An impromptu memorial service for translator Paul Olchváry was held at Spoon Café in the College’s bookstore on Wednesday, Feb. 21. The event was planned as a book talk with Olchváry, a community member, who was also a renowned translator of Hungarian literature and publisher at the Williamstown-based New Europe Books, but he passed away on Feb. 14, at age 58. The event instead became a memorial to remember his life and work.
On the day of the book talk, Spoon was packed with those who knew Olchváry, including Town residents and professors at the College. Attendees expressed an outpouring of support for his friends and family and shared memories of his life. The event was standing room only by the time the talk started and remained full until the end, when attendees offered condolences to the family.
“Paul was a brilliant translator and a wonderful man,” Professor of English and Chair of American Studies Cassandra Cleghorn wrote in an email to the Record. “He was truly an old-school person-of-letters, with a deep, humanistic, through-and-through literary sensibility that is rare these days. We are stunned by this loss.”
The original subject of the talk was Olchváry’s most recent work of translation, József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium. Olchváry’s translation of the book was published in January 2024, the first time the work had been released in English since its publication in Hungarian in 1950. In the years after Cold Crematorium’s Hungarian publication, American publishing houses saw it as potentially dangerous to publish due to McCarthyist censures of the work’s description of the Soviet Army as liberators in Eastern Europe. The book is often characterized as a memoir but also provides a meticulous description of the cruelty in concentration camps during World War II.
At the time of his passing, Olchváry was the publisher at New Europe Books, a publishing house that he founded. Since 2012, New Europe Books has published literature from Central and Eastern Europe. Olchváry was also the editor of Hungarian Cultural Studies, a journal dedicated to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences about Hungarian culture.
Olchváry was born in Buffalo, N.Y., to Hungarian parents. After attending graduate school at Indiana University Bloomington, he lived in Hungary for a decade. There he honed his Hungarian language skills and began his work of translating literary works from Hungarian to English. While in Hungary, Olchváry taught college-level English composition. He also founded an English-language news digest in partnership with the U.S. embassy in Budapest.
On return to the United States, he worked as a senior copywriter at Princeton University Press and then at Globe Pequot Press. In 2012, Olchváry founded New Europe Books after moving to Williamstown. Over the decade and a half, he published a number of fiction and non-fiction works covering everything from American expats to the Viktor Orbán government. New Europe Books is slated to release three more titles in the coming months.
Formal memorial services for Olchváry will be held in Buffalo, N.Y.
