Director to the telephone. I beg your pardon. The problem is, we can’t get heat and clean air at the same time. If the stoker puts a small amount of coal in the furnace, then the air is clean, but it’s cold. If he puts more in, then the whole auditorium smells of coal…. Yes…. Yes…. Yes…. Yes…. Well, that’s exactly what I said, the engineer should come out and examine it, to see if the problem is with the coal, or with the furnace…. Yes…. Yes…. Yes…. Yes…. No…. No…. Yes…. Yes…. Good…. My regards. Puts down the telephone receiver, sits at the writing table, and rings.

Nearly two pages today, which brings my three-day total up to three pages. I’d like to get up to three or four pages a day, the pages are short enough for that to seem like a reasonable goal, but I’m beginning to be satisfied with my pace. I found one mistake in what I’d done previously; I should have translated “igazgató” as “Managing Director”, not “Artistic Director”.

Roboz. But is there no way?

Director impatiently. I am very sorry, Miss. My regards, Miss.

Roboz. Still, would there be some possibility?

Director opening the door. I am very sorry, Miss. My regards.

Roboz. But I beg of you, if there is any chance …

Director. If you please, I have a great many tasks to attend to. You see how many people are waiting out here. The telephone rings. And the telephone as well.

And now, I give you the opening of the play. I re-read further than this, but I delayed beginning my translation until I finished deciphering the definition of “nagysád”, which elucidates the subtlety with which it illuminates both the relative social classes of the two characters and the precise level of respect which the director chooses to demonstrate within those parameters. After giving the matter careful consideration, I have decided that the best translation of this term is “Miss”, although I reserve the right to revisit my decision, and I feel confident that the hour and a half I spent working on this was time well spent. (I am being sardonic here, of course, but I am actually not the slightest bit sarcastic.)

The phrase “ajánlom magamat”, which appears frequently as well, took a bit less time to resolve. A word-for-word translation would be “I recommend myself”, but My Precious confirms my intuition that it’s a well-worn conventional phrase whose intrinsic meaning is unimportant. What matters is that it’s stiff and impersonal. “My regards” seems to convey that in English, a heck of a lot better than “Miss” conveys the effect of “nagysád”. Fortunately, everything in the director’s manner works together to convey the same impression, so if one term lose much of its force due to the lack of a natural English equivalent, the speech as a whole has essentially the same impact.

I haven’t been completely idle this last month, but I haven’t gotten a lot done either. I feel that it’s time to get serious; from now on until I finish translating Ferenc Molnár’s, I plan to post once a day reporting on my progress, and quoting a few lines from each day’s work. Tonight I got bogged down on the second line of dialogue—I spent over half an hour with my mammoth dictionary trying to grasp every nuance of the term “nagysád”, an archaic form of address which is both courteous and overtly condescending—so all you get for now is the opening stage direction.

A musical theater, the office of the artistic director. There are two windows on the far wall, through which can be seen the upper story of the house opposite. Between the two windows is a bookshelf. There are doors to the right and left. Along the right wall, upstage, is an upright piano. To the left, upstage, is a large writing table. On the writing table are two telephones, a house phone and an outside line. There are two armchairs in front of the writing table, with a wastepaper basket to their right. In the center is a table, with more chairs, papers, books, and a tray with two glasses. To the right, easily visible, is a stove. It’s a sunny, late autumn morning. Just as the curtain rises, the director escorts a young woman, Miss Roboz, to the door on the right.

I started reading a one-act play by Ferenc Molnár, Az ibolya (The Violet), a bit over a month ago. There are a few sentences where the grammar defeated me (I have no idea what the dative case, as in “I give the book to you“, means in the context of the verb lát, to see), but for the most part I had a clear sense of what was going on and what the characters were saying. So, yay me.

The next step is to go back to the beginning and read through it again, translating as I go. I’m not sure if this will be faster or slower than the first time through—probably slower. I think the first draft will probably take me a month or two, and I’m not sure how long polishing it will take. I do want to finish polishing it before comparing my work to the existing 1929 translation, so I can learn as much as possible from the differences. I expect errors of meaning on my part to be infrequent, although not infrequent enough. I’m more worried initially about stylistic clumsiness, but I’m fairly confident that with time and practice I can develop a good balance between fidelity to the source language text and naturalness in the translation.

