Posts filed under 'artistry'

Afternoons—A Case Study: On Teodora Lalova’s Afternoons like these

December 15, 2021 | in Reviews | by Andriana Hamas

Lalova’s poetry confirms that regardless of the Other’s differences, we could always try and reach them by explaining . . . the unfamiliar details.

Afternoons like these by Teodora Lalova, translated from the Bulgarian by Jason H. Spinks, Kalin Petkov, and Gabriela Manova, Ars and Scribens Publishing, 2021

The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov writes in one of his books that “August is the afternoon of the year.” With this subtle line, he takes his rightful place next to other insatiable thinkers who have dwelled on the special character of this particular time of day, either attempting a convincing explanation for its beguiling qualities or giving up once and for all their efforts to figure it out. So, even if we choose to ignore the all too famous quote by Henry James about the aesthetic pleasure he derives from the phrase “summer afternoon,” we should at least pay attention to what Jorge Luis Borges had to say on the matter. In one of his short stories, “The End,” he notes that “There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”

While I was reading Teodora Lalova’s debut collection of poems, united under the title Afternoons like these, I similarly found myself on the brink of grasping a curious feeling, too elusive for me to fully comprehend. From my perspective, the text appeared to be very close to capturing that crucial essence of the hours preceding twilight that so often escapes our miserable efforts to express it in words. Each poem, as is to be expected, achieves this in its own way. Some prefer the ironic twist of fate, while others choose to shed light on the more delicate nuances of existence. There is also a third kind that tackles complex philosophical questions in an “unbearably light” manner. Nevertheless, once the piece has located the throbbing heart of the unique afternoon, it offers a single or several lines that are certain to remain with the reader:

On afternoons like these I want to write poems about the smell of chimney smoke,
about the unread books and about first loves.
Of course, on afternoons like these
I don’t have my notebook with me.

In Conversation: Len Rix on Translating Hungarian

April 30, 2018 | in Interviews | by Diána Vonnák

"Translation is itself an artistic enterprise, an act of co-creation, relying on empathy, intuition and imaginative insight."

Len Rix is best known for translating Antal Szerb’s works into English: Journey by Moonlight has been a long-time favourite, reissued many times. In recent years, Len translated Magda Szabó’s The Door and Katalin Street, both poignant novels about memory, integrity and the way history intrudes into the private realm. In February this year, he was awarded the PEN America Translation Award for Katalin Street. Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large Diána Vonnák asked him about his remarkable journey to the Hungarian language, his thoughts on Szerb and Szabó, and the translator’s craft.

Diána Vonnák (DV): Not that many people take it upon themselves to translate from Hungarian without family roots or some other connection. One of them is Ottilie Mulzet, who says Hungarian is “like a rubber band. It can expand and expand, until you think, well, this rubber band is going to break at any moment now, or it can shrink into just a few sparse words, where all the most important parts are left out and you just have to know.” What was it about the language that made you choose it? Do you agree with Mulzet and her emphasis on elasticity?

Len Rix (LR): It was initially the sheer sound that drew me to it, so strange and beautiful, with its soft and alluring vowels and diphthongs that simply do not exist in English, and its musical spoken rhythms. Then it became the elaborate and rigorously logical grammar, with its agglutinative case endings and “reversed” word order that drew me on. And all those wonderful new words!

This “elasticity” is partly to do with the age and historic isolation of the language, which have both acted to keep the case-endings and other suffixes intact. Old English and Anglo-Saxon were similarly agglutinative until the Nordic invaders arrived. They shared the same (Germanic) root words but had evolved different endings, which were soon set aside. Cut off from its Finno-Ugric cousins, Hungarian missed out on that. The one language to which it was exposed down the centuries, Latin, would have done nothing to diminish its tendency to ramify endlessly. Cicero’s “periodic” sentences can equal the best of Krasznahorkai. There is one in his Pro Milone, as I recall, that runs to fifty-seven lines of close print without a full stop.