I translated a history book

The story of my translation job

Last year I was approached to translate Professor Róbert Hermann’s book entitled ‘1848-49: A szabadságharc hadtörténete’ [The Military History of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49]. Despite my initial reluctance, I accepted, and I was given the chance to collaborate with Professor Hermann, the foremost Hungarian historian of the topic, and Chris Pringle, a hobby military historian, wargamer, and translator, as well as the publisher Helion and Company to bring about the first full English language account of the conflict. The first run is done, this is how it went.

Interest in 1848-49

I like the period of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49. My first exposure, like all Hungarians, came from elementary school where every March 15 and October 6 we’re supposed celebrate the revolution of 1848 and its final defeat. Other than remembering the tedious and pointless chore of memorizing Sándor Petőfi’s poems and the names of the executed generals who fought on the Hungarian side, I remember very little about my enthusiasm of the period.

My fascination was ignited in my teen years, when I learned a great detail about the conflict from a computer game entitled 1848, published in 2005 by Hussar Games, a small Hungarian developer through a government contract for education purposes. I replayed the war over and over and over again, building up the revolutionary army and winning the war for the Hungarians dozens of times, destroying Austria and kicking the Russian juggernaut back behind the Carpathians. Just for completeness I played the Austrian side too sometimes, but the game was much easier and much less fun that way.

Since then, no matter how old I am, I keep finding new things in 1848-49 that keeps it fresh on my mind. As a kid, I understood it as a struggle between an evil empire and a rag-tag group of rebels. As a teen, I thought of it as a struggle of nations. Reaching adulthood, I saw it as a clash of ideologies. Now, in my fourth decade (oh shit), I took a liking to the interpersonal drama that plagued the Hungarian leadership and how that drama fueled the narrative of the war.

How the job found me

As long-time readers of this blog may know, one of the first posts here was a series about Artúr Görgey, a general of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49 and, as I assert, Hungary’s only military genius. I never intended to take it any further and, although I did have some ideas for future topics on 1848-49, it was never meant to be anything other than a some few-thousand-word essays on a specific topic that would pique my interest.

Fate had other things in mind, however. As it turns out, a Transylvanian Hungarian hobby historian, Dr Szilárd Szilágyi, took note of the blog, it being one of the very few writings on the topic in English available online, reached out to me, then introduced me to Chris Pringle, an academic publisher by profession (and a servant of the dark side, that is to say, Elsevier), military history enthusiast and editor and translator of military history books in his spare time. He had taken a liking to the conflict and was working on several projects on it, one of them being a planned translation of Professor Hermann’s book. The original intention was for Szilárd and Chris to translate it but Szilárd could not make it and had to back out. Chris asked me whether I want to replace him.

Naturally, I said no. I had neither the expertise, nor the time, nor the artistic touch required for a project like this. By that time I was also employed full time at my new job in Toulouse, and I was (and still am) eager to give a good impression. This seemed like a good way to miss my chance to do that, so I was rather reluctant to take up such a time-consuming hobby. I had done some shorter translations before, which had been just enough for me to discover that I had neither the talent nor the affinity for it.

After explaining the project in more detail and assuring me that he would take his own role seriously, Chris eventually won me over. Most importantly, it was his obvious passion for the period that did the trick, which easily matched my own. That, combined with the opportunity to bring Europe's biggest unknown war to a broader audience was enough to change my mind. My wife Nóra was incredibly supportive and gave me every assurance that she’s perfectly fine with me reducing my own free time if I wanted even if that meant I had less time for her. Throughout it all she’s been nothing but the greatest support, listening to my ramblings about a topic she has absolute zero interest in, and sharing the moments of difficulty and triumph with me. It means much more than I can ever put to words. My dad, a professional translator, in addition to having provided me with the aforementioned opportunities to test my abilities as a translator in my teens and twenties gave valuable advice during the time of decision and negotiation.

So, we set off and after I had completed an abysmal trial translation in December 2020 that made me question what little self-worth as a translator I had, Chris, Róbert, and I made a contract with Helion and Company, a publisher specializing in military history books and Chris’s long-time collaborators, to do the job.

