Ferenc Kemény
Encyclopedia
Ferenc Kemény, also known as Francis Kemeni or Franz Kemeny (July 13, 1917 – October 2, 2008) was a Hungarian
translator. He was born in Budapest
. In 1956, he emigrated to Norway and as of the 1980s, he was living in Oslo
.
(He does not count his native Hungarian
into the above.)
When he was in a company, in connection with a sonnet of Mihály Babits
translated into Spanish by him, someone asked him with surprise, "Oh, so you speak Spanish as well?" – Gábor Devecseri, a noted poet and translator of classic literature, replied instead of him, "Ferenc Kemény speaks Poem, and this is what matters the most."
A collection of his translations appeared in 2005:
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
translator. He was born in Budapest
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
. In 1956, he emigrated to Norway and as of the 1980s, he was living in Oslo
Oslo
Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...
.
Knowledge of languages
He categorized languages into three groups:- the lowest level, from which he translates: 16 languages
- middle level, into which he translates: 12 languages
- the highest level, which he speaks: 12 languages (DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, EnglishEnglish languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, PortuguesePortuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, RomanianRomanian languageRomanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
, RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Serbo-CroatianSerbo-Croatian languageSerbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
, SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
)
(He does not count his native Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
into the above.)
Translations
He mostly translated poems, but he also dabbled in a wide variety of other literary genres. Until 1985, he translated Hungarian poems into 17 languages and rendered poems in 30 languages into Hungarian. He translated into Norwegian from 8 other languages and from Norwegian into 12 other languages. He translated poems from German, French, Spanish, Romanian and Russian into English, from French and Italian into German, from English into Spanish, from German into French, from French into Italian.When he was in a company, in connection with a sonnet of Mihály Babits
Mihály Babits
Mihály Babits was a Hungarian poet, writer and translator.- Biography :...
translated into Spanish by him, someone asked him with surprise, "Oh, so you speak Spanish as well?" – Gábor Devecseri, a noted poet and translator of classic literature, replied instead of him, "Ferenc Kemény speaks Poem, and this is what matters the most."
A collection of his translations appeared in 2005:
- Tengertől tengerig: Kemény Ferenc 2500 év európai költészetéből válogatott, 30 nyelvből készített, 150 formahű műfordítása – kézirat gyanánt ("From the sea as far as the sea : 150 form-perfect translations from 30 languages, selected from 2500 years of European poetry", by way of a manuscript, anthology, paper-bound, without ISBN)
Other books
- Das Sprechenlernen der Völker ("Speech Learning of Nations", ISBN 3700301219), 1975, Vienna. His unorthodox views on historical linguistics and the origins of Hungarian language were advanced in this book.
- Im Anfgang war das Korn oder die Großen Mythen der Menschheit ("In the Beginning was the Seed, or the Big Myths of Humankind", 1993)
- Ér-e valamit a történeti összehasonlító nyelvészet? ("Is Historical Comparative LinguisticsHistorical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
Worth Anything?, ISBN 9630369982, 1997) - Az elméleti fizika új alapjai ("New Foundations for Theoretical PhysicsTheoretical physicsTheoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...
", ISBN 9630397757, 1998)