As a language editor-translator who started in the multiple disciplines embraced by veterinary science (more excrement, literally, than you might suppose), then dallied a brief while in the even more diverse disciplines of  physics (cleaner, but hardly more welcome as it had been my least favourite subject at school) before moving on, for a much longer while, to the usually more entertaining climes of part-time translating of works of Hungarian prehistory, history, sociology and cultural studies before entering the field of translating Hungarian literary works about 14 or 15 years ago, it has long been a mystery to me why one should get more money and kudos for producing what are called literary translations than any other sort of translation. As if it were inherently more difficult, or creditable. My thesis is that “non-literary” scholars can produce work that is at least as demanding (and enjoyable) as any writer who attracts the label of literary. Empedocles, Tacitus, Blaise Pascal, Miklós Bethlen, Marquis de Sade, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ortega y Gasset…—those are just a few non-literary writers who come to mind as being cited, whether explicitly of not, by Hungarian “literary” writers in the last twenty years and, moreover, in the realistic expectation that their Hungarian readers would have some clue who they were etc.

 

Just about all of Endre Kukorelly’s work throws up names like these. Not a few of his pieces, even entire works, take off on events from his own childhood in Budapest, or rather shuttling between the permanent, school-term home Szondi Street in Pest and the family’s summer dwelling in a “weekend” cottage in Szentistvántelep just to the north, on the right bank of the River Danube, with excursions to East (USSR-dominated) Germany, even the Soviet Union (not at all out of political motives, purely for the girls). All related in an off-hand, resolutely demotic register. Citations from Hölderlin and Kierkegaard, Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy might lie within a vaguely familiar ambit, but then you also encounter the likes of film director Aleksei German (Khrustalov, My Car!), Vassily Grossman, Valentin Kitaev, Mayakovsky, and the Warsawianka to help make various specific points.

 

So too with the piece that is translated here. It turns out to hinge loosely on King Matthias Corvinus, generally reckoned to be the most important and influential of Hungary’s rulers (r. 1464–1490), conquering Moldavia and Wallachia (in 1468), then taking over Bohemia, including Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia (in 1478) and eventually much of Austria (1485). Kukorelly doesn’t refer here specifically to these events but to a dozen and more other figures, soldiers and statesmen of his period, to allies (several popes) and some bitter enemies (Ottoman Turks). But then along comes another, much more modern “King Matthias”: Mátyás Rákosi, the leader who was dumped on Hungary after its liberation by the Soviet Red Army in early 1945 and whose misrule was the direct cause of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Not that the author spells this out: it is just taken for granted. And all as a background to a seemingly innocent and carefree boyhood. It’s not that you need a Ph. D. in history to negotiate these references, but it does illustrate the wide range of knowledge that is typically assumed, with different national flavours, on continental Europe. More to the point, to me it underlines the fact that for most of Europe there is no rigid dividing line between “literary” and “non-literary”.

 

To illustrate that, the piece from Kukorelly translated under the title of “King M.” was presented to me few days ago as part of a still on-going larger project. Most obviously it elaborates on several aspects of personal history that were first touched on in Kukorelly’s 2003 novel Fairy Vale, or Riddles of the Heart of Man (see excerpt and review on HLO), and in his 2006 book Ruin: A History of Commonism (Second Revised, Enlarged Edition). (See excerpt and review on HLO, as well as some extracts in The Hungarian Quarterly, Summer 2007, with an accompanying article.)

 

By pure coincidence, Thursday, 14 January 2010 is the date that Corvina Press of Budapest set months ago to publish a book of essays, edited by Péter E. Kovács and others, by a dozen authors on various topics of late medieval Hungarian history with the main title of Infima Aetas Pannonica. Some of the essays relate to Matthias’s time, others to the reign of his predecessor, Sigismund (1387–1437), or the subsequent house of Jagiello (1490–1516). They range from clarifying or filling in small but important details of the lives of various individuals—not just the grand, such as the editor’s own lengthy contribution on “Emperor Sigismund’s Coronation in Rome” or József Márton on “Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Contacts with Hungary” (i.e. the later Pope Pius II), but also on lesser lights such as Bálint Lakatos on “The Papacy’s Policy on Hungarian Personnel 1523–1525: the Case of Imre Kálnai’s Appointments as Archdeacon and Royal Secretary” or Balázs Kertész on “Two Hungarian Friars Minor (Franciscan Observants) in the Late Middle Ages: Pelbart de Temesvár and Oswald de Lasko.” There are also perhaps unexpectedly fascinating papers by relatively young, but obviously already accomplished historians like Klára Pajorin on “Crusades and Early Humanism in Hungary” or László Solymosi on “The Library of Veszprém Cathedral and Its Lenders in the Late Middle Ages”. (Failure to mention an author’s name is in no way a comment on their work: simply shortage of space will not permit it.)

 

Which brings me back to my starting-point about the artificial distinction that is often made between literary and other endeavours. Authors like Endre Kukorelly not only show no reluctance to lean on the work that is done by “professional” scholars, indeed revels in it—to mention a few others: Attila Balázs, Centauri, László Darvasi, Péter Esterházy, László Krasznahorkai, Zsolt Láng, László Márton, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, Iván Sándor, György Spiró. They clearly feel that hard scholarship adds grist and zest to his accounts. So why hold translators to non-existent tramlines? Is there a fear that readers will not or cannot follow? Conceptually speaking, of course.