Melinda Mátyus’ novel in verse MyLifeandMyLife is one of the most original pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations.
This is the first translation of Mátyus’ work in a foreign language and it comes in a bilingual edition, with the original Hungarian following Jozefina Komporaly’s English translation. We are grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse for allowing us to publish here Komporaly’s translator’s note in which she discusses Mátyus’ unique sense of grammar and syntax, and her own approach to translating it.
Translator’s Note
As a translator from less frequently translated literary cultures, I am used to pitching projects to publishers and journals, in the hope that their schedules might accommodate a Hungarian or Romanian text among the array of languages they cover. The percentage of translated literature is still strikingly low in the English-speaking world, and unfamiliar authors are perceived as a major risk. Most of the time, an established author has a higher chance of being picked up by foreign language platforms, as there is a clear guarantee of previous success in the source culture. Chances are significantly increased, however, if there are existing translations into languages of wider circulation, seeing that in such cases someone in a receiving culture has already vouched for the work, confirming that it has potential relevance in a context other than its own.
The work of Melinda Mátyus is truly an exception in this sense, on several grounds. Firstly, Mátyus has entered the literary scene relatively recently, after several decades of having another career in which she is still active. Her belated debut, however, compensates for this delay, as she writes with a maturity, poignancy and urgency that instantly positions her in the vanguard of contemporary Hungarian literature. Secondly, Mátyus has not yet published a full volume of work (her first standalone collection of fiction is forthcoming soon), despite many high profile publications in literary magazines and despite being awarded several literary prizes. Thirdly, this volume is the first foreign translation of her work, put together with the intention to showcase her original talent and to make a point in favour of taking creative risks against the odds, for which author and translator can only be grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse.
I discovered the fiction of Melinda Mátyus via her publications in the literary magazines Látó and Jelenkor, two of the best places to look out for contemporary cutting edge Hungarian writing. Our shared interest in theatre also helped with forging a connection, and I started our collaboration by translating her very personal review of an exceptional pandemic-era stage production for World Literature Today. This review – akin to her fiction – steers clear of adhering to strict genre norms and conventions, focusing instead on unconventional insights and a very particular sense of grammar that deconstructs received notions of what contemporary writing is or has to be. In this respect, I fully endorse Gábor Vida’s view that Mátyus is ‘perhaps the only truly ground-breaking creative, who doesn’t mould her sentences according to the requirements of literary theory courses but brings her own pace and rhythm to language and to the actual as well as psychological reality under scrutiny’. Her one-of-a-kind juxtaposition of seeming detachment and utter involvement with the universe of her characters is simultaneously riveting, upsetting and rewarding, and may require more than one reading in order to unpack the nuances behind the apparent simplicity of style.
When translating from my heritage language (Hungarian) into the language of my habitual use (English), I am generally mindful of dialogue and of doing justice to both cultures on equal terms. Though I am in favour of readability in English, I am not prepared to compromise the uniqueness of the original or to camouflage the fact that we are dealing with a work in translation. For this reason, I have been much more flexible with sentence structure than is usually the norm in English-language prose, offering up a provocation of sorts and inviting readers to perceive unconventional sentence structures as a means to conjure up an environment or a situation that may be new to them. Mátyus generally writes in relatively short yet very dense sentences, and her texts have a fragmented and symmetrical structure with unexpected twists. That said, when she includes the odd elaborate clause, she signposts a moment of change and, often, of emotional turmoil; for this reason, I retained these in English rather than splitting them into shorter and possibly clearer sentences from a target culture point of view. Lastly, I also retained her trademark conjoined repetitions – as seen in MyLifeandMyLife – out of respect for her writing style and in the hope of piquing the interest of readers who are willing to go the extra mile. Throughout this process, I continued to stay loyal to the original’s meaning and register, while rendering its intentions into English, without necessarily going for equivalence or the closest possible match for each and every word. Ideally, I managed to achieve coherence and a sense of harmony, and as Sophie Hughes contends regarding her take on the craft of translation, striving for “a playful pursuit of equilibrium across an entire work, an exhilarating and, yes, joyful balancing act of loyalties: to sense, to significance and to style.”
Komporaly, Jozefina. “Translator’s Note.” In Melinda Mátyus, MyLifeandMyLife. Translated by Jozefina Komporaly. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023, 57-62. Published by permission.
Jozefina Komporaly is senior lecturer at the University of the Arts London and a translator from Hungarian and Romanian into English.