Published in early 2019, Anna Bentley’s translation of Ervin Lázár’s children’s story “Arnica, the Duck Princess” was voted The Times’ Children’s Book of the Week in March. The translation was published by Pushkin Press, whose mission is to create a wider audience for “exciting, high-quality writing from around the world”. This much-loved Hungarian story fits the bill perfectly: the fairy-tale world created by prize-winning author Ervin Lázár (1936-2006) is skilfully shaped through his innovative and inventive use of language. At the same time, his characters refuse to conform to the traditional fairy-tale dichotomy between the good and the bad, allowing him to explore complex questions such as the nature of love, happiness and friendship. Thus, although the blurb on the back of the Pushkin Press publication calls it “a hilarious classic children’s tale”, this is really selling short both the original and the translation.
The book’s playful approach makes it rather hard to judge the target age group. The beautiful illustrations and picture book format suggest a younger audience, and the website of one Hungarian bookseller even claims that it is aimed at five-year-olds. However, the book is on the compulsory reading list in Hungarian schools for fifth graders (10- to 11-year-olds), which seems far more appropriate in terms of both language and themes. The telling of the duck-filled fairy tale is initiated and driven by the narrative framework of a dialogue between father (author/narrator) and daughter, who invent and develop the story between them, deciding which characters to include and when the story should come to an end. It is the topics addressed during this conversation, which range from freedom and responsibility to love, happiness, and why bad things happen to good people, that make the story ideal for pre-teens. In terms of the translation, the modern, unpretentious, idiomatic language will likewise be immediately appealing to readers of this age group. And, like Winnie-the-Pooh and many other classic “children’s” stories, it will have an enduring appeal among adults who appreciate its subtle humour, inventive language, and the poignancy of its message.
The first challenge for the translator lies in the title of the book. In the Hungarian story (Szegény Dzsoni és Árnika), Poor Johnny takes his place beside Arnica as eponymous hero. His name neither looks nor sounds Hungarian, but is the phonetically written equivalent of Johnny, which of course makes its translation both straightforward and problematic. Anna Bentley quite rightly chooses to leave him out of the title: there’s nothing exotic about the name in English, and, after all, even Johnny himself acknowledges that Arnica is his superior in terms of initiative and brains. In the opening lines of the book, “in which we team up to write a story and get to know the main characters”, the narrator comments to the child who has demanded the story and named the character that “Johnny sounds like an English name”. Aware that the book is a translation, an older English reader might enjoy the resulting ambiguity and confusion: “Of course Johnny isn’t English! Poor Johnny is Poor Johnny and that’s that.” Anyone who finds it problematic receives the same kind of put down as that delivered by Christopher Robin, when pressed to clarify whether Winne is a boy’s name or a girl’s name: “He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?” And here too, the narrator has to accept the logic of their young collaborator and concede defeat: “It’s all the explanation you are going to get.”
Apart from the question of whether or not Johnny is English, the setting of the tale creates no real problems in translation. There’s nothing exclusively Hungarian about it: we’re in the world of fairy tale “far away, over the mountains”, bordering the witch’s territory “almost at the world’s end”, a place where characters can “stroll into our story” and end up seeking the “Land of Wonders”. Knights arrive to claim the princess, and “Angers” fly out of “Angerland” to take up residence in people’s hearts. However, despite the witches and fairies and spells and people turning into ducks, unlike a classic fairy tale where good characters are good and bad characters are bad, this is “actually a true story”: characters are happy and unhappy for very human reasons; they are selfish, gullible and take offence – and some of them even play football, for which they have “talent coming out of their ears”.
The language of the translation conveys these parallel worlds as cleverly as the original. In the world of the fairy tale there is “woe and weeping and wailing”, the witch’s house “shimmered and shone” to tempt Poor Johnny, the witch has a penchant for saying “Odds bodkins”, as witches should, and there’s even the occasional “hey presto!” Johnny strolls through the story with a timeless detachment, eloquently conveyed in his down-to-earth, up-to-date language: he ponders why the witch is “mighty nimble all of a sudden”, he regrets not being able to reciprocate the disguised witch’s love “You being so beautiful and all”, and “Wouldn’t you know?” he asks, as it dawns on him that he’s almost been duped. At the same time, the interspersed dialogue between the narrator and child is conveyed with a realism and poignancy that set it apart linguistically from the rest of the story: “Is there such a thing as love that isn’t true?” “Is love like magic?” “Does everything turn out all right in real life?” “Does every cloud have a silver lining?” It is this use of linguistic register to tell more than one story that gives Ervin Lázár’s tale its value, and Anna Bentley can be commended for reflecting and reproducing these subtleties.
