Dezső Mészöly was a poet, prose writer, translator, literary historian, and also a genuine ‘theatre man’. He spoke English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew. Even this brief list is enough to unsettle us when we try to frame his life’s work straightforwardly. Such a many-branched oeuvre resists any attempt to delimit the ‘Mészöly corpus’ with pedantic precision – nor is such precision perhaps necessary. László Lator is justified in speaking of his ‘uncertain literary position’, just as Pongrác Galsai is justified in calling him a ‘wandering knight’. Mészöly accepted this title; he himself understood and explained it thus: “I was neither populist nor cosmopolitan [(népi–urbánus) labels for the two main 20th-century Hungarian literary ‘camps’]. With the gentry stamp stuck on me unbidden, what could I have sought in the camp of the populist writers (whom I privately held in great esteem)? But among the cosmopolitan writers too, I stood out with the tangle of my wide-ranging rural roots: my world of experience, vocabulary, my entire intellectual armoury somehow diverged from theirs.”
His professional journey was profoundly shaped by his early years in 1942. At the University of Cluj, he earned a doctorate in humanities; in his dissertation, he sought to answer the question of how medieval religiosity becomes intertwined with the most modern doubts in Villon’s works. In his view, Villon’s reading and critical reception are often filled with misunderstandings. In 1937, György Faludy’s translation volume Francois Villon balladái (lit. The Ballads of François Villon) was published – a book that Mészöly himself found successful and vivid, but which he believed misled readers. This motivated him to show what the ‘real’ Villon is like. In 1942, he published his study Villon Magyarországon (lit. Villon in Hungary).
Throughout his life, he remained under the spell of the French poet; one of the cornerstones of his work as a translator is his rendering of François Villon’s oeuvre, along with the series of meticulous philological studies devoted to him. His collection of essays Villon és a többiek (lit. Villon and the Others, 1966) and the publication of Villon’s complete works bear witness to this.
Some years later, in 1993, his collection of translations and studies entitled Az igazi Villon (lit. The Real Villon) was published, with its main merit lying in its masterful re-creation in Hungarian. Beyond its aesthetic merits, the freshness and vividness of its language significantly enhanced the freedom of expression.
Alongside Villon’s surviving works, the volume includes, in an appendix, poems attributed to Villon, as well as extracts from Villon’s predecessors, contemporaries, and presumed readings. Finally, three studies round out the book and substantially assist the reader’s understanding of Villon and reshape our perception of him. With a charming acrostic, the author dedicates the work to Ottó Süpek [Villon scholar and literary historian].
In 1943 – we might almost say ‘for fun’ – he translated Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. As he translated, he also ‘played’ the role inwardly; his actor’s instinct was at work, and he himself claimed that this is why his translations are better than those of his predecessors. This translation of Antony and Cleopatra brought Mészöly success and recognition: in 1946, the play was staged at the National Theatre with Gizi Bajor’s legendary Cleopatra, and thereafter Mészöly worked in the theatre as an assistant director, translator, and dramaturg until 1958. The experience he gained there continued to shape his path. From 1963, he also worked as a dramaturg for Hungarian Television.
Two additional main strands of his translating career are Shakespeare and Molière. In 1978, his volume Esszék és asszók (lit. Essays and Bouts) was published, a work in which the professional translator confronts himself. One of the book’s great merits is that Mészöly does not write in technical jargon addressed only to insiders, but in an accessible manner to all readers. His flowing prose, enlivened with linguistic play, invites the reader into scholarly debates and shared reflection. His book is, on the one hand, philology resting on scholarly foundations, and on the other, a kind of lyric on the tormented delight of artistic expression. The volume discusses three problem areas from multiple angles. Its backbone consists of Villon’s poetic world, the problems of Shakespeare translation, and the interpretation of Molière’s The Misanthrope, supplemented by a few short essays published under the collective heading Lámpafénynél (lit. By Lamplight). The first cluster of reflections, Villon nyomában (lit. In Villon’s Footsteps), is a rich series of meditations composed by a translator who has immersed himself in Villon from both a literary-historical and a philological perspective, to present the author ‘in a new mirror’. Mészöly’s critics repeatedly address as a central issue the extent to which he regards Villon as a medieval poet, and perhaps sees him less as a kinsman of the early-modern and Renaissance writers. The second section, Shakespeare-napló (lit. Shakespeare Diary), is where Mészöly seeks to dispel a misunderstanding that perhaps still haunts our view of Shakespeare. Some see Shakespeare primarily as a poet, while others, at the poet’s expense, identify him above all as a playwright. Mészöly points out that the great poet and great theatrical magician are not only the same person, but that text and theatricality cannot be separated. In the third part, he interprets Molière’s play The Misanthrope. Géza Hegedüs observes that this volume is also characterised by what characterises its author: “professor-level scholar and schoolboy-level punster”. Even his work as a translator is suffused with poetry; his essays can be chanted like verse.
