Picture a country or, better, a metropolis of the 1960s and ’70s, with its means of transport (airport, buses, underground, trolleybuses, taxis), hotels, banks, police stations, prisons, courts, hospitals, places of worship, cemeteries, parks, brothels, markets and fairs, sports grounds. A place where people work, buy the most modern consumer goods of the age, celebrate, pray, die, protest, violently, too. And yet nowhere is there any trace of libraries, cinemas or theatres, only of cabarets and dance halls. A place where, more than anything else, one is struck by the saturation of space: an unbroken flow of cars but above all of people on foot, queues everywhere (even to take the lift in the hotel), a throng, a pervasive crush, even in the cemeteries and the maternity wards, from which there is scarcely any escape, and which smothers you in a claustrophobic embrace:

It must be the maternity ward: there are hundreds of cribs in orderly rows, full of infants swaddled in white. They are newborns of every race, like the adults of that city, with the most varied features, complexions light and dark. The adjoining rooms too are full of babies, and those that do not fit are arranged along the corridors or propped against the walls. In some cots there are two or three, perhaps twins, or perhaps the babies are simply put together at random, for lack of room. Then more wards, overflowing with little ones, as though they would never end, nurses in white gowns who never stop bringing in more: ten, twenty at a time, newborns still purple or serenely asleep… (pp. 148/149, Voland ed.).

And above all a place where, for all that there is an airport, a currency-exchange desk in the hotel where part of the story unfolds, souvenirs, tourist maps and whatever else a traveller might need, not one of the world’s most widely spoken languages is spoken, nor any of the rarest; the classical languages are unknown, and the script in use is an unfamiliar one, its rudimentary characters recalling runes. What is spoken instead is a language of forbidding sonorities, made of sounds that seem onomatopoeic and random, in which it is almost impossible to trace any regular structure, as though it lacked double articulation altogether. Indeed the inhabitants are often described as brutish; their words are accompanied by gestures, by an intonation and a tone of voice in which aggression prevails, or dislike, or at best indifference. For all its technological modernity, there is something archaic, tribal, about this society. An urban uprising of extreme violence will break out in it, in a succession of bloody events of which no trace remains but the bullet holes in the walls. An alienated and alienating society, where love is a brief illusion doomed to fade (and here one may think of 1984 or again of Zamyatin’s We)

Such, described in brief, is the place where Budai lands after a flight of who knows how many hours, he had fallen asleep and has no watch, on a plane he boarded by mistake, thinking he was on his way to Helsinki for a conference in linguistics.

Set in motion by this initial error of orientation, the story told in Épépé (1970), by the Hungarian Ferenc Karinthy (1921–1992), unfolds. From the night he is brought to the hotel, we never lose sight of the protagonist as the days slip by, his financial and physical resources dwindling, without the faintest glimmer of a solution to his desperate situation of solitude, anguish and bewilderment: he cannot make contact with anyone, searching restlessly through this boundless metropolis for some way to leave quickly and recover his ordinary life, or for some way to communicate with the outside world. The money he changed into local currency on arrival will run out, he will have to work, and various adventures will befall him, including a fleeting love affair.

His misadventure is recounted in an oneiric dimension, marked by a dilation of time and space that makes the narration vertiginous, almost nauseating. The chronological markers remain precise and apparently logical, yet the minutely detailed accounts of long waits distort our perception of them. In the same way, space seems endless, with its painstaking description of the buildings, the streets and back-streets the protagonist tramps without pause. Summarised thus, the tale will, we hope, arouse curiosity. The “reading notes” hint at an allegorical story built on the topos of the absurdity of the world the individual confronts, of the failure to communicate. Kafkaesque echoes resound, naturally, all the more so given the Mitteleuropean proximity. And once we combine a Hungarian author, a sprawling metropolis and a popular uprising that ends in a bloodbath, the political reading cannot but come forward as well. Huxley and Orwell thus appear on the scene too. Nor should we forget a Robinson Crusoe lost in reverse but no less solitary, and Gulliver’s Travels, to which we shall return. And finally let us add, as Emmanuel Carrère does in his introduction, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, by Perec.

But, as both Carrère and other reviewers point out, the text is also humorous. Surrealism is never far off, in certain wholly absurd episodes and characters. The author, born in 1921 (and dead in 1992), is the son of the better-known writer Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938)[1], famous for his literary pastiches and his burlesque public antics. If many scenes seem the almost realistic, faintly caricatural depiction of everyday situations in the great cities and/or in the societies of the Soviet world (the market, the snack bars, the overcrowded metro), at certain moments one senses that the author lets himself be carried away by the game, taking pleasure in imagining the most absurd situations at his character’s expense. And so, though the existential and the political dimensions are undoubtedly at the heart of his concerns, let us not forget this playful element, nor always chase after his ideological or philosophical intentions.