One of Ervin Lázár’s trademarks in his children’s tales is his talent for coming up with fantastic and inventive names for his characters, and Anna Bentley has clearly had fun with this too. Árnika remains Arnica: she’s a healer, not only of Poor Johnny’s broken bones, but of bitterness, anger and discontent in all the characters she meets on her way. Her father is King Tirunt, inspired by the “Östör” of the Hungarian, with its hints of whip and lash (“ostor”) and a touch of Turkish despotism. It’s a wonderful name for the most kind-hearted and well-meaning of rulers. He’s a “king-next-door” type, the kind that fill the “Dribblesome Teapot” stories of Norman Hunter, who have to be surrounded by sensible courtiers to prevent them from giving away half their kingdom every five minutes. It’s the task of the Chief Royal Counter, for example, to count to a thousand before checking whether the king’s temper has subsided, while the “chief royal brainboxes” are just as incapable of coming up with solutions as the “minor royal brainboxes”. The terrifying robber chief becomes “Tig-Tag”, just as his name in Hungarian is inspired by the children’s game of hide-and-seek, or tag. Other names are more straightforward: the Witch of a Hundred Faces and the Seven-Headed Fairy belong firmly to the world of classic fairy tale.
Another reason for the wide appeal of Ervin Lázár’s work in Hungarian is his inventive and creative use of language, and his use of self-coined words and words inspired from regional dialect. The translation exploits the possibilities of English, capturing and reflecting repetitions and rhythms, while never becoming too stilted and awkward for younger readers to enjoy. Victor Coppermine, for example, who takes offence at everything, “puffed and pouted and moaned and groaned”; in response to efforts to cheer him up, he simply “crouched and grouched”, preferring to stay “sad and sorrowful and moping and miserable”. The occasional “gewgaws”, “nincompoop”, “clodpole”, “turkeycock” and “crooked sixpence” are sufficiently removed from the everyday to add the necessary touch of exoticism.
Wisely, the translation makes use of existing idioms in English where appropriate, rather than literal translations that would sound stilted and out of place. Johnny turns “white as a sheet”, the spectators at the football match are “packed like sardines”, the eleven brothers’ eyes “turn wide as saucers”, Victor Coppermine takes offence “at the drop of a hat”, Johnny flees from the witch “faster than you could say Jack Robinson”, and “every cloud has a silver lining”. These are perfect translations of the idiomatic Hungarian in this context, rather than a literal rendering of the Hungarian words. Sadly, while “Odds bodkins” is certainly just what a fairy-tale witch should say, the duck reference in the Hungarian here is missing. However, as in the Hungarian, “Your duck or your life” and “A quacking good joke” work perfectly.
The book contains some genuinely funny scenes, such as when the members of the robber band learn to play football (“Football? What’s that?”). They take to this unknown game like ducks to water, in a sequence so reminiscent of Nick Park’s 2018 animated comedy “Early Man” that it’s easy to see why it remains so funny. As an interesting aside, a film was made of the story in 1983, in which a 20-year-old Viktor Orbán plays one of the footballers in the robber chief’s team, the all-conquering “Poor Johnny FC”.
As a modern-day fairy tale that touches on and offers answers to moral dilemmas, the story is sure to be read and loved by generations to come, and it certainly deserves to be appreciated by audiences outside Hungary. This English translation is delightfully readable, perfectly capturing the message that, alongside the hilarity and nonsense of the larger-than-life characters with their fantastic names, the important thing by the end of the story is that “the number of happy people in the world has gone up.”
This review was written by Rachel Hideg
You can read an extract of Arnica the Duck Princess on HLO here.
Arnica the Duck Princess by Ervin Lázár was translated by Anna Bentley and published by Pushkin Children's (2019). It's available in Hungary from Bestsellers, in the UK from Pushkin and in the USA from Penguin Random House.
