We’ve had the pleasure of welcoming Hungarian Shakespeare scholar, Dr Julia Paraizs, to The Shakespeare Centre recently, and she sends this dispatch about her research here:
‘I recently had the pleasure to have access to the outstanding collection of The Shakespeare Centre Library. This is a brief account of my work with relevance to the holdings of the Library. As the recipient of a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship to The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham from the Hungarian Scholarship Board I conducted research in Stratford-upon-Avon from August 2011 to November 2011.
My research project focuses on nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare in Hungarian and I was interested in those nineteenth-century Shakespeare editions which are pivotal to the project and are in the holdings of The Shakespeare Centre Library.
The project in Stratford is part of a larger editorial enterprise under the supervision of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I am a member of a team of editors who edit the complete works of the most influential Hungarian poet from the second half of the nineteenth century, János Arany (1817–1882). His translations of Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1864; Hamlet, 1867 and King John, 1867) have become the standard texts in Hungarian editions of Shakespeare’s complete works ever since. All of Arany’s translations had been published as part of the first Complete Works of Shakespeare in Hungarian (1864–1878). The first complete Shakespeare edition was supervised by the leading literary society of the period (Kisfaludy Társaság) which established its Shakespeare Committee in 1860 to design and implement the translation project involving the leading literary authors of the time. The enterprise that made Shakespeare a national writer was financed by a private sponsor, Anasztáz Tomori.
Since the new edition of Arany’s translations will be published in a bilingual edition, my research in Stratford investigated their source editions.
Arany’s library burnt down in the Second World War, therefore the research is based on textual evidence. The translation guidelines of the Shakespeare Committee drafted by Arany in 1860 proposed the first edition (1854–1861) of the renowned German Shakespearean, Nicolaus Delius, to all translators for the sake of uniformity. Delius’s edition is an English text with a German apparatus which was regarded as the ideal edition for nineteenth-century Hungarian Shakespeareans. Delius’s Shakespeare was an influential edition in the second half of the nineteenth century; it reached seven editions up to 1919, was used by F. J. Furnivall for his Leopold Shakespeare (1877) and influenced the idea of a new variorum edition by H. H. Furness.
Although The Shakespeare Centre Library’s catalogue holds an earlier “Delius” edition from 1854, identified on the basis of William Jaggard’s 1911 bibliography, it has been proved to be a false identification (by Andrew Murphy in 2003). While there is no copy of a first edition, the Library holds the second edition.
Textual parallels, however, point to other sources. Arany started to translate Shakespeare from a paperback edition of the complete works by the Tauchnitz Publishing House which was based on John Payne Collier’s landmark edition from 1842–44. Based on the bibliography of William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, the Library is in the possession of a complete special series set of the Tauchnitz Shakespeare in 37 parts which was published after the general series came out in seven volumes (Leipzig, 1843–44) and is considered rare partly due to the short life of paperback editions.
As earlier scholarship has shown Arany’s work was also influenced by the classic German Shakespeare, the “Schlegel-Tieck,” translated by Count Baudissin, Dorothea Tieck, Ludwig Tieck, and August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Since Arany in a letter mentions a number of steel engravings taken out of a German translation and pasted into his own copy of Tauchnitz, I looked at the precious illustrated German editions form the Shakespeare Centre’s Library in order to find some textual clues.’
Julia is a junior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from November 2011. She received her PhD in Literary Studies from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest with a thesis on nineteenth-century Shakespeare in translation.