Chris has been a great co-translator throughout, going well beyond the roles I expected him to fill, which were grammar checking, applying Helion’s house style, and a native speaker’s touch. He actually learned a great deal of Hungarian during this project and by mid-way through he was correcting me on the meaning of some words, a hugely impressive feat, given how difficult the language is for foreigners. While the brunt of the actual legwork still fell on me, through his Herculean efforts that went well above his call of duty, my job became a lot easier, and the pressure on me producing anything of literary beauty lessened greatly.

How the book went

Progress was painfully slow and hard at first. Róbert’s writing style is incredibly rich (and very entertaining to the point that one finds himself laughing out loud while reading a supposedly dry history book). It is richer than anything I’ve ever attempted translating before, making use of the whole range of tools that are found in the Hungarian language. These same tools don’t exist in English, and my command of it, though decent, is simply inadequate to find the ones that do exist, with which I could have produced a richness that approaches Róbert’s original. The fact that the book begins with a detailed introduction of the instruments, politics, conditions, and characteristics of the war was little help, with which, despite my well above average fascination of the topic, I knew absolutely nothing about. At times, I could hardly understand even the Hungarian text. I had to educate myself in the jargon of both languages in more fields than I ever expected: geography, transportation, engineering, weaponry, civil administration, military hierarchy, even religious liturgy. Some of these I had a great deal of interest in, some I didn’t.

Another challenge was the fact that the book, although a comprehensive overview that interested readers of all backgrounds can and will enjoy, it was very much written with a Hungarian reader in mind. As a result, references to people, places, and events that foreigners won’t recognize happen on every page. Simple terms such as 'Mohács', 'kuruckor', 'reformkor', 'Tót Atyafiak', and references to Szekler legends are all instantly recognized and understood by (many) Hungarians in more detail than any footnote can explain, but these are completely unknown to foreigners. It was up to Chris and I to decide which references we shuld keep, which do we replace by English analogues, and which do we explain in footnotes – I passinately wanted to avoid annotating the book to death.

To illustrate this challenge, take the word 'szabadságharc' itself, which is the Hungarian name used for this war, but only this war. It appears everywhere in the book, even in its title. The literal meaning is ‘freedom fight’, or 'struggle for freedom' which isn’t an accepted English term. The closest translation is ‘War of Independence’ but it's a term that is actually a misnomer for this war, given that it wasn’t really a war for independence, certainly not before April 14, 1849.

A related point is that the book, being written by Hungarians, for Hungarians, is not a balanced overview of the war. It’s not meant to be, nor is a balanced overview possible in my opinion. This year, the “year of wonders”, as Hungarians describe it, has left a profound impression on Hungarian society. The wealth of information available on even the most minor skirmish is just immense. Biographies, poems, novels, legends, anecdotes keep the characters of the conflict alive and breathing a good 170 years later. But all of it comes from Hungarians. Austrians, despite winning the war, did everything they could to wipe it out of their collective memory, whereas for Russians, the conflict was just a side-show and far overshadowed by the Crimean War that started a mere 4 years later; they didn't even actively do that much in it other than die of cholera in droves. The other ethnicities, Serbs, Vlachs, Slovaks, and Croats, were mostly rural societies at the time without a standardized written language, and as such, produced precious little. What they produced is biased, even more so than the Hungarian sources, and therefore they had a hard time reaching Hungarian historians (and very few nation's historians even research the topic). What did reach them is easily dismissed as they can’t rarely hold up to much scrutiny, nor did Hungarian historians have much incentive to not dismiss them.

As a result, Hungarian popular remembrance of the war is remains biased, simply because there is not a coherent alternate viewpoint even existing anywhere else. Truth be told, the Hungarian remembrance is not wholly one-sided; it’s not without self-reflection or self-actualization. Yet, at this point, the bias is severe enough that we don’t even know how severe it is exactly. This book is an accurate reflection of this fact. Critical, fair, and true, to the best of its ability, but that ability is limited by the lack of sources of the war as the other side saw it. This is not made any easier by subsequent historical developments; the Austrian repression of the facts about the revolution in the immediate aftermath, the Hungarian crackdown on the Kingdom’s minorities after the Compromise of 1867, and the utter shit-show the region has devolved into in the 20th century. I recommend Róbert’s book to everyone without reservation, but it’s good to be aware that our ability to write and understand history is always limited, even when the wealth of information about a subject is abundant; and this book is no exception to this rule.

