Oldal 141 [141]
GÁBOR ROMHÁNYI TÖRÖK
In June 1984 I received a contract from a publisher to translate the Three
Novels. By then both French and English versions had been lexiconized.
I began to compose in October and finished in July 1985. That was from
the literary perspective the most fulfilling time of my life. I am using the
word “compose” deliberately. In this work the musical and poetic qualities
of Beckett’s sentences reach their zenith. I would gladly quote at length from
these books, but space does not permit. I shall merely remark as follows about
the cruellest of all. The Unnamable is a revolutionary new style of writing,
audible literature. While Molloy and especially Malone Dies are much more
conservative, the latter is full of traditional images and regularly composed
sentences of musical worth. The word-avalanche of The Unnamable rolls
on through relationships formed in words, deprived of time and space, or
without cause and effect, through chance events, goals, devices, possibilities,
probabilities, conditions, identities, differences, measurements, proportions,
mutual influences, events, variations, movements, and processes towards the
solitary reward, the final silence, to which it will only be entitled if and when
it has, at least in passing, related everything.
The Hungarian Three Novels was published over thirty years ago, in May
1987. I did not understand at the time, and I do not to this day, how a novice
literary translator like me was given a publisher’s contract for the translation
of one of the strangest and most debated books of the twentieth century,
and at a time when Budapest was traditionally rich in all sorts of schools
and cliques of translators. How could it have come about that after Beckett’s
Nobel Prize of 1969 not a single influential “professional” literary translator
jumped at this golden opportunity?
I can state without any trace of exaggeration that the publication of the
novel meant a breakthrough in my translating career. Good news came from
the Parisian publisher Minuit: Beckett was satisfied with the Hungarian Three
Novels. It was about then that I found out that the Beckett Archive had been
operating in Reading, England, since 1971, and that all his literary documents
were regularly collected there — published and unpublished, manuscripts
and drafts of works already published, so that all these things should be
stored there to assist the work of researchers. I wrote to Beckett asking for
his support for my proposal to spend a short time in the Reading Archives,
as I wanted to study his unpublished works in manuscript form. He replied
that he could arrange for my stay of about three months in Reading. Thus,
I went over there in October 1988. Professor James Knowlson looked after
me personally and ensured that my time there and my work in the Archive
were perfectly free of trouble. I made a thorough study of the manuscript
of the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written in 1932 but then
still unpublished. I read it several times, made a lexicon of it, and when it
was published posthumously in 1993 I immediately began to translate it. It
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