Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain: Reading, Translating and Staging Milton in Communist HungaryMiklósPéti. London: <scp>UCL</scp> P, 2022. ix + 286pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9781787358556. £20.00 (paper).

It is difficult in a brief review to do justice to the richly detailed research, critical insights, and political subtlety that characterize Miklós Péti's Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain. A note of caution at the outset: this remarkable study of the reception of Milton's works in the years of state socialism in Hungary (1948-1989) cannot be skimmed. It requires serious concentration from readers, especially from those (like this reviewer) who are not overly familiar with the constantly shifting political and cultural policies in Hungary during the four decades under discussion. But readers’ concentration will be rewarded. For many western Miltonists, Péti's book may well open up hitherto unexplored intellectual territory, territory in which translation, both as subject and method, plays a central and dazzling role. Rather than taking a chronological approach to his subject, Péti divides his book into chapters that focus on different genres of Milton's works. This treatment allows a clearer exposition of how selectively Milton's works were read in communist Hungary. After an Introduction supplying critical and historical contexts for what follows, Chapter 1 examines Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; Chapter 2, Samson Agonistes; Chapter 3, Milton's prose; and Chapter 4, the shorter poems. An Appendix provides, on facing pages, Hungarian and English texts of the theatrical production of Paradise Lost staged in 1970 by Károly Kazimir. Given that what mattered during the years of communist control was the “political currency of any work by any writer,” native or foreign, Milton posed a clear problem for those who wanted to introduce his works to Hungarian readers. Yes, the man who was acknowledged to be one of England's greatest writers was a social revolutionary—he “actively participated in the English Civil War (or the English Revolution)”—but he was also a deeply religious Christian (2). The variety of strategies that Hungarian interpreters employed to handle this dilemma is the core subject of Péti's monograph. Unsurprisingly, the term “ambivalence” recurs throughout the volume. After providing a summary of the epic's reception in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Hungary, Péti devotes much of his initial chapter to the two important translations of Paradise Lost published in the post-war period: Lőrinc Szabó's partial translation undertaken in the late 1940s and 50s, and István Jánosy's complete translation of 1969 (now the standard version). The chapter ends with a discussion of Kazimir's theatrical staging of the poem, which used Jánosy's translation. Péti's comparison of the two Hungarian translations measures, among other things, shades of difference in their political alignments under the broad umbrella of state socialism. Indeed, sensitivity to the political implications of word choices in Hungarian translations of Milton's work is one of the outstanding features of Péti's book. Before I give an example, let me describe his method. After quoting a passage from Milton's work, Péti provides the Hungarian translation, and then translates the Hungarian back into English. So, discussing Paradise Lost 1.263 (“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven”), he comments of Jánosy's translation (Inkább Pokolban úr, mint asolga Égben) [“rather a Lord in Hell than a servant in Heaven”]: “Jánosy's phrasing duly reproduces the classical (Odyssean) allusion implicit in the original, but by translating the Miltonic verb ‘reign’ with the noun úr (lord), he also evokes, perhaps ironically, the Old Testament, and in the contrast of úr (lord) and szolga (servant) the communist vocabulary of the class struggle” (49). In contrast to the repeated efforts of translators and commentators to mould Paradise Lost to fit the prevailing ideology, the main strategy for dealing with Paradise Regained after the mid-twentieth century was to ignore it. As Péti observes, “The brief epic … came to be collateral damage in the post-war effort to make Milton … an author palatable to communist tastes” (27). Little, apparently, could be done with an epic about “personal, internal redemption” having as its central character an “intellectual” who despises the people, “a confused rabble” (25). In what may be regarded as a redressing of the neglect of Paradise Regained in the communist era, Péti himself translated Paradise Regained into Hungarian in 2019. As Péti's second chapter argues, the Hungarian reception of Samson Agonistes was altered, more than any other work by Milton, after 1948. Before the war, the verse drama was dismissed “as a largely autobiographical piece, a bitter dark tragedy” (74). After the war, it “became Milton's second most important work,” even “his crowning achievement,” made available to Hungarian readers in two translations (in 1955 and 1975), two radio plays (in 1954 and 1970), and several critical essays and reflections (74). Reinforced by the