Ferenc Kemény

Ferenc Kemény (July 13, 1917 – October 2, 2008), also known as Francis Kemeni or Franz Kemeny, 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.

Knowledge of languages

He categorized languages into three groups:

(He does not count his native Hungarian 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 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:

Other books

References

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