Here is a first attempt at translating a famous poem by Kosztolányi into English. My plan is to come back to the same poem later, and try it all over again… hopefully with better results.
This is not (as a certain horrendous Italian art-film suggests with venom) a poem that takes a naïve view of childhood innocence; rather, it’s a wistful meditation on growing up and growing old. I suspect it’s not the sort of thing we in the United States would expect our children to understand. However, the Hungarians put so much confidence in their children’s intelligence and perception that this poem and others like it are taught to them from a surprisingly early age.
OK, first the original:
Akarsz-e játszani?
(Kosztolányi Dezső)
A játszótársam, mondd, akarsz-e lenni,
akarsz-e mindig, mindig játszani,
akarsz-e együtt a sötétbe menni,
gyerekszívvel fontosnak látszani,
nagykomolyan az asztalfőre ülni,
borból-vízből mértékkel tölteni,
gyöngyöt dobálni, semminek örülni,
sóhajtva rossz ruhákat ölteni?
Akarsz-e játszani mindent, mi élet,
havas telet és hosszú-hosszú őszt,
lehet-e némán téát inni véled
rubin téát és sárga páragőzt?
Akarsz-e teljes, tiszta szívvel élni,
hallgatni hosszan, néha-néha félni,
hogy a körúton járkál a november,
ez utcaseprő, szegény, beteg ember,
ki fütyürész az ablakunk alatt?
Akarsz játszani kígyót, madarat,
hosszú utazást, vonatot, hajót,
karácsonyt, álmot, mindenféle jót?
Akarsz-e játszani boldog szeretőt,
színlelni sírást, cifra temetőt?
Akarsz-e élni, élni mindörökkön,
játékban élni, mely valóra vált?
Virágok közt feküdni lenn a földön
s akarsz, akarsz-e játszani halált?
And now, my English version:
Come play with me
(Kosztolányi Dezső)
Will you not come, my friend, and play with me,
Be my companion, play a game forever?
Put on false faces for the world to see,
join hands and step into the dark together;
Sit at the table’s head; solemnly measure
the water and the wine with practiced eye;
cast away pearls; in small things take our pleasure;
mend ruined clothing with a weary sigh?
Come play with me: make all of life a toy —
the long, long autumn; snowy winter days,;
when we could sit in silence and enjoy
Could we not sit in silence and enjoy
ruby-red tea, that steams with yellow haze;
And in the silence, fear sometimes to meet
threadbare November on the busy street –
that poor street-sweeper, old and pale and ill,
who whistles underneath our window sill.?
Come play with me: do you not want to live,
pure-hearted, playing games of Christmas eve;
long journeys, ships and trains; of snakes, and wings;
of dreams, of happy loves; of all good things?
Or play at sorrow, and pretend to rave
before the shoddy splendor of the grave?
Come play with me at immortality,
Until our game’s a game no more, but truth –
Then lie among the flowers here with me
upon the ground, and play the game of death.
NOTES
Title: Trouble already. The title should be “Do you want to play?” And that’s what it would be, if those words appeared in the body of the translation the way they appear in the original. But I chose to translate the phrase a little less directly — it seemed like a good idea at the time — and as a result, I felt I had to use this sillier title.
Lines 1 - 4: In the words of the old cartoon:
“WE SHALL RHYME ‘JUNE’ WITH ‘MOON’”,
CRIES TIN PAN TOMMY.
Did I really just attempt to rhyme forever with together? That’s certainly more “Captain and Tenille” than Kosztolányi.
The first line means, literally (and in Yoda-speak): “My playmate, tell me, do you want to be?” Immediately we have a problem, in that “playmate” has unfortunate connotations in the post-Hefner world. I wanted to use the words “my friend”, both to imitate the sound of mondd (”tell me”) and to demonstrate the familiarity between the poet and the person he’s addressing, which is conveyed by the Hungarian verb in a way that’s impossible to duplicate in English. I compromised on “companion” for “playmate”, and put it rather redundantly on the second line.