We propose to set aside the analysis of the rich devices deployed, the quality and originality of the novel, the enjoyableness (or otherwise) of reading it[2] in order to concentrate on a deep and evident paradox that nourishes both the narrative and the metaphorical structure of the tale: that Budai, precisely a seasoned professor of linguistics who knows “thirty-odd languages” and possesses the most rigorous and up-to-date tools and methods of linguistic analysis, cannot disentangle a single element capable of giving him the key into this language. He wears himself out for days on end, desperately trying to grasp some sense in the words he hears, in the countless written traces that come to hand: from coins to street maps, from telephone directories to the volumes he leafs through in a bookshop, the labels at the zoo, the invoices, the signs, advertising and otherwise, everything that modern language teaching would call “authentic documents”. Is it read from right or from left; are these alphabetic characters, syllabic ones, runes[3] or ideograms? Can one make out recurring forms that might give access to some syntactic structure? In the sounds uttered, is it possible to perceive breaks that would isolate words? Nothing doing: he racks his brains alone, presses various interlocutors, but cannot obtain satisfactory answers, arrives at not the slightest regularity, not even in the sounds. It should be stressed that the author himself had a linguistic training and worked as a translator (of Molière and Machiavelli, among others). The pages and pages he devotes to Budai’s investigations attest to his competence, both methodological and scholarly. Nor does he neglect to report the extralinguistic communicative signs entrusted to intonation, mime and volume of voice, which allow the most overt emotional states of the interlocutor to be perceived, in this case, alas, almost always anger, irritation, at best indifference (rarely benevolence or warmth, with the sole exception of Épépé, to whom we shall return).

The fact, then, that Budai is a linguist gives rise to a proof by absurdity, and therefore all the more effective, an extreme case of the hermeticism, the refractoriness, of reality: even with every means at one’s disposal, it does not reveal its secrets.

Budai’s inability, which is therefore no ignorance, yet leads him systematically to impotence, naturally serves the narrative aim: it sharpens the hyperbolic design that is the true keystone of the narration, and pushes exasperation, frustration and despair to their paroxysm. It is thus all the easier for the reader to be won over, since identification with the protagonist is intense and the succession of failures strikes him as plausible: the average reader is no linguist, and can picture himself in the same circumstances trying to decipher Chinese or Arabic, or even a language in the Latin alphabet.

And yet even hieroglyphs have yielded their secrets, and the difficulties of deciphering a tongue heard and read every day cannot be compared with those of Etruscan, with its limited corpus; nor can it be denied that Budai has at his disposal not one but many a Rosetta Stone.

At certain moments he reproaches himself for having specialised only in etymology; he calls to mind the famous cases of deciphered languages, the Hittite alphabet, the so-called “Cretan Linear B”, Grotefend and Persian, Champollion, yet always finds plausible explanations for how the enigmas were solved, and justifications for himself. From another angle, however, he holds himself responsible for this inability of his. At the very least it feeds his frustration and the dejection that overcomes him.

And so, faced with such an accumulation of failures, a doubt may by this point arise in the reader: where does the fault lie, or at least the limit, with reality itself or with the observer?

