The Near-the-Knuckle Verse of Árpád Lőwy in English Translation

This article concerns the author’s personal and professional experiences with translating Árpád Lőwy’s works into English. It carefully reconstructs the biographical and historical circumstances of the translator’s interest in Lőwy’s poetry, and discusses dilemmas inspired by the idiosyncrasies of the poems themselves, whose poignant, ambiguous, and nearly pornographic idiom might be initially seen as untranslatable. Moreover, the text includes some of the challenges implicit in translating Lőwy’s works.