Director. What is that yellow script in your hand?
Servant. Mr. Lóvay’s new play. He emphatically urges the Managing Director to carefully read over the entire play. If it would please you to promise. Offers the script.
Director holding the phone receiver in his left hand, gestures at the stove with his right.
Servant opens the stove door. In here?
Director nods affirmatively.
Servant thrusts the yellow script into the stove.
Director still holding the receiver to his ear. And the red script, what the devil is that?
Servant. This is another copy of the same play, just in case the Managing Director threw the first into the fire.
Director. That’s the way to talk. I like clever men. Give it here. He takes the red script from the servant and puts it on the writing table. I’ll read it through….
Two pages today. I did one page in the afternoon, and I hoped I’d do two more tonight after the Eugene O’Neill play I went to, but I was exhausted when I got back and got a late start, and then I hit a road block on the word “antréjáról”, which is in none of my dictionaries. (Conceivably, it’s a typo. Figuring out what a misspelled word should be is an advanced skill.) I think I may need to work ahead a few pages to get enough context to make a reasonable inference, or perhaps just a plausible guess; unfortunately, there are enough cultural references and weird allusions to make the next page puzzling at best. For example:
Márkus. Good day. I am Márkus.
Director. Emilia?
Márkus. No. Only Toncsi.
Director. Too bad.
When I quoted that, I had no idea what they were talking about, only a vague suspicion that perhaps there was a prominent actress named Emilia Márkus. It turns out I’m right; Wikipedia.hu has an entry for Emília Márkus, who played Juliet at the age of seventeen, starred in the first Hungarian film, etc. I’m not sure exactly what the role of the translator is in clarifying obscure allusions, but, regardless, I want to understand as many of the obscure allusions as possible, for my own peace of mind, even if most of them end up not mattering much.
I also went back to the scene I talked about yesterday, and changed it from “right outside my door” to “in my antechamber”. I lose the emphasis in the original on “precisely”, but it’s closer to the original author’s word choice. Again, it’s possible to waste a tremendous amount of time twiddling with minute details, but in the end, if I don’t treat every word as deserving of my close attention, I’m setting a low standard which I’ll ultimately be dissatisfied with.