I don’t often offer myself unqualified congratulations. I consistently fail to live up to my standards (or, equivalently, set standards higher than I’m capable of achieving), so I just want to repeat two words from earlier, this time with extra bonus sincerity:

Yay me.

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I’m currently reading Az ibolya (“The Violet”) by Ferenc Molnár, a play that was published in 1921. It’s a bit paranoid, but I bought a copy of the first edition, which is unquestionably in the public domain here in the United States. Eventually I plan to translate it and post excerpts here on Gentleman Translator, or maybe even the whole play, and I don’t want there to be any doubt about my right to do so.

Even so, I could easily be mistakenly accused of copyright violation. For one thing, I think Molnár’s work is still under copyright in Hungary and many other countries. Also, “The Violet” was translated in the ’20’s by Louis Rittenberg, and as far as I know Rittenberg’s translation is still in copyright, even though the original Hungarian text is in the public domain. All it takes is one dumb lawyer, who thinks he represents the copyright holder for the English-language version and not a copyright holder for a version, and I could be facing a complaint.

And, of course, if I quote judiciously from Rittenberg’s translation to compare it to my own, that’s a legitimate “fair use” of his copyrighted material. Quoting small segments of his work doesn’t impair the value of his property in any way, and I think there’s obvious value both as an educational exercise and as an act of literary criticism. If his estate challenged my use of the material in court, I’m confident they’d lose.

If I cross the line and infringe someone’s copyright, they should have legal remedies available to them. But these legal remedies should only be available if I actually cross the line. An allegation alone shouldn’t be enough to take action against me, not until it’s been proven in court and I’ve had the chance to defend myself. Under SOPA and PIPA, I wouldn’t necessarily have that opportunity before this site goes down; I don’t think it’s likely that the law would end up being applied that way to this particular site, but the principle the proponents of this legislation are trying to establish deeply disturbs me.

I sincerely hope good sense prevails.

The Studio Theatre is currently doing a German play in one of their theaters, and they hosted a panel with four translators discussing the particular challenges of translating plays. No particular insights that hadn’t already occurred to me, but I was interested to hear how collaborative the process tended to be. One thing they talked about was listening to performances in both the original language and the translated version, to make sure the laughs and other emotional reactions hit in the right spots.

Sounds like the bit they all find most challenging is getting the tone and level of diction right. It’s very easy to say the same thing in dozens of different ways, some much more elevated than others, and matching the tone of the translation to the original is—well—probably not the most difficult task of the translator, necessarily, but the most fraught, because unless you know the source language very well you’re like a blind sculptor examining his model with gloves on. A couple of them work with literal translations and a source-language partner, which is so not how anti-social me wants to do things. (I’m a gentleman, not an extrovert.)

I acquired a couple volumes of Ferenc Molnár’s plays in Hungarian, three one-act plays and one three-act play, all of which have long since been translated into English. I think I’ll translate at least one of the plays, then compare it to the canonical translation, and see how my work measures up. Could be a very useful exercise.

I’ve been playing around with the Index Translationum, a United Nations database of translated works, comparing the number of works translated to English with the number translated from English. I wasn’t surprised that the ratio is pretty lopsided; the exact ratio depends on which period you search over, of course, but a quick and dirty estimate is that 75 times as many books are translated into Hungarian as from it. If you restrict yourself to books classified as “Literature”, which is the category of books I’m most interested, the ratio goes up to about a hundred to one.

A scattershot sampling of other languages turned up ratios from 7 to 1 (for Romanian and Turkish) to 200 to 1 (Latvian). (Russian was an outlier, with supposedly twice as many books translated into English as the other way around, but I strongly suspect bad data.)

I also looked at how many works of literature were translated from various languages per year per million native speakers. Hungary managed about 0.6, the same as Japanese. French had 4.7, German 1.9, Swedish 3.4, Romanian 0.9, Turkish 0.1. Estonian was the champion among the languages I looked at; 69 translations over ten years, only 1.1 million native speakers, for a ratio of about 6.3.

Naturally, I’ll do my best to fight this injustice. These freeloading countries won’t get away with it any longer than I can help, taking our books without giving us a fair return.