All through the verse, I originally use the phrase “would you not” to try to imitate the constantly-recurring “akarsz-e”, “do you want.” It didn’t work; it’s not the same thing at all. So I next changed the plaintive, questioning, highly-doubtful “will you, won’t you…” to the more exhortative “come and play”.
Of course, in translating “akarsz-e?”, I also have to fight against memories of the infamous Hungarian Phrasebook sketch from Monty Python: “Do you wa-a-a-ant… Do you wa-a-a-a-ant to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?”
I’ve reversed the order of lines 2 and 3, mostly to preserve the rhyme. I have completely sacrificed the inner sounds of the poem, here and throughout the verse, to maintain both the overall sense of the poem and the literal rhyme scheme. I found it just about impossible to come up with a good, workable, literal translation of line 3, which literally means, “with a child’s heart, to appear important”. I thought that most combinations I came up with involving the words “child’s” or “children’s” were too awkward, so I decided to wing it.
Strange how words as seemingly simple as “always, always play” should prove so difficult to state convincingly in English. “Mindig, mindig játszani” seems a perfectly reasonable thing to say in Hungarian, or any other language in which infinitives don’t split. I decided to go for rhythm over beauty.
Lines 4 - 8: My Hungarian isn’t good enough to resolve the ambiguity of “semminek örülni”; whether it meant “not take much pleasure in anything” — which fit the sense of the lines, but which I think would usually have been expressed with more negatives — or “take pleasure in trivial things”. For good or ill, I went with option 2… to fit better with my use of the word “enjoy” a few lines later.
Lines 9 - 12: Of course, “enjoy” is a desperate addition of my own, for the sake of the rhyme. The original simply says to drink tea together, and remains mute (néma) about the emotional state. The description of the steaming cups of tea is a game of sounds that I was completely unable to reproduce.
Lines 13 - 16: At this point, the rhyme scheme of the original changes. I postponed translation of the first bit of Line 13 in the original until later, since I couldn’t come up with a convincing way to convey everything in lines 13 - 14 without doing serious violence to the rhyme scheme. So I gave rather short shrift to the whole idea of “living with a full and pure heart”, adding it as a throwaway reference in the middle of lines 17 - 18. To make up for the break, I attempted to connect “némán téát inni” (”drink tea in silence”) with “hallgatni hosszan” (”fall silent and/or listen and/or possibly even sit looking at each other for a long time”).
Lines 17 - 22: Here I’ve made up not only for excluding the reference to “pure hearts” above, but also for extending the references to poor old November by a whole extra line (again for the sake of the rhyme). I admit that the repetition of “street” is unfortunate.
Kosztolányi’s list of things to play is sort-of complete, though I’ve shifted the order… and brought the reference to “happy lovers” from its very own line (line 23) in the original to an ignominious place among the snakes and boats. I probably should have worded line 20 like this: “of happy lovers, dreams, and all good things”, but I decided at the last minute, for euphony’s sake and to keep the proper emphasis on the flow of ideas, to drop “lovers” and substitute “loves”. I’ve also reduced his “birds” to mere “wings” for the sake of convenience. Poor birds. Oh, what the hell… it was a highly allusive list to begin with…
Lines 23 - 24: And here is one line extended into two, rather unconvincingly, to make up for the reference to love that’s been moved up a line. One of the many problems here is that these lines now bring too much attention to the idea of death. Admittedly, we have a literal reference to lamentations and cemeteries in Line 24 of the original, but bringing death into the poem even one line earlier makes a surprising amount of difference to its tone as a whole.
Lines 25 - 28: “Death” must be the very last word of the poem, just as it is in the original. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any convincing rhymes for “death” that fit in this context. Putting “truth” and “dooth”… er, excuse me, “death” together makes me squirm even more than “together” and “forever” in Lines 1 - 4.
I wish I could have found a way to reproduce the hesitant, heartbreaking stammer in the last line: “akarsz, akarsz-e…”; “Do you want, dare I hope that you might want…” (to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?) But for the expression to have its full impact, I would have had to find a way to reproduce the effect of the repeated “akarsz-e”-s at the beginnings of so many lines, all the way through the poem. So far, I have found no way to do this effectively in English.