Translating Language, Text, Short Story, Genre, Style, Literary Trend... and Culture

(Estonia, 2002)

Is it possible to give account of a translation in a way that one cannot say too much of the source text? In what follows, I would like to do my best by considering only the target text, the Hungarian translation of Tuglas's short story, and I can very clearly describe the elements I cannot take into consideration. Moreover, my aim is not to assess the quality of the translation (which would be a rather dubious endeavor if I ignored the source text) but rather to show its context in the target culture - in the network of texts the Hungarian version has landed.

So let me list all the elements I am unable to take into accounts. Since I do not speak or read Estonian, I have not read the Tuglas story in the original. I do not know, further, Tuglas's position in the present canon, neither in his contemporary one; I do not know anything about his reception or of the contemporary or later reception of his short story; and, most importantly, I have no idea about the stylistic, generic, cultural, textual status of his work in the context of its conception.

What I do know more or less is the stylistic, generic, cultural, textual field where Tuglas's text arrived when it was translated into Hungarian. I know some of the expectations, presuppositions, background knowledge, taste, inclinations of the Hungarian readers of the thirties. I know Hungarian, so I have some idea of how a style is formed, a lexeme is selected, a sentence is structured.

So from what I do not know and what I do know I will try to sketch out the issue of intercultural translations. Of course, practically every translation is intercultural; languages and cultures mutually define each other, and most frequently translations are made starting from one language and producing something in another. But - and this is one of my hypotheses - there may be serious modifications, changes in the status and interpretation of the original if this interculturality is taken into account.

Translating a text of another culture always has in its background a tacit presupposition that it can find its place in the “target” culture. Thus, when a short story (that of Tuglas) is translated, it will evoke a certain genre, a specific style and, accordingly, a particular literary trend in the reception of the literary field where it would land. Knowing what I do not know, only those familiar with Estonian literature and culture could justify if the Tuglas story has had its proper place in the Hungarian context. All I can do is to judge the text of another culture in terms of my own.

Now let me first have a look at the text the way I have read it. It is an interpretation based on another interpretation.

The text, as far as it can be perceived in its Hungarian translation, belongs to the post-Symbolic, Secessionist period of European literature. It is characterized by the central role of vision, the description of the extreme circumstances with a huge number of details, by an "oriental" character of the nature, full of sensuality, while, on the other hand, an extravagant picture of the horrors of the sea. The living and the dead are confronted, in several levels and from several aspects, with a great emphasis on the rich vegetation of the living; the sphere of the living nature is, paradoxically, not or not only a site for quietness and satisfaction, but it turns to be lethal, deadly. On the level of the story, there are, again, the lonely hero is an ancient motif, not to speak of the hero on the sea and having transcendent or wonderful experiences (from the Odyssey through Robinson Crusoe to The Ancient Mariner). The Secessionist attraction to the fundamental myths of European culture is very well known; a number of prose fiction of the period relies on a traditional topos, although fairly modifying, transforming it or even taking it to the extremes. An emblematic Hungarian example of the age is Ady’s programmatic poem, “Fly, My Ship”, with the figure of the daring, lonely seaman and the world as his enemy. And let me remind you the Pre-Raffaelite and Secessionist painting where the topic is very often a topos, an evocation of the old and well known event or character. It implies, further, that what is important for the narrator of the narrator of the text is not the originality or the novelty of the situation, but, rather, the fine, detailed analysis of the character, the possibilities, the sentiments, and the most energetic and expressive, tragic and moving solution he can represent. In Tuglas’ case, the lonely mariner landing in a sort of Paradise after his tortures on the sea, is not the topic proper of the text; what is at stake, rather, is the problematic nature of this Paradise, and the unexpected and dramatic reaction on the part of the seaman.

The detailed, concentrated description and the unexpected, visionary, contrastive changes (on the level of plot, character, state of mind, etc.) are clearly the main characteristics of Secessionist (or Post-Romantic, early Modern) writing. The search for the details, the constant struggle for a sensuous description is something parallel to what is referred in the field of visual arts as “decorativity”, “ornamental style”. However, it serves not (or not only) to decorate what is given, to add new and new elements, but rather, in the first place, it is the fight of the language to express the endless richness and intricateness of the world. Attributes and qualifications, words for colors, odors and voices are abundant, each striving to grasp what is in the senses - a constant struggle to match language and sensuality.

The very best field for this operation is a world full of sensual experiences - a world which is either frightening or dark or evil, or pleasant or flourishing or erotic. We can find both in Tuglas’ short story; and the source of both is the extraordinary working of nature.

Another main element of the text is nature: either in its adversary, evil form, or in its kind, familiar form. In both cases, however, nature is beyond human control: not only human activities are excluded from this world, but even in the sphere of humans (i.e., giants) hardly any trace of human intervention can be seen. Thus, nature is the most horrible and the most beautiful when and because no human can cope with it.

