Until now, only a few of Bálint Balassi's poems have been translated into English in different parts of the world, now 38 of his poems can be read in English in one volume; i.e. Balassi breaks into the Anglo-Saxon literary world.
Pál Molnár , the president of the Balassi Sword Art Foundation, said this in his press release on the occasion of the publication of Peter V. Czipott's bilingual book Toll és sáblya – The Pen and The Sword, published by Kairosz Kiadó.
Péter Czipott was born in California in 1954 to Hungarian parents. Dr. Czipott is an internationally renowned literary scholar and translator, primarily translating works of fiction from Hungarian to English. John M. Ridland Balassi-Kardos, he published a two-book volume of selected poems by Sándor Márai (Alma Classics, 2013) and Miklós Radnóti (New American Press, 2014; 2nd revised edition, 2020). In addition, he made the translations of poems by many Hungarian authors public domain in literary journals and anthologies. As an individual translator, he published Antal Szerb's masterpiece, Utas és holdvilág (Journey by Moonlight, Alma Classics, 2016), and as a co-translator of the author's work, Men's novel for girls, the Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi's book (Those Who Remained, JewishGen Press, 2021). . For his services to Hungarian literature, he received the Bálint Balassi Memorial Medal in 2010, and the Hungarian Gold Cross of Merit in 2020.
Pál Molnár , asked the American writer to translate Balassi's poems This is the fourth book related to the Bálint Balassi Memorial Sword, an international literary award founded in Hungary. The first was published in 2002 under the title Kardtársak, in 2016 the collection Balassi's kardtársa was published, the third volume under the title Rímek sáblyaélen was released on the book market in 2020, in the latter two books you can also study the works of foreign translators in their native language. Each volume was published by Kairos.
Source: gondola.hu
(Header image: book cover/Kairos)