My challenge as a translator, working to bring the book to an international audience who might be (rightfully) more suspecting of national bias than a Hungarian reader is three-fold: (1) bring a true representation of the book as based on Hungarian sources and displaying all the values and flaws of our national biases, (2) temper the book wherever needed so as to keep the audience from thinking they’re being fed pro-Hungarian propaganda (which the book isn’t, I promise, but the suspicion may still arise), and (3) remain consistent throughout the book in a way that invites the reader to do some critical thinking of their own.

So, TL;DR: it was hard work that challenged me in many ways. But I’m super glad I accepted to do it.

Here’s how it went in some statistics: the English version of the book will have around 160,000 words (excluding stuff that we will add, such as footnotes, annotations, translator’s/editor’s remarks, etc.). To put it to perspective, that’s around the length of The Two Towers, Dune, Harry Potter 6, or one third of War and Peace. The first run took me around 190 hours to translate, this will be complemented by Chris’s work (he’s super-fast and yet thorough, so that’s a lot less, probably), and several more rounds from me (hopefully also a lot less). The first touch was made on December 6, 2020, with my first draft having been completed yesterday, on November 20, 2021. For 11.5 months, much of my free time was spent in 1848-1849. Thanks to my meticulously kept work diary and rudimentary data visualization skills, I can actually show the exact distribution.

It’s interesting to look back at my year this way. I can see my first panicked efforts over the winter of 2020-21, the stabilization during the spring, an almost total lack of efforts over the summer, the wake-up in August, followed by a steady effort to bring it home in the autumn. I can even see smaller things, the hikes we made in the spring, our first real hikes in the Pyrenees, and (not that need a reminder) the crazy period during early October where I worked on too many research projects at the same time and research ate into the weekend even more than it usually does.

My mind, however, was not on the time, but the actual progress, which, didn’t always line up with my time investment. Over the winter, when time spent was high but productivity was low, I felt like I desperately needed to figure out a way to get this done. It took until February to come up with the ‘5000 (Hungarian) words per weekend’ rule, with which I could comfortably do this before the deadline and have some time left for other activities as well.

I was helped out early on by the strict French corona lockdown which didn’t let me leave my home more than 10 kilometers, putting the Pyrenees and the Cathar castles out of my reach. With the best of the outside options taken away, time was truly well spent on translating.

This quickly changed in the spring, when the lockdown was lifted and we went hiking from time to time, producing a much more erratic progress line than planned. In any case, it was moving well. Things broke down over the summer, where conference season, research, and other activities got in my way. For two months I barely looked at the text. I felt complacent and I was also kind of fatigued by it.

Then came August and I took some time off for this project which reignited my interest. For autumn, I settled into a very comfortable rhythm: 5 days of research during the week, get fed up with it, refresh myself with 2 days of translation during the weekend, get fed up with it, repeat. It was great.

By late autumn my speed was almost double than my initial one. This is due to my increased efficiency due to a well-kept work ethic, acquired familiarity with the topic, increasing experience, and reaching the more action packed and therefore less research-intensive second half of the book.

All in all, this has been quite a journey, and I enjoyed it profoundly. There’s a lot more work to be done, and I cannot allow myself to be complacent about it, but, the principal translation, the one that gives me a first, readable, English draft, the one I dreaded the most, and the one that I will miss the most, is over.

For now, I’m exhausted, but I may write up more details in the coming months, of the book, the translation, and the war in general. The planned appearance is the second half of 2022. Stay tuned, and thank you for reading this summary.

November 21, 2021.

Comments should be addressed to peter.bayer7@gmail.com.

Footnote: in an earlier version of this post I had referred to my wonderful colleague as Dr Chris Pringle, but the 'Dr' was an accidental addition on my part. I thank Chris for correcting me and my apologies for bestowing him with a doctorate only to unceremoniously remove it later.