Dear Sándor,
A few years ago, the Swedish musicologist Ove Nordwall collected my old and unpublished compositions, including several songs and choral pieces written to your poems. Two of the songs for soprano and piano were sung in Hungarian by Dorothy Dorow, an English singer living in Stockholm ("Kalmár jött nagy madarakkal" and "Táncol a hold fehér ingben") and more recently by Ilona Varga, who also lives in Stockholm. Two of the choirs ("Éjszaka" and "Reggel") were sung by the excellent Swedish Radio Choir under the direction of Eric Ericsson. These two pieces have also been released on the cassette "Europäische Chormusik" on the German label "Electrola". The Swedish choir sang the pieces in Hungarian, but with a strong Swedish accent.
The music publisher B. Schott's Söhne in Mainz would like to publish these pieces. I think they have already written to you about the choirs.
In the choral piece "Éjszaka" I have set the 7th verse of "Tropische Motive" to music, in "Reggel" the second verse of "Rongyszőnyeg", in both not the complete text but individual verses or even shorter fragments - the musical structure of the two choral pieces is montage-like, which justifies the fragmentary use of the text. Schott intends to publish the choral works in German and English translation in addition to the original Hungarian version - the need for this has been demonstrated by the Swedish publication of the Hungarian version.
The publisher Schott has asked you for permission to publish the Hungarian texts in German and English - and has asked me to obtain them for you. The translations are a very big problem, because they are not translations of meaning or poetry, but free translations that do not change the rhythm of the music; in songs the sung melody line could be adapted to the German or English rhythm - in choirs this is not possible because of the polyphonic nature of the music, and the rhythmic form of a single solo cannot be changed without distorting the structure of the whole piece.
Schott initially asked German and English poets, but was unable to find a suitable translator. In principle, it is not possible to translate the poems or fragments of poems in such a way that English or German poems are created that rhythmically cover the rhythmic framework of the music.
Since Schott wants to publish the pieces as soon as possible (a Stuttgart choir has already organised the first German performance of the two pieces), I have tried it myself - not with a translation, but with a completely free transposition, i.e. a complete perversion, and now I am impertinent enough to ask you for your consent to this murder.
ÉJSZAKA. At the beginning of the piece, the line "rengeteg tövis" (many thorns) is repeated, very often in [note1] rhythm. The adjective "rengeteg" could not be rendered in the same rhythm in either German or English, so I translated the noun "rengeteg" in the figurative sense, distorting your poem. In German - retaining the rhythm given above - there are the following possibilities "Wälder voll Stacheln" and "dornige Wildnis"; in English "thorny huge jungles" and "mistery forests". As the music is montage-like and the verse fragments in the individual voices appear as fragments of the original poem, I have used both the German and English versions in irregular alternation.
Later, the word "rengeteg" is repeated in [Rhythmus2] rhythm. German: "Wälder und Wälder und..." etc., English: "infinite wilderness", repeated.
The next word "éjszaka!", which was taken out of the original sequence, appears at the end of the piece, in a very low, dark chord, in [rhythm3] rhythm, at a slow tempo. German: "Midnight". In English it was difficult to find a three-syllable word, so "Darkness, night". [...]