A similar work by Mészöly is the Shakespeare Diary, published in 1998, in which the translator again writes about his own translation. The book summarises thoughts, arguments, and debates from 1948 to 1998. It is here that Mészöly’s fundamental attitude towards translation becomes most apparent. He fights, as he states, against everyone who does not approach Shakespeare from the perspective of theatrical performance. “Shakespeare, even when read, is theatre.” (Shakespeare-napló, p. 143.) “For we know that Shakespeare did not have a single play printed; he did not intend them for reading, but for recitation on stage, for the ear.” (ibid., p. 21.) At the same time, the book contains remarks that do not fully support this strict position. Some have thought that Mészöly emphasises Shakespeare’s theatricality so strongly precisely to validate his own principle as a translator: that is, that translation should be produced unequivocally for the theatre and the actor. From this same theatre-centred point of view, he makes disapproving remarks about earlier Shakespeare translators (Mihály Babits, Mihály Vörösmarty, Dezső Kosztolányi, and Lőrinc Szabó).
In 2003, his volume Örökbefogadott versek (lit. Adopted Poems) was published. It includes material from several earlier books and is not merely a heap of poems, but also a cultural and historical survey. From Sophocles to the twentieth century, he has rendered into Hungarian many well-known and lesser-known poets. The book features the complete works of Villon, excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, works by largely unknown contemporaries who wrote in the shadow of giants, gems of rococo and classical verse, and a sample of poems from the most recent eras. A real curiosity is the final section, which presents the works of Queen Elisabeth of Hungary [Empress Elisabeth “Sisi”, consort of Emperor Franz Joseph, who wrote poetry in German].
We could endlessly list Mészöly’s translations and adaptations – from Carlo Goldoni to Ödön von Horváth and from Sophocles to Ostrovsky – yet the backbone of the ‘Mészöly translations’ is nevertheless formed by Villon and Shakespeare.
His subsequent volumes (Shakespeare új tükörben [lit. Shakespeare in a New Mirror], 1972; Molière műhelyében [lit. In Molière’s Workshop], with Miklós Gábor, 1975) also feature essays and translations.
As a poet, Mészöly was less widely known. His poems were only compiled into collections in 1975 and 1983, although there was no period in his life when he did not write. To some extent, he also found poetry in translation, especially in translating verse drama. László Németh described him as follows: “In Mészöly’s case, we are not dealing with a mere translator, but with a poet of linguistic bent, who does not write his own original works, but sends his shoots up along the greats of world literature.” His first poetry collection is titled Önarckép retus nélkül (lit. Self-Portrait without Retouching), and Mészöly stresses that he set himself the standard of honesty. The editor still omitted some of the poems, yet Mészöly did not give up his desire to publish them. In his second collection, Villon árnyékában (lit. In Villon’s Shadow), he managed to smuggle these poems in – by giving the clearly political, painfully evocative of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, poems a misleading title: he labelled them San Salvadori énekek (lit. Songs of San Salvador). In the collection Don Quijote nyomában (lit. In Don Quixote’s Footsteps, 1999), these poems already appear under their original titles.
In the introductory self-confession to Self-Portrait without Retouching, Mészöly writes: “My mother tongue is verse. I cannot remember when or how I learnt it: just as one cannot recall how one learnt to speak. (…) There was a prolonged period in my life when translation overshadowed my own work – and indeed my whole life. Should I regret this in retrospect? Or be grateful for it? Translation was a majestic narcotic, filling me with daring dreams and proving an effective antidote to serious suffering. I did not become either crippled or vicious. (…) I wanted to give a self-portrait, fearing neither capricious lights nor harsh shadows. Each of us has as many portraits as acquaintances. Like it or not, our likeness is traced out in the consciousness of our fellow human beings. We also have the right to add one of our own to these.”
Role-play, of course, remained an endlessly appealing pursuit for the poet Mészöly. His poems freely traversed different periods of Hungarian history and lyric poetry, conjuring, for instance, the sixteenth-century Szatmár castle-captain ancestor of the family, András Mészel of Szatmár, through Versek egy várkapitány hagyatékából (lit. Poems from a Castle Captain’s Legacy). Among its ancestors, the family proudly listed professors of linguistics, Reformed pastors, painters, and hussar colonels.
