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The Petőfi Literary Museum?s (PIM) Hungarian Book and Translation Support Office decided earlier in the week about the allocation of nearly 18 million forints under the arrangements of the Publishing Hungary Programme.
Foreign publishers had until May 31 to apply for funding from the Hungarian Book and Translation Support Office for planned new translations of Hungarian works in the next two years. A total of 71 applications were submitted by the deadline.
The committee, which comprised László Bengi (ELTE University), Pál Hatos (Balassi Institute), Ildikó Józan (ELTE University), Sándor Szakály (Károli Gáspár Reformed University), Attila Thimár (Pázmány Péter Catholic University) and Dóra Károlyi (PIM), granted support to more than half of the applicants. As a result, 39 publishers will get 17.9 million forints of support to translate 40 works by 33 Hungarian authors into 21 languages.
The winning bids include contemporary works, as well as classics. Dezső Kosztolányi?s novel Nero will be translated into French, his novel Kornél Esti will be translated into Macedonian and Skylark will be translated into Swedish.
Works by György Spiró will be translated into three languages thanks to winning bids by publishers from Poland, Austria and Italy.
Publishers from Britain, the US, Portugal, Switzerland and Romania have also been granted support.
László Krasznahorkai?s Sátántangó and Zsigmond Sándor Papp?s new novel Little Lives will be published in Romanian thanks to the grants.
The amount of support generally covers 40-60 percent of the translation costs. They will be paid once the work is published. The first payments are expected to be made this year as Miklós Szentkuthy?s Marginalia on Casanova is due to come out in New York in a few weeks and a volume of poetry by Sándor Weöres will be published in Finnish for the Helsinki Book Fair, where Hungary will be an honorary guest, in October.
The PIM Hungarian Book and Translation Support Office said it hoped that similar amount of additional funding for translation support will become available before the end of this year.
Simon said at an event last Friday that he planned to provide an additional 100 million forints for the publication of Hungarian books abroad.