Let us now compare this situation with that of a far better-known protagonist: Gulliver. Budai, as we said above, is a Robinson in reverse, but above all an anti-Gulliver: for Gulliver, each time he washes up in a new territory, contrives to learn the language and to master it quickly. Within a few days he already possesses what one would call a basic language, words useful to everyday life. Even the language of the Houyhnhnms, the horses, which in its phonetic components recalls the language Budai hears, soon becomes familiar to him, to the point that after a few months he is able to discourse even on political, social or philosophical questions with his “masters”. How does Gulliver go about it? It must be acknowledged that he always receives help from one of the inhabitants, like the kindly little girl of Brobdingnag, the land of the giants. Essentially he relies on lists of words, which he repeats and has repeated, and which he transcribes in a notebook together with their translation. All rather predictable, but one may observe that what moves him, above all, is curiosity. Certainly Gulliver’s extraordinary speed of learning is a contrivance which, like the forbidding difficulty of the language of Épépé, serves to sustain the invention and to give the tale its colour; but it also carries content. Why is what proves feasible for Gulliver not so for the linguist Budai? We may of course read these differences as symptomatic of the cultural climate and philosophical convictions of the two different times in which the two texts were written: faith in the work of reason, the pragmatic optimism of the Age of Enlightenment, versus loss of meaning and the failure to communicate, precisely, in the contemporary world. But having repeatedly called upon this great theme of modernity, we shall now lean on another (overworked?) category of our own day: the impressive, almost fearsome, faculty of empathic intelligence. For, beyond the intrinsic difficulty of the language, in the society where Budai has washed up both empathy and intuition are in short supply (his interlocutors, faced with a man who shows them a map of the city and mimes a plane in flight with his arms, seem unable to grasp what he wants!): yet of both of these Budai too seems deficient, as he does of genuine curiosity. Stepping outside the codes, hazarding hypotheses, that is what made it possible to decipher the languages in the cases cited. He, by contrast, advances cautiously, and every time he thinks he has found a solution he is assailed by doubts: what if the word he believes means “Hotel”, because it is written on the façade, in fact referred to the name of the hotel itself? What if, instead of indicating “wood and coal”, a sign actually meant “fuel”? A castrating pedantry. In short, Budai tries to decode the language in a fundamentally intellectual approach, whereas Gulliver tries to learn it, to make it his own, so as to be able to exchange with his hosts, who are not even his own kind!

The one exception in this abyssal solitude remains Épépé. But who is Épépé? In this name, which gives the tale its title, the humorous and the tragic charges of the story are condensed: Épépé is the sweet, fair-haired, delicate lift attendant with whom Budai manages to establish a human bond, made of glances and smiles, until after a time he crowns it with a night of love. She represents for Budai the hope of receiving tenderness and comfort, and of seeing the doors to an understanding of the language open before him. And yet Épépé, for all her kindness, cannot grasp that Budai is asking her to help him, as he urges her to say numbers or repeat sounds. But in the precious intimacy of the night, after their embrace, Épépé launches into a long monologue in that most forbidding tongue. And there, at last, miraculously! Budai “understands” her story:

“(…) and all at once everything became clear. It seemed to him that he could follow what she was saying, or at least the essentials, the details, as we know, do not matter… It was an outpouring about how unbearable life was at home, the cohabitation with all those people: assorted relatives, uncles and aunts and the husband’s two children from his first marriage. And housemates and subtenants too, and even people who rented no more than a bed for the night and whom they could not get rid of, invalid and ailing old folk, shrieking neurotics and filthy, intractable drunks, women of dubious life, themselves furnished with brats too (…).” (p. 162, Adelphi ed.).

It matters little, then, whether what he understands corresponds to the truth, whether it is plainly built on a succession of narrative topoi drawn from so-called actually existing socialism. What matters is that empathy, at its paroxysm in amorous abandon, has allowed him to cross the bounds of the self and lose himself in another’s life. Alas! Whereas it is Robinson who imposes a name on Friday, Budai for his part, despite the physical intimacy attained, cannot even find out whether she is called Bébébé, Tyétyétyéty, Tété, Gégégé, Pépé,Védédé… And, in the despair aroused by her inability to understand what he is telling her, he will end by beating her savagely. Humour and tragedy are thus condensed in this name, like an infant’s babbling.

The question of translation

If we are to speak of language and communication, how can we not now confront the question of translating a text written in a language that few people know, apart from its own native speakers, inside and outside the country?

As it happens, the novel exists in no fewer than two Italian translations, relatively close together in time, a rather rare occurrence even for better-known authors and texts. Likely questions of rights and of editorial policy may account for it; we cannot know, and it does not concern us in this context.

Hungarian is known to be a language of the Finno-Ugric family. Its chief characteristic is that of being an agglutinative language, that is, it unfolds words composed with various suffixes or prefixes (subject to syntactic rules) indicating, for example, grammatical case. Often, then, the semantic nucleus of the word must be sought out amid sundry appendages. There is no marking of the gender of nouns.

Personally, I suspected that the sequence of sounds recorded by Budai might be a humorous transposition of the phonetic chain of the Hungarian language, but the French translators, whom I questioned on the matter, ruled this out. [4]In short, trying to know the source language so superficially yields no great results. It follows that it becomes difficult to point out the merits and demerits of the various versions; and in any case what fundamentally interests us is neither to rap knuckles nor to hand out blue ribbons, but rather to observe, without denying ourselves the odd conjecture and impression as we read. We leave it to the sensibility of each reader to decide whether the text before their eyes pleases them. We seize instead the occasion of this slightly skewed vantage point to draw out elements of analysis useful, in any case, to translation studies, and to take an interest, however briefly, both in the richness of the paratext and in questions of the work’s reception.

