Create your own dictionary

In my experience, literary translators are - by default - in love with words, phrases and ingenius sentences. And the same way as "Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night" (as Woody Allen pointed it out) being bilingual (or at least being fluent in two languages) doubles your chances of stumbling upon memorable sentences or expressions that give you at least as much pleasure as a date on Saturday night, if not more.

For years I have been collecting little snippets from books - usually reading the original and the translation side by side - in simple spiral notebooks. Now that the stack of them starts to resemble the Leaning Tower of Pisa I decided to succumb to modernity and go digital. Leafing through a dozen notebooks to find one particular phrase started to look like a daunting challange.
So what you can do is open a simple Excel file, and start filling in the rows - in alphabetical order - with the hundreds of memorable quotes and their translations - and voiliá! - you have your own, personally edited dictionary with entries like "bro's before ho's", "check out my new squeeze" "handlebar mustache", "vertically challanged" - entries that are curiously missing from a "normal" dictionary. 

Some serious ass-kicking

I haven't even unpacked my bags (or uploaded my Borneo videos on Vimeo) when I got thrown in at the deep end. One of my editors asked if I could help out with a book - the originial translator could not keep the dead line. Since I have such a soft heart, I said yes, without even asking about the details. Big mistake. The book in question turned out to be a hard-core Tom Clancy "finish off all the terrorists, drug-dealers, bad-guys with all conceivable weapons on Earth" book. I am not a particularly aggressive person (except when in a sleep-deprived state, which means less than nine hours sleep, which means EVERY FRIGGIN' DAY!!) so this stuff does not come easy to me. The original translator (a guy) asked me to alert him every time a gun gets fired (he does not really trust a female translator to be able to cope with situations like these) but that would mean practically EVERY TWO MINUTES.
Anyway, I am off to kick some terrorists' asses.
If that does not generate traffic to this site, then I don't know what...

A break from words

This was the first vacation for years when I did not carry a laptop and a book to translate. I thought Borneo deserves my undivided attention - and I was right, of course. What's funny is that I did not even really got into reading any of the books that I carefully selected for this trip and carried with me. From a thinking/reading/analyising/criticizing empty shell I went into a sensory being. Waking up in the morning to the unmistakeable calls of gibbons. Following an orangutan with her baby for hours. Plucking leeches off my different body parts. Rendered speechless at the sight of 50-60 metre tall trees. Getting muddy, exhausted and achy after strenous walks in the forest. Falling asleep at the sounds of a dozen different frogs. Just being.

For R.

Psalms of Devotion by Miklós Radnóti

1
Honey, why do I even play with witching,
ornate words when I am more
sorrowful than a willow, prouder than a pine,
and fairer than Sunday morning.

When in the autumn, when the sunlight
glitters pale I worship you with simple
words and I love you
as only a willow can love the languid river.

Twilights bring colorful vestments so that
I can pray to you with sad, simple words
that are born inside of me
and there is nothing left after them.

I am more sorrowful than a weeping-willow,
and I love you with pretty words all the same,
although you are lovelier than a daisy
and simpler than simple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc_OtRN9juE

For Your Birthday - Születésnapodra

Dear Attila,
first of all, happy birthday to you! Maybe you know it already, but people all around the country recite your poems today, celebrating not just your birthday but the power of poetry. Although one has to wonder - does anyone even read poetry today? Seems like. Did you know that you are on Facebook (alongside with Radnóti, Petőfi, Arany...) and you have a solid fan-base? Doesn't that strike you as funny?

When I was a small child, I used to fall asleep listening to the words of your Lullaby, feeling vaguely special, since it was addressed to "little Balázs". ("The sky closes its blue eyes, the house closes its many eyes, the meadow sleeps under an edierdown - go to sleep now, little Balázs"). As a teenager I got goosebumps just reading the line "and I shiver realizing that I have lived without you" ("és beleborzongok, látván, hogy nélküled éltem"). When struggling with melancholy (a.k.a depression) your poem, Hopelessly (Reménytelenül) was speaking from my own heart ("My heart sits on the branch a nothingness, its small body shivers soundlessly, stars gather around it, and watching it gently. Time falls inside me like a stone, through space, silently, The mute, blue time floats by, sword-edge glints - my hair"). And You Know There is No Mercy: "They loved you by cheating you, you cheated so cannot love, so press the loaded gun, against your empty heart. Or throw away all principles, hoping true love will find you, since you, like a dog, would believe in whoever trusted you".

I never liked having poetry read to me. We used to have actors reciting poems on TV - they always did it with lots of emotion and sometimes exaggerated facial expressions. I feel that reading poetry is a private matter. The exercises that we had to do in school, the analysis - "What did the poet want to express with this? What did the poet think when he wrote this?" never made any sense to me. I have the feeling that the poets did not have any conscious intention with their poems ( I mean the really good poets, not those hired for political propaganda, or whatever). Poems are fragments of the truth, bubbling up from the unconsciossness, revealing some insight that conscious effort would never be able to express. The unexpected pairings of words or thoughts cannot be willed - they can flow through you and you might catch them, but never intentionally. At least, this is how I see it.
And I don't even dare to try to translate this right now - feels too perfect for that. 

Óh szív! Nyugodj!

Fegyverben réved fönn a téli ég,
kemény a menny és vándor a vidék,
halkul a hó, megáll az elmenő,
lehelete a lobbant keszkenő.

Hol is vagyok? Egy szalmaszál nagyon
helyezkedik a csontozott úton;
kis, száraz nemzet; izgágán szuszog,
zúzódik, zizzen, izzad és buzog.

De fönn a hegyen ágyat bont a köd,
mint egykor melléd: mellé leülök.
Bajos szél jaját csendben hallgatom,
csak hulló hajam repes vállamon.

Óh szív! nyugodj! Vad boróka hegyén
szerelem szólal, incseleg felém,
pirkadó madár, karcsú, koronás,
de áttetsző, mint minden látomás.  

Jack of All Trades

Based on the knowledge gained from my recent translation works I should be able to:
- assemble an indoor fussball table
- discuss the effects of Pilates training on young Brazilian futsal players
- perform a colonoscopy or a 4D foetal ultrasound
- perform knee surgery
- talk somebody into buying a small Swedish forwarder (which is a forestry machine - for those, who don't know)
- fix any problems with a waste-water reclaiming system (especially the ones caused by the ultrafilters)

In the Works

Right now I am working on the following - a book where the storyline features a dog that gets separated from his owner (I can get really emotional even just thinking about it - I guess that's what happens when you treat your own dog like one of the most important person in your life), a web-site for a medical center, and a description of an indoor fussball table.

I cannot complain that my work is dull or unvaried.