The playful spirit that in an excellent stylistic ear, and the strong propensity for imitation, characterised Mészöly’s writing from his earliest youth – as evidenced by his cheekily charming adolescent parody of Károly Szász [19th-century Hungarian poet]: “Játszogatsz kicsiny fiú a' puha föveny'n / háborúba nem kisér még borús könyem, / majd midőn már kis kebeld száz borúra kész / főbe nyomva siskodat háborúba mész” (lit. “You play, little boy, upon the yielding sand, / My darkening tears do not yet march you into war; / But when your tender chest has learned a hundred storms, / Helmet pressed upon your head, to war you will march.”) – lines that mock-faithfully reproduce the archaic diction and metrics of the original.
The slender volume contains barely more than fifty poems, yet this suffices for Mészöly to unveil a sovereign poetic world that cannot be confused with anyone else’s. The intellectual, the thinker who casts an immense store of learning into verse, polishes his poems with unprecedented care. “His varied poems, for the most part using antique verse forms, are the result of very deliberate artistic work. Perhaps it is precisely this excessive craftsmanship, this high finish, that sometimes makes his mode of representation impersonal, distant – even when he is writing outspoken erotic love poems or poems recalling family memories and moods. His ars poetica is very characteristic: ‘Akármiként állítjuk föl a mércét: / a vers csak úgy szép, ha nem tudni, mért szép.’ (lit. ‘No matter how we set up the yardstick: / a poem is only beautiful if one cannot tell why it is beautiful.’)” His Farkasüzenet (lit. Message from the Wolves), which evokes Petőfi, Forma (lit. Form) – whose final line reads: ‘forma varázsától tisztul a gondolat is’ (lit. ‘by the magic of form, thought is also cleansed’)- and Deákos zsörtölődés (lit. A Classicist’s Grumble) are among his most characteristic poems, offering examples of twentieth-century poetic and human comportment. A weighty diction, concision, and at points a mocking, ironic tone are the principal virtues of the volume. Alongside the original poems, the book also contains a ‘versified translation, faithful yet imbued with personal lyricism’ of Sophocles’ Antigone, forming a worthy pendant to several other Antigone translations in Hungarian translation literature.”
In 1993, his volume Lyukasóráim (lit. My Free Periods) appeared, consisting of selected scripts from the television programme Lyukasóra (lit. Free Period), as well as original writings (poems, feuilletons, and short stories) that the author wrote in his own ‘free periods’, those fragments of time not burdened by the sense of ‘demanding duty’. At the very beginning of the book, in a diary fragment, Mészöly relates how the television programme Lyukasóra came into being and how his personal free periods gradually filled up.
The programme Lyukasóra was founded by renowned literary figures (Tibor Gyurkovics, László Lator, Sándor Lukácsy) based on Mészöly’s idea. In the programme, a close-knit circle of poets, actors, and literary scholars guide each other – and the viewers – through the captivating world of poetry, often venturing into scarcely known territories. Participants arrive at each meeting with a quotation; the game is to guess the author or translator. As the poems and poets are evoked, anecdotes and treasures of literary history surface, inspiring witty exchanges and reflections. This is what turns the puzzle game, on each occasion, into an intimate literary café. At the launch of the programme, Dezső Mészöly acted as quizmaster; later, as he aged and his health declined, he withdrew into the background, but he continued to accompany Lyukasóra broadcasts with letters and new riddles. Frequent guests at these gatherings included Anna Kubik, Anna Ráckevei, Anna T. Szabó, László Lator, Szabolcs Várady and János Papp.
Ferenc László, writing in Holmi (2011), remembers him thus: “He preserved, to an impressive degree, both elegance and that gallantry which always bowed before beauty, and he surely earned the right, as a lover of the ‘world-theatre’, to see the ultimate wish of his poem De profundis fulfilled.”
„Tragédiák s komédiák káprázatos teátruma!...
Szólít-e még az ügyelő csengője újra engem is
a tündöklő porondra, hol
a végtelen repertoár
során örökké váltja egymást szeszély, veszély, élet, halál?
Csilláraid kristály-világát hadd lássam még fejem fölött,
mielőtt szédülten s kifúlva a süllyesztőben eltünök!”
(lit. “Dazzling theatre of tragedies and comedies!…
Will the prompter’s bell still summon me once more
to that glittering stage where,
through the endless repertoire,
whim, peril, life, and death forever succeed each other?
Let me see once more your crystal world of chandeliers above my head,
before I, giddy and spent, vanish into the trapdoor below!”)
Between 2004 and 2006, a three-volume collection of his life’s work was published, titled Magyar ég alatt (lit. Under Hungarian Skies, 2004), Angol ég alatt (lit. Under English Skies, 2005) and Francia ég alatt (lit. Under French Skies, 2006).
[2015]