OTTILIE MULZET
Ottilie Mulzet is a literary critic and translator of Hungarian poetry and prose. She received the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, and the 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below. In this interview, she discusses the challenges and rewards of translating complex literary works into English.
Interview by Liam Kelsey
American readers are becoming familiar with your translations of László Krasznahorkai’s work, but you’re also known for your translations of Szilárd Borbély’s writing, in particular his novel The Dispossessed, which, at least in terms of style, is a very different novel from any of Krasznahorkai’s. How did the experience of translating The Dispossessed compare with that of translating a novel like Baron or Seiobo There Below, (which you also translated for New Directions)? Were there any unique pleasures or difficulties of either?
Szilárd Borbély (1963-2014) was primarily a poet, although he also wrote essays and verse dramas. His prose is very influenced by his poetry, which tends to be terse (apart from his more narrative poems) and dense with allegory. He was also writing from his experience of deep personal trauma, which I don’t think is necessarily true of Krasznahorkai. My sense is that in The Dispossessed, Borbély wanted to give an almost ethnographic portrait of his childhood growing up in a tiny, deeply impoverished village in north-eastern Hungary. (In one interview, he even mentioned that ethnographers came to collect information about the dialect of Hungarian that people spoke there). It needs to be stressed that the social gap between metropolitan intellectual circles and the villages of Hungary’s cultural and economic periphery was enormous in Borbély’s childhood, and remains so today. One of the more challenging aspects of translating that book was making sure I got all the ethnographic details right — which few people from outside this environment would even know.
I would say that all of Krasznahorkai’s works are challenging, but they all tend to be so in different ways. For Seiobo, it was researching, and correctly understanding, all the different art historical information, as well as the techniques. For Baron, the more challenging passages were the Professor’s inner monologues, but these were also among the most enjoyable.
Do you consider Krasznahorkai to be a particularly Hungarian writer? Many of his themes are broadly existential, but it seems like there’s this other part of his work that is speaking directly to Hungarians and their national experience. What do you think we lose, then, not just as English readers, but as non-Hungarians?
I think part of Krasznahorkai’s genius is that he speaks very much to local conditions in Hungary, and yet his work is very universal as well. As someone who goes to Hungary regularly, when I was translating Baron I could conjure up many of the scenes internally because they were so true to life. I often encountered (and still encounter) people who seem to have walked straight out of the pages of the book. So I think if you are familiar with the texture of everyday Hungarian life, it certainly helps in visualizing some aspects of the book. Yet on the other hand, some of the dysfunction it describes seems to have become (especially since its publication in Hungarian in September 2016) a truly global phenomenon, and one certainly not limited to east-central Europe.
The Dispossessed, by Szilárd Borbély — Harper Perennial, 2016
There’s this line at the very beginning of Baron that seems to shed some light onto what Krasznahorkai, a notoriously mysterious artist, is trying to do in his work, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it. It’s spoken by an unnamed conductor, and he’s addressing an orchestra he’s been hired to direct. He says:
"...I don't like at all what we are about to bring together here now, I confess, because I'm the one who is supervising everything here, I am the one — not creating anything new — but who is simply present before every sound, because I am the one who, by the truth of God, is simply waiting for this all to be over."
To me, it seems like the author is talking about his own work in this passage, and, if this is in fact the case, Krasznahorkai seems to be making some very startling confessions about his work. Namely, that he doesn’t particularly like the work — the music — and also that he is not, as he says, creating anything new, but is actually assimilating already-existing individual parts into a single and more cogent whole; that he is not a musician, but a conductor. In any case, what do you make of it? Could you speculate if the author is talking about his own work?
I took it as a paradoxical Beckettian statement when I was translating it, something like, “I’m about to spend nearly 600 pages saying this thing that I actually don’t want to say.” As I was working my way through the book, though, I began to think the conductor might have something to do with the menacing figure in the black car who appears later on in the book — although this is just a guess. The conductor sets the whole thing in motion, he’s the one controlling the novelistic mechanism, as it were, whereas his counterpart (or alter ego? differing embodiment?) represents a force field that can bring all of life — the “Great Flow of Being” as the Professor calls it — to a halt. Certainly, there is a kind of Manichaean aspect to the book, especially when considered in relation to Seiobo, with its invocation of metaphorical light, even if unattainable.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai — New Directions, 2019
Seiobo There Below, by László Krasznahorkai — New Directions, 2013
Do you have any favorite Hungarian writers currently published in English whose work is not yet widely known?
