Paul Olchváry
Photo courtesy of Paul Olchváry
Bio
Paul Olchváry has translated many books for leading publishers, including József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium, György Dragomán’s The White King, Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir, and Károly Pap’s Azarel. He has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary’s Milán Füst Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Tablet, AGNI, and Guernica. Born and raised in a Hungarian family in the United States, mostly near Buffalo, New York, Olchváry went on to earn an MA in writing from Indiana University, Bloomington, and then spent much of his younger adulthood in Hungary. A former senior copywriter at Princeton University Press, he is the publisher of New Europe Books and the editor-in-chief of Hungarian Cultural Studies. He is a full-time floating teacher at Pine Cobble School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he lives with his teenage son, Ákos(h).
Project Description
To support the translation from the Hungarian memoir Private Affair by Alíz Halda. Private Affair tells the true story of Halda's tragic love affair with Miklós Gimes, a leading Hungarian journalist famously executed in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution along with Prime Minister Imre Nagy and several others. To write the book she drew not only on her memories but also on her diaries, her correspondences, and on historical documents. After Gimes' death, Halda never committed herself closely to anyone else, and, for decades, she was unable to find employment due to her relationship with Gimes. After the fall of communism, she eventually went on to serve as a member of Hungary's parliament. Private Affair was published in 2002, just six years before Halda's death.
The Cold War was ending. Fresh out of Indiana University, Bloomington—where, having been raised in a Hungarian family in America, I’d dabbled in Hungarian studies while pursuing an MA in English—I moved to Hungary in 1990 to try my hand at teaching essay writing to English majors at a university. There I hit upon another idea: literary translation jobs as a back door to kickstart my own writing career. Well, that back door proved in fact to be a front door: to a life as a literary translator.
That life had begun for me at IU in 1988–89, when I first translated short stories in a class taught by renowned Hungarian literary scholar Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. He became my mentor. I am grateful to him for encouraging me to believe that literature in a language as peculiar and non-Indo-European as Hungarian can—despite naysayers who insist that translation is impossible—come alive in English faithfully to both the meaning and the beauty of the original.
Someone once wrote on the trajectory of my translation career that I am unusual among translators of Hungarian in taking on “one-off” books and writers without a discernible “plan.” Indeed, I’ve tended to fall in love with a book and think, This must be translated—and then, next thing I know, begin to translate it regardless of whether the author already has other books in the pipeline. Single books have been known to “change the world,” after all.
Here I am, more than 30 years later—20-some translated books later—not exactly well off, but more or less happy, honored to have helped bridge a cultural divide.
That November 2023 call from the National Endowment for the Arts notifying me that I’d won a 2024 grant thus brought a big smile to my face. I’d won such a grant 17 years earlier. The same is the case now with the big book—a much bigger book!—of love and revolution that I can’t wait to dive back into, in 2024, now as its English-language translator: the late Alíz Halda’s Personal Affair. We Hungarians have been at odds for years now over the country’s notoriously “illiberal” direction in Europe, but if there’s one thing we can agree on, it’s that much of our literature, if only others could understand it, could make the world a more beautiful place. So now, too, I am grateful.
About Alíz Halda
Alíz Halda (1928 – 2008) was a teacher, actress, opposition activist, and, after the Cold War, a member of the Hungarian parliament. She is perhaps remembered in Hungary most of all for her one book—a beautiful, nuanced chronicle of both revolution and love. In Magánügy (Personal Affair) she recounts her relationship with Miklós Gimes, one of several top figures in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet occupation who were later executed. The book provides vital insight into why a political-historical event that captures the world’s attention are, for their participants, also exceedingly personal. This reminder resonates amid the Ukraine war and so many other conflicts throughout the world today.