SHAKESPEARE AS SYMBOL OF HUNGARIAN NATIONALISM
SHAKESPEARE, William, and Mihály VÖRÖSMARTY, translator.
Lear Király …
Pest, Landerer & Heckenastn, 1856.
12mo, pp. [2], 214, with half-title; a very good copy bound in contemporary marbled boards preserving the original wrappers; front wrapper slightly worn, foxing to endpapers; contemporary ownership inscription to front wrapper.
First edition of the first translation of King Lear into Hungarian by Mihály Vörösmarty, commissioned by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and carried out as part of a joint effort between three of Hungary’s most renowned poets.
Shakespeare was first made available to a Hungarian audience in the late eighteenth century in the form of loose adaptations or translations based on German versions of the plays. A very loose adaptation of King Lear which transferred the action of the play into pre-Christian Hungary appeared in the late eighteenth century as Szabolcs vezér, but Vörösmarty’s Lear Király was the first direct translation of the play. In 1831, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences established a theatrical committee which called for the translation of foreign plays into Hungarian, twenty-two of which were by Shakespeare; the Hungarian nationalist and Romantic poet Mihály Vörösmarty (1800–1855), a member of the committee and author of ‘The Szózat’, Hungary’s second national anthem, assisted in drafting the list. He was at the forefront of the effort to translate Shakespeare into Hungarian, having produced translations of Julius Caesar in 1840 and Romeo and Juliet in 1855.
Had it not been for Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet and Vörösmarty’s friend, ‘Vörösmarty’s renderings of Shakespeare would have remained isolated masterpieces, instead of becoming organic parts of a historical movement’; Petőfi discovered that his fellow poet János Arany had translated King John and The Merry Wives of Windsor into Hungarian, and proposed that the three poets should translate all of Shakespeare’s plays systematically (Mark, ‘The First Hungarian Translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works’, in Shakespeare Quarterly 16:1 (1965), p. 111).
OCLC finds two copies in the US (University of Chicago, NYU), and one in the UK (BL).