Krisztina Tóth (1967-) is a writer who really deserves more recognition. She writes about life in Eastern Europe — particularly from a woman’s perspective — with biting irony and surrealistic black humor. In general as well, Hungarian women poets have not received the recognition they deserve. Some of them are published in English, for example: Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922-1991), who remains an important and influential figure for poets writing today, has been translated by both George Szirtes (The Night of Akhenaton) and Hugh Maxton (Between). But there are also poets such as Anna T. Szabó, Zsuzsa Beney, Magda Székely, Mónika Mesterhazi, Zsuzsa Takács, Zsófia Balla, Ágnes Gergely, Zsuzsa Rakovsky, and many more besides, who are eminently worthy of more attention. Some of them have been translated individually. For this reason, though, I’m now working on editing an anthology of women poets in Hungarian.
Conversely, do you have any favorite Hungarian writers whose work is not yet available in English?
I do, and some of them will be coming out of the Hungarian list that I edit for Seagull Books, including Andrea Tompa’s Hangman (translated by Bernard Adams), Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. and Pál Závada’s Market Day (both translated by Owen Good), István Vörös’s Thomas Mann’s Overcoat (translated by me), Ferenc Barnás’ The Parasite (translated by Paul Olchváry), as well as a selection of short prose pieces by Iván Mándy (1918-1995, translated by John Bátki).
You’re also known as a translator of Mongolian literature into English. How does the experience of translating Mongolian into English compare to the experience of translating Hungarian into English?
They are two very different languages and two incredibly different cultures. But probably what is most salient is that there is so much more sociological and cultural and religious context in Mongolian that will not be readily available to the Anglophone reader, unless they already happen to be familiar with it.
How did you become a translator of these two very different languages?
I learned Hungarian first, and I began studying Mongolian out of linguistic curiosity, as an Altaic language, and also because of my interest in both shamanism and Buddhism. Shamanism (or, more properly, Tengrism) was (and is) the indigenous religion of Mongolia; it subsequently experienced several waves of Buddhism and officially adopted it in both the 14th and 16th-17th centuries, although both were heavily attacked during communism. Also, Mongolia is one of the very few countries in the world where there are still herders living a genuine nomadic lifestyle, although this too is under pressure from climate change and the forces of development. People, not unjustifiably, tend to associate Mongolia with Chinggis Khan, although the image of Chinggis Khan in the West is often distorted by Orientalism. Mongolia, though, being adjacent to Central Asia and China, was a major part of the Silk Road, and this led to a kind of cosmopolitanism and a creative syncretism that you still sense today in the folklore, the language, the literature, and the culture overall.
Do you have any Mongolian writers you wish were better known to the English-speaking world?
An enormous part of Mongolian literature is formed by the vast quantity of traditional oral culture, which encompassed a range from the purely oral to a kind of ongoing exchange between the written and oral. Currently, this body of knowledge has been my main area of focus: my translations have involved the Tara legends (Dari ekh, or Mother Tara in Mongolian), which were passed down orally before being written down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, other Buddhist legends, and Mongolian origin myths. Gradually, I am working my way up towards a full volume of these texts, some of which are extremely fragmentary and require ethnolinguistic research for full comprehension.
Do you have anything in the works you’d like to speak about? Translations? Original writing?
I’m currently putting the final touches on Gabor Schein’s Autobiographies of An Angel (Yale University Press, 2021). This is a double autobiography with two narrators, one speaking from the early 18th century, the second in the mid-20th century. It’s a no-holds-barred meditation on being Jewish in Europe, deeply ironic, utterly scathing, and so very necessary. It’s dark and yet somehow exhilarating. In terms of personal projects, I’ve been working for many years on a series of photographic and essayistic meditations on disappearing (or disappeared) spaces in Prague, entitled City Without Memory. Prague is strange that way — a city of absences. I’m trying to capture something about that.
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Liam Kelsey is a writer from Minneapolis, MN. His fiction, science fiction, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Silver Needle Press and other independent publications. He would like you to read Break it Down by Lydia Davis and The Weird and the Erie by Mark Fisher. He would like you to listen to the band Pile.
