The Irish were out in force at the Budapest Book Fair - forging new friendships and rekindling old ones. Shane Hegarty reports.
Günter Grass is reading in a room across the hall, but a smattering of people have chosen to skip the Nobel Laureate's visit to the Budapest book fair and have instead come to hear two Irish poets.
After the Hungarian moderator, Dóra Pódor, gives the locals an explanation of Irish names ("We find them difficult to understand"), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Liam O Muirthile read some of their work. It is captivating; a trilingual event, with O Muirthile's Irish-language poetry also read in English and Hungarian. It's then that one realises Pódor speaks astonishingly good Irish.
In the bookshops of a city with its impressive literary tradition, you will find Roddy Doyle and Joe O'Connor in Hungarian, as you will anthologies of Yeats and Wilde. Ireland Literature Exchange (ILE), which offers grants and bursaries for those interested in translating Irish works into other languages, wants to add to the shelves. With the backing of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, this is not only its first visit to the Budapest Book Fair, but the first time it has brought writers to an event of this type. Siobhán Parkinson, Anne Enright and Gerard Donovan are also along; a handful of the hundreds of writers who have come to this massive event, which took place towards the end of last month. The halls are packed with stands featuring books and publishers from all over Europe. The ILE provides one of only a couple of English- language stands.
After the reading, the Irish contingent gathers for coffee, where they chat with Hungarian publishers and swap translator stories, while beside them Günter Grass signs autographs for an enormous queue. Pódor, it turns out, studied Irish at TCD. Did she feel self-conscious reading the works of the people sitting either side of her? "No. Why? They can't understand what I'm saying."
O Muirthile enjoyed the event and was unworried by language barriers. He had explained to the audience that he once heard a reading of Russian poetry that taught him one could feel poetry without having to understand the words. Afterwards, he tells me that he once read his poetry, in Irish, in an American prison. "It doesn't matter. They just listen to it on a different level. I think they kind of get it in a strange way." Writing in Irish in Ireland, he says, means cultural baggage. Bringing the poetry abroad can relieve that burden.
O Muirthile recently spent time as writer-in-residence at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. "In France, it didn't matter what Irish social context the poetry came from. For me it was a sort of liberation that allowed me to continue writing in Irish, which is paradoxical." He enjoys taking the Irish language on to these foreign fields. "It's funny how this language, which doesn't have a huge literary context in Ireland, can have a context on an international stage."
For this week, Rita Kéri, who previously translated Robert MacLiam Wilson's Eureka Street into Hungarian, adapted three poems from their English translations. "It was instinctive," she says. "I tried to get the meaning to a literal translation, then to feel the rhythm inside it. And it's not always the same rhythm, but I tried to give it a subtlety in the Hungarian."
The Irish have attracted a decent amount of interest. Transylvanian publisher Andrés Kovács is showing particular interest and is looking at translating an anthology of Seamus Heaney's poetry, or perhaps even a several-volume anthology of Irish poetry. Involved with the Hungarian State Theatre, he says Brian Friel's Translations and Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets found an audience among the minority Hungarian population within Romania. Both became award-winning productions and he believes it's because his audience recognises the Irish experience.
"I'm convinced that for a Hungarian Transylvanian, it's not always easy to speak about the minority situations and the Hungarian culture. Sometimes it's easier to approach this issue through another narrative. It is another perspective, but it is also my perspective and I can convince the reader that it's a sort of universal problem of tension between small and big cultures. Translations is practically a Transylvanian story. The actors found it very familiar. They said, that's our life there." Having already published the work of Welsh poet William Owen Roberts, Kovács is keen to translate Heaney, as there is currently just one Hungarian translation of his work and it has a print run of only a few hundred. He sees an important lesson in contemporary Irish literature. "In Hungary there are fears that Hungarian culture will become a minority in all of Europe. And the Irish experience is great. It's a model for us."
Gerard Donovan, author of Schopenhauer's Telescope, attracts a lot of interest as one of the writers selected for the fair's European First Novel Festival. His reading, alongside English writer Lavinia Greenlaw, finds people sitting on the floor.
Anne Enright and Siobhán Parkinson also attract a good crowd to their reading. In this format, a moderator asks a few questions of the author before passages are read in both languages.
The moderator here is also the Hungarian publisher of Eureka Street and is keen to find Irish works. He seems to have a misty view of Irish publishing: Parkinson, for instance, has to convince him not all children's authors are famous faces. Later, when he talks of the small Hungarian market of "only 14 million", Liam O Muirthile, sitting at the back, finds this hilarious. "Only 14 million!"
Once again it is interesting to hear the rhythm change between languages. "What they can't translate is personality," says Enright afterwards. "What you are doing is presenting your personality and I think you need a lot of that in a reading."
Both writers are happy, though, and bemoan the lack of similar events in Ireland, where you are often pointed at the microphone and told to get reading. "Irish writers are always treated differently at home than foreign writers, so I presume the Hungarians are being treated like dirt," she laughs.
An event like Budapest is an opportunity to travel and get a new perspective on their work. "It throws your work into a very stark light," says Enright. "It concentrates your mind and clarifies your style to a degree. You realise, this is what carries over. It's a salutary thing. Then, of course, you sit down and write the same old thing anyway . . ."
The ILE has already been involved in the translation of two of Parkinson's books, but she admits that when she returns to Dublin, whatever results from Budapest will carry on without her. "It could be years down the line before any of this comes to fruition, and then you'll get a small royalties cheque a year after that."
Meanwhile, back at the stand, the ILE's Máire Ní Dhonnchadha is coming to the end of an exhausting couple of days during which she has been juggling writers, publishers, books and languages. But she feels that it's been worth it.
"We've re-established old links and made new ones. I think we could have had a bigger programme, longer readings, and possibly also discussion-based sessions on Irish writing and translation. But it's our first time in Budapest and we're quite happy and know they're impressed by the Irish presence."
This weekend, she is at the Prague book fair with a group of writers that includes John F. Deane, Hugo Hamilton and Keith Ridgway.
"I've arranged to meet people again there and this is showing that it's vital when links are forged. You never know. Something done here might have a knock-on effect in Serbia and Montenegro or wherever. In the publishing world, it takes a while for things to kick in, but if we continue to do this kind of programme on a regular basis, it will have great benefits."