The Battle and the Freedom of Translating Hungarian Literature

Not an overwhelming number of Hungarian authors are internationally recognized, but those who are have made quite a splash, like László Krasznahorkai, Imre Kertész, and Magda Szabó.

Spoken by fifteen million people worldwide, Hungarian is linguistically very different from the languages that surround its territory. Hungary itself lies in between Eastern and Western Europe, drawing influence from both for its culture and literature. Two seasoned translators join two emerging translators to discuss what issues affect Hungarian literary translation in particular, and what these issues say about literary translation in general. What obstacles do Hungarian-English translators face that translators of global languages do not, and what do they benefit from that other translators don’t?

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Moderator

Timea Balogh, a Hungarian-American writer and translator, holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and studied literary translation at Balassi Institute in Budapest. A 2017 ALTA Travel Fellow, her translations appear in The Offing, Asymptote, Waxwing, and elsewhere.

Presenters

Judith Sollosy grew up in America, where she studied dramatic literature, literary theory, and film history before returning to Hungary in 1975. Her translations have appeared in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Hungary, with reviews in The New York Times and the LondonTimes. She was awarded the Hungarian PEN Club’s Ady Medal in 1996 for popularizing contemporary Hungarian literature. Owen Good is a northern Irish translator of Hungarian poetry and prose, and editor of Hungarian Literature Online. Winner of Asymptote‘s Close Approximations competition, his translations have appeared elsewhere in amberflora, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Moth, Ploughshares, and Words Without Borders, among others. Good’s translation of Krisztina Tóth’s novel Pixel (Seagull Books, 2019) took runner-up in the 2020 EBRD Literary Prize. Paul Olchváry has translated more than ten books from Hungarian, including György Dragomán’s novel The White King and Károly Pap’s novel Azarel, and has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary’s Milán Füst Foundation.