Ferenc Kemény

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.

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 (Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish)

(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:

• 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 Linguistics Worth Anything?, ISBN 9630369982, 1997)
• Az elméleti fizika új alapjai ("New Foundations for Theoretical Physics", ISBN 9630397757, 1998)

References

• Kató Lomb: Bábeli harmónia ("Babel's Harmony"), Gondolat, 1988, Budapest, pp. 88-92
• Aguiden