A first Italian translation, by Agi Berta, was published by Voland in 2001. The second edition, edited by Laura Sgarioto, with a preface by Emmanuel Carrère that also accompanies the French edition, appeared in 2017 from Adelphi. We shall also take up the French translation from Zulma, 2005 (Denoël, 1999), by Judith and Pierre Karinthy. We have our Rosetta Stone!

The two French translators, husband and wife, share the author’s surname: she is his adoptive daughter, he a first cousin (his father being Frigyes’s brother). To them we owe numerous French translations of Hungarian authors, as well, of course, as of Frigyes and Ferenc Karinthy. These biographical facts are not irrelevant.

The first Italian translator is a native speaker of Hungarian, and a bibliographic search turns up no other literary texts translated by her.

The second translator had already devoted herself, and still devotes herself, to translating Hungarian authors for the Adelphi publishing house and for others as well.

It is not always possible to know how translators work. For the French translators, however, we have a direct testimony: from an interview by Guillaume Richez, on the blog Les Imposteurs, dated 16 February 2017, we learn that Judith has always been a professional translator. Pierre was an engineer and has devoted himself to translation alongside his wife for some twenty-five years. Their account of their “four-handed” working method is precious: “Judith has the text in hand. Pierre sits at the keyboard. Judith proposes a translation, sentence by sentence. From there we begin a discussion. We take a first decision. Three to five re-readings will follow.”

What follows should therefore be taken as a limited exercise, whose aim is to bring out some of the procedures at work in the practice of translation.

We shall proceed with a first sample, chosen for its lexical richness and for the brief descriptions of setting, so telling throughout the tale. The corresponding sentences are presented in succession, in this order: the French translation, the Voland translation in italics, the Adelphi translation in bold:

Arrivé en haut, il est sur une place spacieuse; le ciel est toujours opaque, couleur d’étain, il bruine: un crachin silencieux et froid.

Sbuca su una larga piazza: ritrova il cielo plumbeo impenetrabile e una lieve, silenziosa e fredda pioggerella.

Sbucò in una grande piazza; il cielo era plumbeo, coperto da una coltre impenetrabile di nubi, e cadeva una pioviggine silenziosa e gelida

En partant au hasard, il constate aussitôt que le fourmillement des piétons n’est nullement inférieur de ce côté-ci de la ville.

Mentre si incammina non può fare a meno di notare che anche lì lo sciamare della gente è impressionante.

La folla era densa come ovunque, pensò non appena vi si immerse, senza darsi una meta precisa.

Il doit se trouver sur une foire ou un marché, on y vend de tout dans des stands, sur des étalages ou simplement répandu à même les pavés; des camelots font l’article, un déluge de musique descend de haut-parleurs hurlants.

Deve trovarsi in qualche mercato o fiera: si vendono articoli di ogni genere in chioschi e bancarelle, ma anche per terra. Si tratta per lo più di roba usata. Strilli di banditori, musica, altoparlanti che risuonano

Doveva essere finito in un mercato o in una fiera: sulle bancarelle e perfino sul selciato si vendeva di tutto, i commercianti urlavano a squarciagola, musica e altoparlanti al massimo volume.

En progressant péniblement à travers cette densité, emporté par le flot lent qui recouvre tout l’espace, il lui semble qu’on offre essentiellement des objets usagés:

Intanto la folla inarrestabile lo trascina intorno alla piazza (vedi sopra: Si tratta per lo più di roba usata ) :

C’era soprattutto roba di seconda mano, gli parve, mentre avanzava adagio intorno alla piazza, trasportato dal flusso:

meubles, lustres, habits, fourrures fatiguées, vaisselle, tapis, bric-à-brac, antiquités, marchandises rebutées, jouets d’enfants, ballons, énormes blocs de mousse synthétique, tuyaux enroulés de différentes couleurs et de différentes grosseurs, pneus, baudruches, verres à vitre.

mobili, lampadari, vestiti, pelli logore, stoviglie, tappeti, cianfrusaglie, prodotti industriali di scarto, pezzi difettosi, giocattoli, palloni, cose di plastica colorata, tubi di vario colore e misura, pneumatici, taniche, bicchieri di vetro

mobili, lampadari, abiti, pellicce consunte, vasellame, tappeti, cianfrusaglie, oggetti d’antiquariato, prodotti difettosi o di scarto, giocattoli, palloni, grossi tagli di gommapiuma, tubi di ogni colore e diametro arrotolati e impilati, pneumatici, canne da giardino, lastre di vetro.

