Collective residencies / Translation of Catalan poetry into Hungarian and vice versa / Olot
DÓRA BAKUCZ
From Thursday, 9 March 2023 to Friday, 17 March 2023
Bio
Dóra Bakucz lives in Budapest, Hungary, she is a translator, has a PhD degree in Cultural Sciences and works as a teacher of Literature and Translation at the Cath olic University Pázmány Péter of Budapest. She translates from Catalan and from Spanish into Hungarian, and has translated also novels, short stories and poems f rom Hungarian into Catalan in collaboration with other translators; she organises e very year a workshop of translation (Hungarian-Catalan) at the House of the Translator of Hungary, at Balatonfüred. Some of her more important translations from Catalan literature: Mercè Rodoreda (El carrer de les Camèlies), Pere Calders (short stories), Quim Monzó (Guadalajara), Sánchez Piñol (La pell freda, Pandora al Congo). She translates also theatre plays, from au thors like Jordi Galceran or Sergi Belbel. She is a collaborator of the collection "Biblioteca catalana" edited by the publishing house L'Harmattan, and of the universal literature magazine, 1749.hu.
Project
We are four translators who will work on the translation of contemporary Catalan poetry to Hungarian. We would like to put together a lively, flavorous collection of young Catalan poets' works (approx. 7-8) and publish it in Hungary. We have a vice-versa project too, we arrive to Olot with a bunch of Hungarian poetry in hand translated to Catalan and in the workshops of Olot we would like to polish the final versions together with the poets in person who will pay visit, each for a day or two.
Shared poetic landscapes
Our project in Faber Olot was a meeting of two cultures: Catalan and Hungarian, with the title: "Translation of Catalan poetry to Hungarian and vice versa".
The first three days we spent with five Catalan poets: Maria Callís, Andreu Gomila, Pau Sif, Carles Dachs and Jaume Coll. On behalf of the translators there were four of us: Balázs Déri, Krisztina Nemes, Kata Varju and the project coordinator, Dóra Bakucz.
There were three very intense days: after presenting "the versa" of the project, in other words, donate a taste of the current Hungarian poetry that we have been translated during the last years in the House of the Translator of Hungary, we began the sessions with talks and presentations about the most important referents of current Catalan poetry and we continued speaking, analysing, commenting on texts of the poets present, selected by us, translators.
We discovered points in common between questions and topics expressed in the poetry of our cultures –Catalan and Hungarian– and we also talked about typical and atypical poetic techniques and forms, possibilities that the two languages allow. After this inspiring weekend, we started the individual translations, everyone in their room, with that beautiful and motivating panorama that we had at the hotel.
The work could not become monotonous because we had a lot of visits: one day came Eva Baltazar, another day Carles Dachs and Jaume Coll to work together again, and one afternoon came also to visit us Montserrat Bayà and Ignasi Farinyes, two of our collaborators who usually participate in the translation seminars from Hungarian into Catalan. On Wednesday we went on an excursion with Pepa to get closer to the beautiful landscape of La Garrotxa what we could see from the hotel's windows. Also, the restaurant's waiter helped us to know better Olot and its people through the stories he explained us between the tasty courses of the dinner.
The last day we had a final session to see the results of the week: every translator chose 4-5 of the translated poems and we read them, we commented on them, we analysed them. It turns out that we have a rich and quite heterogeneous selection of current Catalan poetry that can help Hungarian readers to get a very interesting picture of the Catalan poetic landscape.