Friday from the Archives: “A Second Life to Tell the First: An Interview with Elaine Neil Orr” by Kathryn Stripling Byer in NCLR 2015
“I’ve often puzzled over the mystery of translation, for example, how a work of language, particularly a poem, is cast into another language, another set of names,” wrote Kathryn Stripling Byer, in her interview with Elaine Neil Orr in our 2015 issue’s special feature “North Carolina Literature in a Global Context.”
September 30th is International Translation Day and this year’s theme is “Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights: the power of being understood.” The International Federation of Translators believes, “It is a timely and highly relevant theme for International Translation Day (ITD) 2026, highlighting the essential role of translation, interpreting, and terminology in fostering inclusion, equity, and participation in an increasingly interconnected world.”
Byer went on to reminisce on her 2008 odyssey through translation:
In 2008, the cantata Alma, in which several of the poems from Wildwood Flower were set to music by composer and North Carolina native Harold Schiffman received its international premiere, in Györ, Hungary, by the Györ Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hungarian National Choir, and mezzo soprano Katalin Halmai, with Mátyás Antal conducting. In conjunction with that premiere, the City of Györ honored Harold with its silver medal and a certificate from the mayor in appreciation of the composer’s contributions to the cultural life of the city. My husband and I were thrilled to be in attendance, and I was charmed by the young Hungarian woman delivering the accolades, especially her calling Alma the “Apple” cantata! “Alma” means “apple” in Hungarian, a serendipitous linkage, with its connection to Eve and the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The poems had to be translated into Hungarian for the premiere’s program brochure, a task the lovely Szidónia Juhász took as her own, rendering my words into her native Hungarian, her “funny language,” as she called it. A difficult language, too, not a part of our Indo-European language family. Hungarian is a highly inflected language in which nouns can have up to 238 possible forms. It is part of the Uralic language family, Knowing nothing of that language, I was both confounded and
thrilled to hear how it sounded in the voice of a young symphony musician who graciously offered to read one of the translated poems aloud to me. I felt as if I’d entered another culture, as indeed I had, the words I had written set down into someone else’s history and landscape. I have saved the original program, with those translations. Audience members told me that they were moved by the Hungarian renderings, although many of these people were also fluent in English. Here was a North Carolina mountain woman’s voice singing her songs in Hungarian! Amazing. I wonder how they would have sounded if they had actually been sung in Hungarian rather than English?
Read the rest of the interview and three of Byer’s translated poems in English and in Hungarian in ProQuest. Add the 2015 issue to your collection today!
