Considering that you are not only a writer but also a translator who has prepared highly original translations of several excellent books, don't you sometimes cringe at reading your own novels in English or German?
I try to help my translators as much as I can without going on their nerves. I keep a large file in which I collect all their questions and my answers, and I send this to translators who approach me. It also includes comments, photographs and drawings of various objects. It is getting bigger. Sooner or later, I'll post some details on my homepage because it is quite educational. Reading my text in a foreign language is an uplifting experience and at the same time a good lesson, because it makes me realise that there is only one language I master to some extent, Hungarian. Even if I can speak and read in other languages, I still cannot assess the quality of a translation. Perhaps the only exception is English, because I am indeed in close contact with the language. But, for instance, reading a chapter of my book in Romanian, I had to realise that I could only say if the translation was accurate. I could not tell whether it actually sounded good.
Some excellent Hungarian books have gone unnoticed because of their poor first translation, but later found immediate successes when a second translation was completed. For a young writer who has written two books, it is extremely important that your prose should be as effective in translation as in Hungarian. Doesn't this make you nervous?
A little. But I trust my translators and I myself have translated some extremely difficult texts that worked in the end. So my experience shows that translation is indeed possible. Of course it will not be exactly like the original, but a lot of it will go though. And it is very good to see how conscientiously people work with my sentences. It is good to talk with them about the text and see they were indeed touched by the world in the book, considering that they spent weeks or months in it.
Many people are not familiar with it, so it is worth telling them how this miracle happened.
A lot of things had to come together, one event followed the other. I made friends with an excellent and talented translator Pali Olchváry who liked my book and started working on a translation. We sent over the finished chapters to some of the largest American magazines and one of them was published last autumn in Paris Review, which is one of the five most important American literary magazines. In the meantime, my Hungarian publisher Magvető managed to attract interest for the novel at one of the most important German publishers Suhrkamp. After this, they were approached by Polish, Slovak and Slovenian publishers. Publication in the Paris Review resulted in considerable reactions in American literary circles and a young agent from a serious agency fell in love with the text and made it a matter of heart to find a publisher for the novel. Starting at that point, events accelerated and now it seems the novel will be published in many countries, from Brazil to Norway.
I used the word "miracle" before. Does it ever occur to you that this may be some miracle, a dream? What can one do with such success?
Whatever happened so far is only the opportunity of success but it is something that I need not and should not ponder. It has not changed me, it does not make it more difficult or easy to write. I continue sitting in my kitchen the same way, in my armchair facing the window, trying to envision the scenes for the new novel I'm working on, battling with the sentences I am writing. This battle sometimes feels completely pointless, and at other times simply hopeless. But then I eventually always find the right sentence, even if it sometimes takes several weeks. And then the books slowly start building, from sentence to sentence. If it seems hopeless to look ahead, then one must look back and it gives one the power to continue.
Your novel set in Romania reveals a terribly tough world. Not a very happy childhood. But from the perspective of a child, "from down under," brutality and dictatorship can be very well presented. Is this why you opted for a child protagonist? Or was it because of the mode of storytelling, because the story sounds more dramatic this way?
These considerations probably all contributed to it, but it was not such a conscious or premeditated decision. All of a sudden I heard the voice of Djata (the narrator of the novel) describing the brutal football training in the Wold's End chapter and this voice was so powerful and intensive that perhaps I could not have suppressed it even if I had wanted to. More than hearing his voice, I somehow saw through his eyes and I could describe this semi-fictional world as an eleven-year-old saw it or would have seen it. Many people refuse to believe that the book bears only a trace of autobiography.
What can foreigners do with this world? What is your experience, can they have a feel for it?
I have so far received relatively few reactions, but those were very positive. They said the voice was so convincing that it made them feel the atmosphere of the place on their skin, which brought the whole thing painfully close, despite the exotic setting. And then it turns out that this world is not that far from theirs - and even the most open society can close up within seconds.
Author: Erzsébet Eszéki
