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Bernard Adams

The Village Notary
A Hungarian Classic Resurrected in Translation

If the literary translator’s fundamental motive is the desire to share with others his delight in the strangeness of alien things, the re-translator’s purpose is more complex. He (allowing the masculine to do duty for both genders!) shares the first translator’s enthusiasm, but more is clearly needed. He may be

GREX MONACHORUM

However many the items of knowledge imparted by a Hungarian schooling, two in particular are all but universal. One seldom finds a person even of a distinctly unbookish tendency that cannot call to mind at least a line or two of János Arany’s celebrated poem A welszi bárdok (The Bards