On the strictly lexical plane, we note certain discrepancies, more or less marked:

– énormes blocs de mousse synthétique = cose di plastica colorata = grossi tagli di gommapiuma.

gomma piuma vs plastica, enormi or grossi vs no indication of volume, colorata vs no indication at all

– baudruches, verres à vitre = taniche, bicchieri di vetro = canne da giardino, lastre di vetro.

Here the differences are considerable.

baudruche: the French word denotes “une pellicule de caoutchouc dont on fait des ballons ou autres objets gonflables” (Trésor de la Langue Française), in other words, the (rubber-based) material of the inflatable balloons of times past. Besides being highly specific, the word carries the figurative sense, still lively today, of “pallone gonfiato”, a puffed-up windbag. In the Italian translations, instead, we find “taniche” and “canne da giardino”: a more or less bulky container, and an object that might rather be tube-shaped. Knowing the French translators’ penchant for more expressive and fanciful words, one might read their choice as a slippage from a “plastic jerrycan” to a “balloon-shaped plastic object”. The “canne da giardino” remain a mystery.

– again, on the search for more expressive and at times (elsewhere in the text) highly imaginative forms, one may note the descriptions of the sky, all accurate yet all different: le ciel est toujours opaque, couleur d’étain = il cielo plumbeo impenetrabile = il cielo era plumbeo, coperto da una coltre impenetrabile di nubi.

– And again: des camelots font l’article = strilli di banditori = i commercianti urlavano a squarciagola. The “camelots” are indeed “banditori” (criers); “commercianti” (traders), on the other hand, is a hypernym, is this a literal translation or an interpretation? Finally, from the two Italian translations one may surmise that the original text uses a verb synonymous with “to shout”, “to cry out”, which we do not, however, find in the French translation. There, instead, the description is enriched through a verbal phrase (“faire l’article”), usually employed to describe what street-hawkers do, that is, by adding to the shouting voice the representation of gesture, the animation of the scene.

We shall content ourselves with this very succinct typology of the different translations, to give an idea of the many variants that can arise from interpretation and from the choices that follow from it, among the possibilities the language offers, sometimes very wide, sometimes very narrow.

We come now to the most obvious difference between the versions, which shows up on the syntactic plane, in the choice of verb tenses: in the French text the narration is in the present: “Il passe un bon quart d’heure avant de pouvoir accéder à un ascenseur” becomes, in the Voland version, “Passa un buon quarto d’ora prima di poter entrare nell’ascensore”. But the Adelphi version resorts to the passato remoto (the remote past), with a consequent adjustment of tenses and moods to preserve agreement: “Ci volle un quarto d’ora perché arrivasse il suo turno.”

In this second example, drawn from a passage in which various actions are described in rapid succession, the resulting difference in tone becomes plain:

“Il prend une douche, il se rase devant la glace, il met du linge propre et, comme à son habitude, lave immédiatement son linge sale et l’étale sur la pomme de douche et les robinets.” (p.21)

“Dopo la doccia si rade davanti allo specchio, si cambia la biancheria e come d’abitudine lava subito quella usata e la appende ai rubinetti e sul bulbo della doccia.” (Voland p.12).

“Si fece una doccia, si rase davanti allo specchio, indossò della biancheria pulita; quella usata la lavò subito, com’era sua abitudine, e la appese ad asciugare sui rubinetti e sul braccio della doccia.” (p.25).

It is in this more radical choice that the greatest difference between the two Italian versions is to be found, and it is no small one.

The French translators, whom I questioned about the original version, confirmed to me that the question of verb tenses had presented itself to them from the very outset, and that Budai’s desperate situation admitted of no future, and therefore of no narration in the past either. No small detail: the author, still alive at the time of the project, had approved this choice.

It was thus a deliberate decision on their part from the start, based on a specific interpretation of the tale, but endorsed by the author himself, with whom, as relatives, they had the possibility of conferring.

Indisputably, the four translators are excellent connoisseurs of the two languages, attentive to “fidelity”, with all the ambiguities inherent in that term. The qualities of their language, of their lexical choices, their way of surmounting obstacles, are remarkable. And yet we have three texts whose final colouring is shaded differently in each case.

One may hazard a conclusion: the first Italian translation in all probability drew on the already existing French translation, given the similarities in both lexicon and syntax and in the flow of the narration. The second Italian translation appears more philological, in its lexical choices and its adherence to the text, adopting the same verb tenses and without the small omissions of the first.

