‘The port where I’m heading’

One of Hungary’s great modernist writers, Dezső Kosztolányi (1885–1936) was a prolific poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist. For international readers he is mostly known for the novels Anna Édes (1926) and Skylark (1924), translated into English by George Szirtes (1991) and Richard Aczel (1993) respectively. For Hungarians he is, equally importantly, a major poet whose mastery of verse forms and virtuoso rhyming, combined with a soft, elegiac undertow, make him a central figure of the canon. He was also a tireless interpreter of foreign poets, producing a body of translated verse formidable in both its volume and its scope (including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish authors from medieval times to the early twentieth century, but also, in true modernist fashion, Far Eastern poetry).

In his critical writings Kosztolányi ascribed great value to the art of translation, and it would be hard to overestimate the impact of other languages and cultures on his own work. Indeed, it was through a translation that he planned to start his literary career. In 1904, as a nineteen-year-old freshman at university, he translated Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage for a competition advertised by the Kisfaludy Society (a prominent literary association of the time) for “the translation of longer narrative poems”. From his correspondence we know that he had high hopes and ambitions for this work, and, though it did not win any prizes, he expected to see it in print as his first volume. But when the time came, he debuted in 1907 with a volume of his own poetry, and only a few short excerpts were ever published from the youthful translation. These, together with some heavily corrected longer fragments in MTA KIK, the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, offer a rather incomplete impression of Kosztolányi’s Childe Harold. As for the complete translation, it was thought to have been lost for ever.

In March 2024, however, just in time for Hungarian commemorations of the bicentenary of Byron’s death, the fair copy of the complete translation came to light. It was hidden – or rather lying dormant – in the archives of the Kisfaludy Society (also deposited in MTA KIK), which include only those competition entries that did not win any awards. To ensure the jury’s impartiality, contestants were required to submit works copied by another hand and under a code phrase, enclosing an envelope containing the author’s name. On the announcement of the results the envelopes were destroyed, rendering any future identification of the unsuccessful contestants extremely difficult. Researching the competition archives (some 2,500 documents in 162 boxes) is therefore much like panning for gold: one must go through an incredible amount of dross to find something genuinely precious. Fortunately, in Kosztolányi’s case, the code phrase he used (“Felleg”, a slightly recherché Hungarian word for cloud) was recorded in his correspondence, recently edited by Attila Buda, Ildikó Józan and Éva Sárközi. Even more fortunately, a catalogue of the competition entries, registering their titles and the code phrases used, was also recently prepared by Béla Mázi. So all that was required was to connect these strands of research and find Kosztolányi’s manuscript in Box 101, which contains most of the entries from the 1904 competition. Having lain untouched for the past 120 years, his entry looks exactly as he described it in a letter: “601 pages bound in calico cloth and written in anthracene ink”, with “Felleg” adorning the first page.

Kosztolányi’s was not the only Childe Harold in Box 101: no fewer than six of the twenty contestants submitted translations of Byron’s works, and three were renditions of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Kosztolányi’s entry (“no. 15”) is, however, by far the bulkiest document, and is presented with the greatest care. He copied each stanza of the poem on a separate page (on inspection of the manuscript it becomes clear that he did not observe the rule of submission by another hand) and provided copious commentary, as well as a translator’s preface, for the benefit of his readers. From the latter it becomes clear that Kosztolányi conceived of this task as an opportunity for a strong debut: simultaneously a public service and a private act of self-fashioning. “All civilized nations have striven to receive this masterpiece of the great British poet into their literature”, he writes, “and where there was no occasion to produce a definitive poetic translation, there the literary intelligentsia was looking with constant impatience towards the great, profound poetic creation.” To fulfil this supposed expectation, Kosztolányi altered Byron’s Spenserian stanzas from “an aesthetic perspective” (instead of the ababbcbcc rhyme scheme he uses a less restrictive ababcdcdd), claiming that the British poet “was often a slave to metre and rhyme”. (One of the jury underlined this remark and put a question mark in blue pencil on the margin.) He also defends his “perhaps superfluously exhaustive” commentary by pointing out that “obscurity is more disturbing than all meticulousness or detail”.

In a similar vein, in his private correspondence he wrote to Mihály Babits, a fellow poet and a friend: “I struggle a lot to render his [Byron’s] language, but I feel my strength and talent growing in this virtuoso wrestling”. The endeavour was not lost on Babits, who complimented Kosztolányi in one of his replies: “Yes, you are standing before me […] like a Byron (just go on translating him!)” As Babits’s advice indicates, the identification with Byron (and the Byronic hero) went beyond a mere fashionable pose: exploring the meaning of “childe” as a “young noble in line for knighthood” (OED 1.3), Kosztolányi (himself of noble descent) considered Childe Harold “the port where I’m heading”, and the translation a rite of passage to enter the Hungarian literary scene. Yet he was not entirely free of doubts: as he confided to Babits, sometimes “I consider myself a literary cheat”, suspecting “that this frightening ocean of ink will devour me in its bottomless depth”.

Some of the competition entries were reviewed in the 1904–05 yearbook of the Kisfaludy Society. “Entry no. 15” was considered to be worthy of serious consideration, and although its weak points were highlighted (such as the translator’s tendency to leave out details, or his sometimes confused interpretation of Byron’s text), the jury’s final verdict was that “there are plenty of stanzas translated well and beautifully; the task which the translator had undertaken is without doubt one of the most difficult ones, and although he did not manage to master it, so much serious energy is apparent in his work that further success may well await him in literary translation”. This mixture of criticism and praise, together with the actual beauties and occasional shortcomings of the translation itself, confirm from different perspectives Horace’s precept in the Ars Poetica that writers should choose a subject suited to their abilities and ponder it for a long time. Working to a close deadline, the young Kosztolányi was probably less circumspect and meticulous in his interpretation of Byron’s poem, yet it also gave him scope to showcase his various talents.

In the late 1910she took up Byron again to translate Beppo and Mazeppa, but he never returned to Childe Harold. Like many from his generation, he became critical of the Byronic hero. Perhaps that is why his translation is the single complete version of Childe Harold by a major twentieth-century Hungarian poet: it stands as a monument to a very differently (and certainly more naively) disillusioned era, while later translators were usually content to render only some highlights of the poem.

Now that Dezső Kosztolányi’s translation can be read in its entirety, it also provides an extraordinary glimpse into the workshop of the artist as a young man. It is a beautifully presented and often beautiful text that captures and reflects some of his later strivings and preoccupations in their nascent form: his élan for storytelling, his tendency for melancholy, his orientalist interests, not to mention his fondness for polished poetic devices and playful rhymes – glittering surfaces that can conceal astonishing depths.

Miklós Péti is a Hungarian Miltonist and translator. His book on Milton’s reception in Communist Hungary, Paradise from Behind the Iron Curtain, was published in 2022

The post ‘The port where I’m heading’ appeared first on TLS.