But along the dimension of living/dead, this nature is divided: our hero first must face the forces of the nature which have no living element in them; the terrible, destroying storm, and then the islands covered with stones, without any vegetation. Slowly and gradually, there are more and more life around; and then, in a radical step - as if it was the mirror of the other radical step, the wrath of the sea, leading to the new world - life becomes dominant, vegetation and endless richness, quietness and freedom.

In this respect, it is worth considering the steps leading to the magic island. The seamen come across islands where there is no life; then islands where there are birds who appear to be either lifeless or eternal - they do not die even if they are shot. AAnd, lastly, there is the perfect island of both life and death - the trees they first see are partly dead (at the bottom), and partly blossoming and green (on the top). However faintly and in a hidden way, death is introduced into this world of life from the very beginning.

However, being in nature, involvement in the uncontrolled, wild, living world of nature means a loss of humanity; loss of language. Language, then, can be confronted with pure and mute nature; understanding, explaining, expressing in real nature is either unnecessary, or takes quite non-human (and non-linguistic) forms: a real life in nature is animal life, a life without names and language, reduced to elementary gestures and elementary feelings. Complete happiness is overt and non-problematized, unreflected sexuality, a biological sphere which needs no explication or interpretation.

Wilderness, nature, life in its quintessential form is not culture. There is no mediation in any sense: no market, no communication, no language, no family, no tools. Anything beyond biological needs seems to be superfluous - signs, clothing (in itself a set of signs), reflection.

It seems, however, that the biological self is still more than a mechanistic operation of the body: the giantess shows emotions, seems to be interested in erotic plays, and even communicates in a way of quasi-natural signs. So the division between or the confrontation of nature and culture is far from being absolute. Also, on the other end of the dichotomy, the speaker has very much biological-natural sensations, such as hunger, tiredness, sexual drive.

So there is culture and nature - which will comply to which? Which of them has to give up more of its essential characteristics? In this respect, the winner is nature, naturally. Culture appears as something imposed upon nature, as something parasitic, secondary or supplementary to nature. So the hero will give up - a very remarkable and surprising resignation - his speech; although he notices that the giantess would not speak, he seems to be not too interested in verbal communication. Then, of course, after a momentary surprise, he is ready to overlook nudity. He is very soon ready to express his sexual desire, without any control or suppression by shame.

In this sense, what happens to our hero is a triumph of nature over culture: culture loses its essential elements of communication, reflection, publicity, control, history, etc. - and gains, instead, an unreflected and uncontrolled (wild and natural) erotic world.

But does in fact, in the end, culture overcome nature? Killing the giantess, as a gesture of overcoming nature is clearly not a triumph, as the speaker himself realizes in the end of his story (and not a cultured solution). The ambiguity of life and death, nature and culture, Eros and language, the unreflected and the need for reflection remains unresolved. It seems that our hero must kill in order to find his way back to culture; in a world without violence, he must break the rules, a fundamental law of culture. He has to kill, he has to introduce death (an end) to this everlasting (endless) world of life. A stop to the perpetual repetition. And this violence, on the other hand, belongs very much to the fundamental laws of nature: killing is natural, the same way that life is natural, killing is the main principle of all beings living in the world of nature.

The hero, then, can escape from the field of nature and turn back to culture. However, he feels a depressingly deep nostalgia towards the sphere of nature; his encounter with the other world will affect his relation to his world forever. This is the other which is almost completely missing from his own world: in this sphere, there are no wonders, no room for irresponsible and unreflected deeds, for uncontrolled sexuality, for the immediateness. Simply speaking, there is only a small room for nature. The most important ways out back to this world are dreams or visions, imagination an, perhaps, literature.

I may add here my faint hypothesis that Tuglas’ short story is in a way self-reflective; the language is fighting a desperate fight to appropriate the immortal and deadly nature, the vegetation and the biological, unreflected life, such as the hero is trying to be dissolved in the life of the island, culture (a highly sophisticated poetic and rhetorical language) has a nostalgia for the wild, uncontrolled nature; the colonization or appropriation of the world of dreams and visions on the level of the plot reflects the strategy of the text: a fight to grasp and interpret the world of another dimension.

A last characteristic of the short story which can be said to be typical of Secession is its universality. In accordance to which I have said of the topoi or archetypical nature of the Secession, a text of this period or school tries to avoid references to what is too local, too much related to a concrete time or place, even gives up names (which would refer to a certain country or language). This is a sort of universalism, a conviction that the most important issues are the same all over the world and throughout all times, and that they should be formulated in a very general level. Tuglas’ short story could have been written in several languages in several countries; and Tuglas might have believed that it could belong to any historical time.

It is the universal character which makes for Tuglas’ short story possible to appear on the scene of, say, Hungarian literature. Short stories somewhat similar to that of Tuglas have been written in Hungary; some of the main characteristics of this story can be found in the Hungarian Post-Romantic--Secessionist tradition. The strange thing is that in contrast to the universalistic claim of the school, it years of flourishing came to an end pretty soon. After the first World War, at least in Hungary, this mode of writing become somewhat outdated.

