Rudderless and Without Compromise
Rudderless and Without Compromise

Summary/Abstract: In 1975, I co-edited a book entitled Pesnici Vojvodine (The Poets of Vojvodina). The purpose of the book was to present poems written in the languages spoken in Vojvodina: Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Ruthenian. I may add that – along with Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians and Ruthenians – Croats represent a minority within Vojvodina. Croatian poets have always claimed they were writing in Croatian – just as their Serbian counterparts have always insisted that they were writing in Serbian. Yet the two languages were – and are – very close, almost identical. Indeed, in 1975, the language was officially designated as Serbo-Croatian.) All poems were published in the language in which they had been written, as well as in English, French and Russian. In addition, poems written in the minority languages were translated into Serbo-Croatian. My task was to select Hungarian poems. I had to find a judicious balance between generations, and I weighed my options, consulted poets and literary critics. One thing was absolutely clear and obvious. I knew – and everybody I talked to knew – that Domonkos’s Kormanyeltoresben (Rudderless) had to be included. The only issue was that of volume. The anthology had to accommodate poems in all languages spoken in Vojvodina, as well as translations into several languages, so we had to work within strict constraints regarding length. Had we decided to publish Rudderless in its entirety, it would have taken almost all the space allotted to Hungarian poets. In this way, we had to content ourselves with excerpts rather than the whole poem. And it worked: we succeeded, at least in part, to make this truly exceptional poem available in other languages. This was in 1975. The excerpts were translated into English by an Irish writer, Alan McConnell Duff. The unabridged poem came out in English 40 years later, translated again by an Irishman, Owen Good. In 2015, the English version was published along with translations into 11 other languages. The full English text is now reproduced in Hungarian Review.

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