Translating Beregi

This is an excerpt from Beregi Tamás' forthcoming novel Noctambulo. It is of course, translated by me:

[…] The crowd dispersed for a second, and I realized my stomach was groaning with hunger. I dropped anchor in a small patisserie, breakfasted, and watched a group of women with some fascination as they gossiped outside the window in feathered hats. Then, I continued on my way. Along the Strand—unlike in London’s Cheapside—there were plenty of ladies who drew one’s gaze in the daylight hours: they paraded themselves around in flowing yellow and white costumes, always with parasols at hand; in bad weather they were put up to provide shelter from the wind and keep them dry, while in fairer weather they were used to net a little shade.

It was not just famous restaurants, pubs and theatres that had mushroomed along the Strand, as there were a number of bookshops and photography salons as well. I paused before the window of one of the shops, and perused the collection of children’s portraits on display. The unknown artist had framed the pictures with painted snowdrops and clouds, and sometimes even sketched crushed eggshell around the children, whose countenances each bore a peculiar expression of terror. For even though the drastic reduction of exposure times had meant the disappearance of hidden supports that ensured that little necks, elbows and waists remained motionless (props that were often ridiculed in Punch for their resemblance to instruments of torture) it was still a challenge to keep children still on high chairs with their wooden hoops, horses, swords and rifles, and the procedure was nothing less than torture for both child and photographer. Indeed, a particularly dim-witted young tadpole had even caused one of Thomas Poulton’s work-colleagues to be ousted from the trade: the portraitist had tried to goad the child into looking towards the camera by using dolls and musical boxes—at one point he even improvised a tap dance and a pantomime—but after two hours of fruitless endeavour and eleven wasted negatives, his nerves were tattered and frayed. The boy’s mother, who had meanwhile been waiting in the hallway, suddenly heard her son emit a loud scream, and so she leapt up and burst into the room. There she found the photographer jumping up and down on the ruined negatives and pulling the hair of her beloved offspring, who was clinging onto the chair for dear life. It soon transpired that the boy was the grandson of a distinguished banker, and within a day the photographer was forced to shut up shop with permanent effect.