March 2023

We are a group of literary translators inspired to translate contemporary Catalan poetry. On the one hand, the inspiration comes from the annual literary translation workshops from Hungarian to Catalan that we organize in the Hungarian Translator's House, in Balatonfüred. In the last two years we dedicated ourselves to the translation of contemporary Hungarian women poets into Catalan, with the collaboration of two Catalan poets Carles Dachs and Andreu Gomila, as well as that of other translators.

On the other hand, a Hungarian literary magazine had asked us for a sample of current Catalan literature (novels, essays, poetry, theatre) so we had the opportunity to inform the Hungarian public about actual Catalan poetry by translating and publishing some Catalan poets in the poetry section. Some other authors have also been sporadically published in this magazine, but, of course, contemporary Catalan poetry is much more than what we could get to know and show with these few texts. So we have a lot to discover and translate. By getting involved in this vice-versa poetry transfer we discover that there are several common points of interests and criteria with contemporary Hungarian poetry, and this is what we want to continue to explore through translation and collaboration with the authors present in Olot in the Faber project.

According to our experience, it is much easier for the works of prose to find their ways from one culture to another, whereas poetry stays behind. However, it is the poetry that often talks in a very essential way about what affects us most in this world, so upside down lately. It is precisely for this reason we reckon that by expanding this dialogue we can take a big step forward and facilitate the better understanding and communication between the two cultures. This is the project we want to carry out while staying in Olot: poetic communication from the very heart of these two cultures, through translation, an age-old ministry of these ends.

programa-traduccio-hongares.pdf