János Pilinszky’s ‘Desert of Love’

Abstract

There are as many schools of translating poetry as there are theories of how not to do it. Ladislas Gara in his Anthologie de la Poésie hongroise (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962) opted for the method, alien to French literary tradition, of recreating each Hungarian poem — style, versification, music and all — in French metrical structures. Gara imported this method from Hungary, where it is the only accepted way of translating poetry and where, in order to distinguish between ordinary and literary renderings, two terms are used for translation (fordítás and műfordítás). The latter form of literary art is highly regarded and some of its practitioners are held in particularly great esteem. One such poet was Árpád Tóth (1886-1928). His translation of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, for instance, has been called one of the ten most beautiful Hungarian poems. Another celebrated translation by Tóth is Rilke’s ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’. Literary critics have drawn attention to the precision, style and music of this beautiful translation, in which almost nothing of the original form has been lost and even some of the respective rhyming words exactly correspond in meaning. And yet it is not Rilke.