poetry. If you are curious and want to listen to the language, here is a sample:
Attila József’s Eszmélet recited by the famous actor Zoltán Latinovits
Which other Hungarian authors should we read?
I could give you a huge list, but I wont mention such well-known names as Sándor Márai, or Imre Kertész. I’ll suggest two epic works, and two shorter ones.
Miklós Bánffy’s great Transylvanian Trilogy was written in the thirties and shows the old Transylvania which is now gone forever, the life of the aristocracy before the First World War. An epic novel on the Anna Karenina scale it is a rich an melancholic description of an age wrapped around a love story.
Peter Esterházy is Hungary’s iconic post-modern writer, his Celestial Harmonies is a very baroque novel, compressing the whole of Hungarian history into a very enjoyable encyclopaedic work.
George Konrád’s Guest in My Own Country is an autobiographical work about how a boy in the early teens avoids deportation, and then has to deal with the loss of almost all his friends.
Gyula Krúdy’s Sunflower is one of our most sensual works. There is no one in Hungarian literature who could write with a more tangible passion about food or women.
Obviously I could go on, and I have not even mentioned our poets…
What are you working on at the moment?
My third novel, and some short stories. I have also promised my sons that I’ll finally write a proper story of all the bedtime tales I’ve been telling them for years.
(January 2008)
