But for all publishers out there, Tim’s translated a lot more than Kertesz. In fact, he has a whole host of translations sitting in his desk waiting for a publisher . . .

Which authors would you like to translate and why, if you had the time?

I often translate just for my own pleasure, independent of whether I’ve been commissioned or not by a publisher. If I manage to “sell” one of these translations later on, then all the merrier, but there’s usually no guarantee that this will ever happen. Consequently, I’ve done translations of works—usually one or two—written by ten to twelve different authors, but these manuscripts are still slumbering in the depths of my desk drawer. There is also a list of authors I haven’t translated yet, but would if I only had the time. Among them are István Szilágyi, László Végel, György Spiró and Dezső Tandori, whom I’ve lately included. Ádám Bodor and Péter Lengyel are also on this list, but I know others are already translating them.

And speaking of Kertesz:

In your opinion, what results in a bad translation? And what, do you think, really makes a translation come alive?

When reading a translation or any other piece of writing, it’s extremely obvious if a solid knowledge or understanding of the language just isn’t there. I wrote about this when Imre Kertész received the Nobel Prize. The first English translation of Kaddish for an Unborn Child was painfully bad and fully deserved my criticism that the child, in this case, was actually stillborn. There was hardly a decent sentence in the entire translation—true, Kertész does use rather lengthy sentences in this novel, but that is no excuse. The translation of Fatelessness was barely any better. (In this translation, for example, nine chapters were made into eleven, and I’m talking about the most basic level!) Last year there was an obviously young, American critic writing for an Internet journal who accused me of committing sacrilege, as if I had sent the Rosenberg couple to the electric chair. But if some person (or persons) does not possess a sufficient knowledge of either Hungarian or English, is this something that should remain unmentioned in a critique of the translation?

Unfortunately, there is a long list of English “translators” who really aren’t a great help to Hungarian literature. What makes a translation good? That’s obvious: exactly the opposite of everything I’ve already mentioned. Knowledge, understanding, the right kind of style… these are all very important. In a nutshell, if someone has never learned to write in good, polished English—his or her native language—then this someone will never be a good translator. It’s as simple as that.

Revised Edition was published in 2002, shortly after Celestial Harmonies, and this latter magnum opus provides the broader context for Revised Edition. In the centre of Celestial Harmonies Esterházy placed a figure he terms ‘my father’, fully exploiting both the pseudo-realistic and the metaphoric potentials of the term. An important milestone, this novel, written over nine years, opened a new epoch in Esterházy’s writing after he had concluded the cycle summarily referred to as Introduction to Literature, created little by little over the 1980’s and forged into one grand structure at the end of the decade. In Celestial Harmonies Esterházy deployed, and at the same time superseded, the full arsenal he had developed in reconstructing Hungarian prose – post-modernist poetical devices polished to the absolute, relying chiefly on inter- and para-textuality. In the first part of the novel the signifier ‘my father’ has a relevance in every situation, testifying to a language which is omnipotent yet ironic, frivolous and yet of sacred power. In the anecdotal second part, however, woven through and through with auto-biographic reference and citations from other works, ‘my father’ is a flesh-and-blood creature unfolding before us in his historical embeddedness. In the interplay of the two parts there pulses a dynamic of permanent echoes, of deconstruction and reconstruction, adding up to a cosmic and panoramic tableau of the age, while the encyclopaedic aspirations of European thinking are built up and demolished before our very eyes.

In Revised Edition the main thread is still the figure of the father. But this time we are not seeing a literary trick: reality, which Esterházy had always treated so ironically, becomes the main character of the novel. The plotline is ‘simple.’ Driven by curiosity plain and simple, the author, entitled as any other Hungarian citizen so to do, is searching in the archives of the Hungarian State Security for reports possibly written about him. Upon receiving him, the director of the archives explains that besides the reports written about him they have found some documents which are far more sensitive and may affect Esterházy more closely. These documents are none other than files comprising the work that his father, the late Mátyás Esterházy had done as an informer. Revised Edition starts in the moments just before and just after the author receives the documents in question. This time Esterházy, clearly much impacted by the experience, opts for linear narration – that of reading and commenting on reports made by his father. He copies entire sections from the reports, returns to some crucial sections, inserts the list of persons executed at the time of the report written during the retaliations following the 1956 revolution and quotes sentences from Celestial Harmonies which juxtapose the father figure, the grandiose aristocrat there with the character who transpires from these documents, not unlike a skeleton falling out of the family cupboard.