Bio

Balázs Déri (born in Orgovány, Bács-Kiskun county, Hungary, August 4, 1954) studied Hungarian, Classics (Latin, Greek), Iranian, Coptic, and Catalan (in this order) at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest / Faculty of Humanities (1972–1981), and musicology at Liszt Ferenc Music Academy Budapest (1991–1995). He had been a fellow of the Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi Hungariae (1972–1994), a lector of Greek and Latin at the Faculty of Theology of the Reformed Church (1993–1997), and since 1998 he has been teaching at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest (since 2008 as a full professor, 2002–2018: head of the Departments of Latin and, in 2019, of Religious Studies, 2003–2006: Vice-Dean of the Faculty), where since 2011 he also teaches creative writing (poetry). At the same time, he is a scientific researcher at the Institute of Musicology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He maintains a choral group and a radio program on music topics, and has been running Hungarian Sacred Music Review since 1993.

As a Catalan-speaker, he is one of the first disciples of Kálmán Faluba, the introducer of Catalan studies in Hungary. In 2002, he and György Jánosházy participated in the 9th Seminar on Poetic Translation at Farrera de Pallars, in which a group of Catalan writers translated a selection of poems by both authors. For his part, he has translated into Catalan several works by Hungarian authors (Madách, 1987, Pilinszky, 1988), and in Hungarian works by Ramon Llull (1994) and Ausiàs March (1999), as well a bilingual anthology of twentieth-century Catalan poets (1997) and a volume of poetry by J. Margarit and F. Parcerisas (2015).

Among others, he has been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary (2016).

Project

As a member of the Hungarian translator team (Dóra Bakucz, Krisztina Nemes, and Gabriella Zombori), the purpose of my stay at Faber is to prepare a sample of contemporary Catalan literature for a Hungarian review of universal literature, selecting poetry texts. This time I am interested in the current poetry of the “Catalan Countries”, especially that of the “young poetry” (of poets up to 40) in Catalonia.

The selection of texts will have been made in advance in Budapest, with the help of the Catalan reader of our Faculty (Carles Dachs).

I would also like to meet with some authors that I will translate, and take part in a workshop with a person who usually helps me with translations. (The favorite person is Montserrat Bayà, from Barcelona).

On the other hand, as an alumnus of Piarists in Budapest, I would gladly talk to a group of students of the Piarist secondary school in Olot (Escola Pia d’Olot) about a handful of my poems (already translated into Catalan) that may be interesting to the generation between 15-18.