In contrast to the motifs, characters and plot structure of this short story, the years of its Hungarian publication were much more characterized by what is called New Classicism of the age; a prose style of very few and carefully selected metaphors, where visionary images and scenes were seriously restricted, a sort of succinct and dry "Sachlichkeit", along with the very much hidden and coded erotic elements, if any. This prose fiction concentrated to the local, to the petty events, the everyday happenings of city or rural life, on the specific social roles, functions and behaviors, and especially to the communication of the people in particular situations - all these traits are obviously very different from or even contradictory to what we find in Tuglas’ short story.

Tuglas’s short story was translated into Hungarian due to several motifs. First, translation has been a very important part of Hungarian literary communication from the very beginning, and it has remained a key issue until the present day. Second, keeping up with what is going on in contemporary European culture was, in the beginning of the twentieth century, an even more important point, a weapon in the struggles of Modernism against all sorts of conservative thinking. Third, an outlook to the periphery was also an objective of all schools of Modernism, an interest in “small” nations, outside Europe as well as in Europe; looking for the exotic, the original, the out-of-the-mainstream literature; and, fourth, as of the beginning of the century, the Finno-Ugric line of relation became more and more acknowledged. Points three and four clearly contradict, I can add. Interest in Tuglas was partly due to the central/peripheral status (where Hungary would have been central in contrast to Estonia), whereas according to point four, both Hungary and Estonia were peripheral, finding each other in contrast to the imperialism of “great” languages and literatures.

Tuglas’ short story, then, came a bit late. It has been interpreted by its Hungarian translator as belonging to the earlier tradition: its emphatically poetical language, archaisms, parallelisms, strange sentence structures, elevated style, well chosen vocabulary show that he must have been very well aware of the conventions of the Post-Romantic--Symbolic--Secessionist style. Could he have made it otherwise? Yes, I think he could. There is always a choice. He could have chosen quite another style, sentence structure, etc., without fundamentally changing any meaning of the text. He could have modify the text in accordance with the needs of the New Classicist prose style. But he chose, instead, to evoke the original atmosphere and Secessionist worldview.

I say all this after I had supposed that the Tuglas short story in the original roughly corresponds to what I have said of it. Translating a text into a “wrong” context is not at all a strange or unusual thing in Hungarian literature. For instance, in the early years of the Hungarian Avant-Garde movement, quite a lot of French Symbolist or Secessionist poems - and, of course, Walt Whitman - were translated into Hungarian as if they had belonged to the movement itself. They were simply not perceived or received in their proper position - or, better to say, they have changed their position once they appeared in a different culture.

Or we can have cases where what is at stake is not the style or school or age or mode of writing, but rather the audience. Winnie the Pooh in Hungary is not just a children’s book - since the translator was an excellent writer, a genius, it became an extremely popular book and a constant point of reference in all ages and classes of readers. Gulliver’s Travels or Robinson Crusoe, however, are regarded as primarily books for the youth.

In Tuglas’ case, the situation is more complex. It is true that it was far too late when it appeared on the Hungarian scene; however, its highly erotic connotations must have been shocking. Erotic atmosphere (not to speak of explicit erotic topics) in Hungary were forbidden until the beginning of the twentieth century - mostly a voluntary control and constraint, which was lifted in a very cautious way, full of metaphors and circumscriptions. In the heyday of the Secession, however, erotic language - including the sensual nature of description, but also more open references to sexuality - has struggled for its place and its presence on the literary scene. By the years, the thirties, that Tuglas’ short story appeared, the struggle had been over, and erotic topics, allusions and references were banished again - into a subliterary subculture. High literature preferred, instead, a very sophisticated and suppressed language to express desire, sexuality, or love.

In this context, Tuglas’ work is astonishing and provocative. It might have sounded in the cool, Classicist, reserved tone of Hungarian prose of the age as a sound of the wild, primitive, natural; as the voice of the other or the peripheral. Just as the African sculpture or black dancers were the sites of nudity, sexuality, natural life, Tuglas’ short story might have served as a scandalous text which still must be accepted, admitted and even appreciated since it comes “from outside”, from the peripheries.

But this is just mere speculation. Obviously, Tuglas did not have a wide reception in Hungary, and this short story did not become part of our culture. Still, the fact that his volume was published by a highly prestigious publishing house, whose literary taste was legendary, shows that there might have been some considerations of similar consequences that I have had.

I still have quite a number of questions. I do not know whether the position of Tuglas’ text in Estonian culture has anything to do with its Hungarian interpretation. I do not know the issue of erotic culture or representation of sexuality in Estonian literature. If I had any idea of these, I could ask whether Estonian and Hungarian cultures (being both peripheral ones) can be related to each other. And, of course, if I knew much more of Estonian culture, I had many more questions.