rise of Anglo-American socialist thought (epitomized by the work of Christopher Hill), it was easy “to incorporate [Samson Agonistes] into the revolutionary aesthetic of the communist era—whether it was the hardline dictatorship of the early days or the softer version of state socialism in later decades” (74). In the translation of 1955, by Tihamér Dybas, the phrase “rousing motions” (l.1382) is translated as “spiriting emotions,” which leaves “ample room,” Péti notes, “for both religious and secular interpretations” (77). Such interpretive ambiguity disappeared with the publication of György Jánosházy's “easily digestible” translation in 1975. It “trade[d] the original's poetic and allusive richness for clarity and intelligibility” (83), remarks Péti. Milton's verse drama became “the revolutionary masterpiece,” heralding, in the hero's smashing of luxury and decadence, the historic triumph of the people (87). Samson's service to God became his service to the people. In terms of the writing that was translated or otherwise brought to public attention, Milton's prose, as Chapter 3 demonstrates, had a significantly poorer showing than his other works. The four decades of Hungarian communism could “not provide a comprehensive context in which [the prose works] could be fully appreciated” (117). Indeed, Péti states, Milton's pamphlets and letters are still almost unknown in Hungary. In the period of communist control, they were known primarily through anthologized excerpts, which were interpreted for readers in strict Marxist-Leninist terms by the influential scholar Tibor Lutter. Having examined not only Lutter's articles and monograph on Milton but also the typed synopsis of his course on seventeenth-century literature taught at Eötvös Loránd University in 1951 or 1952, Péti comments: “the overall impression to the modern reader is that of a thinly veiled political manifesto skimming the surface of some aspects of Milton's works” (101). Lutter's partisanship is so exaggerated, Péti notes, that it makes one wonder about the “actual level of commitment to what he professes” (102)—for, reporting on a Cambridge conference in the later 1950s, Lutter praised “the ‘sober, quiet, scholarly realism’ … of old-school (‘bourgeois’) British scholars like E. M. W. Tillyard against the ‘nervous impatience’ … of the New Critics” (103). What remains with a reader after the discussion of Lutter's treatment of Milton's prose is an increased appreciation for Péti's fair-mindedness and the thoroughness of his scholarship. In 1958, a slim volume of some of Milton's shorter poems (those “on the safe side”) was published in a dual language edition (124). Many of the poems had been translated between 1908 and 1941 by Árpád Tóth. His translations, although still regarded as inimitable, make Milton's poems “sound like symbolist poems,” notes Péti (125). The gradually increasing number of Milton's shorter poems made available to the Hungarian public, as well as their various new translators, is the subject of the first section of Chapter 4. The last three sections concern the place of Sonnet 23 in what Péti calls the “patriarchal traditions” that have governed the reception of Milton in Hungary. In particular, Péti discusses the poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy's reaction to those traditions in her translation of the sonnet, published in the 1958 volume. Here Péti's method of translating the translation comes into its own. The wife in Nemes Nagy's version is active. In Milton's sonnet, she “is brought”; in Nemes Nagy's version, she “came.” Milton's “But O as to embrace me she enclin'd / I waked, she fled …” becomes in Nemes Nagy's version, “She was leaning over me; alas, I started up / she flew away …” (134). Because she is leaning over the speaker, Péti comments, “we must imagine [the speaker] lying down,” for the Hungarian rámhajolt unlike Milton's “enclin'd” does not have any mental implications. Behind Sonnet 23, vivid in our imaginations, are the active male protagonists of Milton's classical sources (Hercules and Orpheus). Nemes Nagy's version, in contrast, “trades these ancient [patriarchal] tropes for the similarly powerful image of an incapacitated speaker who is dreaming that he is lying down.” This shadowy female dream figure moves confidently; the male speaker is passive and immobile. In the final section of the chapter, Péti examines two of Nemes Nagy's later poems, which return allusively to Sonnet 23. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, she endows “‘the pale and faint’ female character of Milton's original” with “a voice and a personal history,” Nemes Nagy's own (141). This “Central European woman writer from the twentieth century writing under communist dictatorship” thus makes herself “Milton's unlikely but equal partner” (141). Throughout Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain, Miklós Péti pays generous tribute to the scholars who labored under adverse political conditions to bring Milton's works to Hungarian readers. He treats with scrupulous fairness and generosity those whom he calls “the foremost scholars of their day.” There can be no doubt that Miklos Péti is the foremost Hungarian Milton scholar of his day.