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by chx
1466 days ago
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What about Sister. Frigyes Karinthy, a very famous Hungarian author active roughly 1910-1935 rightly famous for his humorous writing. He is also often billed as a translator -- this, however, is not quite true. His son, much later, in 1981, confessed he had a mentally ill sister, Emilia -- as an example, she used to put buttered toast in her handbag as is -- who nonetheless was a translator genius. She spoke 15-20 languages and she was capable of such feats as typing text in Russian dictated in Spanish. It was she who made the rough translations and Frigyes rewrote these in his style. This, for example, resulted in Winnie The Pooh becoming a cult classic book in Hungarian, much beloved by every Hungarian child (and let me quietly note: adult too) -- and it only resembles Milne's original passingly. Aside from the few sentences this son told the grandson in 1981 we know nothing of her. There are no photos, no records, nothing. Nonetheless the textual evidence is extremely compelling -- it was a longstanding mystery how could Karinthy translate Milne and Wells when he didn't speak English well. (Tangential note: there's nothing in English Wikipedia about this. Obviously not. And I'd rather gnaw off my arm than try to fix anything there ever again. I tried once.) |
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