There are greater periphrastic developments in the French translation, greater freedom in expressive choices. This is unsurprising, considering both the training and the working method of the two French translators, in some measure legitimised by their direct kinship with the author. In the first Italian translation one notes a search for precision and for colour too, without daring invention as the French does: a fitting caution. Apparently more philological, as we said, is the third, with its choice of verb tenses, which, however, sometimes ends up harming the immediacy and dynamism of the text. On the whole this last is more polished, more in keeping with classical stylistic habits (in line with Adelphi’s editorial manner?): vasellame rather than stoviglie, pioviggine rather than pioggerella, and so on, to give small examples.

And we have not had the chance to read the English version, in which the chosen title, Metropole, in reference to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in itself furnishes an inescapable key to its reading…

It should not be forgotten, then, that in analysing a translation, account must be taken of the period in which it is composed, of the stylistic habits in vogue, especially in fiction and its fashions (what of titles made up of entire syntagms, for instance?), of editorial requirements, of readers’ expectations[5] and, conversely, of the audacity, the courage/provocation of authors and… translators.[6]

Which work are we reading, we who do not know Hungarian? Without troubling either Walter Benjamin or the Torah, we may ask what palimpsest hides behind the different versions we hold in our hands. More modestly, we shall stress that the impossibility of reaching the original text, which exists somewhere, obviously, for the benefit of those who understand Hungarian, throws into relief, by contrast, the richness of the content opened up by infinite modes of reading,[7] among which translation occupies its own specific position. A text born of the three versions, one that will never be transcribed,et pour cause, yet exists in the mind of every reader and is his own personal interpretation.

Besides, en abyme, where does the language that Budai is unable to interpret, yet nonetheless “hears”, exist? That is: who was able to transcribe the samples of speech that the narrator reports in the text?

In the end the policeman nods and points his finger at him:

– Csetentcse gluglubb? Guluglulubb?” (Voland, p.36)

” (…) he takes him by the arm and pushes him toward the loading platform of the vehicle with these words:

-Dumucce brudimruscure! Klutt!…” (Voland, p.49)

Not Budai, despite his countless attempts to set them down on paper, certainly the author, who invented it all.

Our disquisitions on a text inaccessible to most in its original language, translated differently even within one and the same language, have rekindled for us the theme of the failure to communicate, in yet another of its variants within Western culture. We like to think that, so long as there are individuals eager to invent and others to question, to act as go-betweens between those who seek to understand and those less inclined to, a certain degree of communication, halting, even maimed, remains possible. It is worth attempting, at the very least.

Odile Martinez Dell’Orso

Notes

[1] An author also famous for the theory of the “six degrees of separation”, set out in one of his stories, Chains (1929), and brought back into vogue in more recent times through its adaptation in Schepisi’s film of the same name (1993, from a stage play by John Guare).

[2] Going off to snoop around on the Web has become a common vice, let us admit it in all honesty. One learns, for instance, of readers who abandoned the book out of excessive anxiety at the protagonist’s long peregrinations, never with a positive outcome, and out of irritation at the accumulation of descriptions and outlandish situations.

[3] It should be stressed that Hungarian itself possesses a runic script, used until the mid-nineteenth century, recently come back into vogue, and, it seems, with ramifications of a political order that this is not the place to assess.

[4] I got in touch by email with the French translators in March 2019, and received, by very swift return of post, a most courteous and open reply signed by Pierre Karinthy.

[5] To what style is the reader accustomed, which register of language do they favour? To some, the use of the passato remoto will seem a setting-at-a-distance; to others, on the contrary, it will give the reassuring familiarity of the texts of the classical tradition.

[6] We refer the reader to Nabokov’s highly sophisticated analyses concerning the possibility, for nineteenth-century Russian readers, of accessing works of English literature essentially through French translations. He stresses how greatly these may have influenced Pushkin in the composition of his Eugene Onegin. Reciprocally, how necessary it is for the translator of Pushkin to be aware of this: “The English translator of Pushkin must be very careful to distinguish between his author’s debt to Byron and his debt to Pichot [that is, the, execrable, according to the pitiless Nabokov, French translator of Byron].”, in Vladimir Nabokov, Traduzioni pericolose (scritti 1941-1969), edited by Chiara Montini, Mucchi Editore, 2019, p. 77.

[7] Cf. Umberto Eco, Opera aperta, Bompiani, 1962; Lector in fabula, Bompiani, 1979