About twenty-one months ago, in May 2021, C.K. Sebő released his musical rendition of Csenger Kertai’s poem “Balaton” (in which Kertai reads the poem aloud to Cz.K. Sebő’s accompaniment). I loved it and ordered the poetry collection, which I promptly and slowly read from cover to cover. I had just started reading it when I went to hear Cz.K. Sebő in concert for the first time. A month later, I met Kertai at his poetry reading at the Három Szerb Kávéház. Soon afterward, we started up a correspondence, and the translation project began.
Kertai’s poems are not easy to translate. The language is simple, at times intentionally naive and innocent, but also brooding. Then again, “innocent” is not the right word; the speaker knows all too well of human imperfection and the futility of attempts to be God-like. The poems speak to each other and build something together. Their worldview is both Christian and existentialist, with a focus on everyday matters (that can suddenly become luminous or murky) or on metaphysical events. The “you” in the poems is not fixed; its referent can shift even within a single poem. The translator has to be bold. Hogy nekem jó legyen has received serious and detailed critical praise—not just praise, but reflections and responses. But in English, some of its subtlety can disappear unless the translator recreates it.
Nearly a year later, in March 2022, Kertai was one of the three featured guests in the online Pilinszky event that I hosted with the ALSCW. In October 2022, he presented in my seminar on “Setting Poetry to Music” at the ALSCW Conference at Yale.
By then, I had translated his poetry collection Hogy nekem jó legyen (For My Good); eight of these translations had been published. “Redemption” and “I” appeared (along with a sound recording of Csenger reading the original poems) in the January 2022 issue of Asymptote; “Lake Balaton” and “On Forsakenness” in the March 2022 issue of Literary Imagination; “Constant Slashing” and “Mercy” in the Winter 2022 issue of Literary Matters; and “With Greatest Ease” and “Moon” in the Spring 2022 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation. Then, just yesterday, two more appeared, this time in the online version of The Continental Literary Magazine: “Maypole” and the collection’s title poem, “For My Good.”
The full collection will be published in English translation—I am confident of that—but the publisher has yet to be found, and in the meantime I want to tighten some of the unpublished translations. I want this to read and resound so well in English that people will truly read it—because it is so easy (for me and others) not to read something, especially poetry. We have demands on our time and energy, stacks of books (or other items) waiting to be read, and bewilderment over the thousands of books being published around the world every day. Where do you begin? How do you choose? Why should this book take your time and attention?
I am one of the worst in this regard. I don’t come anywhere close to reading all that I want to read. Reading a book, and reading it through, carefully, is a special occasion for me. I can’t read casually and quickly.
So I want the translations to be like the “Balaton” poem and musical rendition—leaving the reader with the knowledge, not just the feeling, that they will read more.
I added a sentence to this piece after posting it.
Take Away the Takeaway 