Countess Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, translator who made her father Miklós Bánffy’s novels modern classics

​Countess Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, who has died in Tangier aged 101, came to prominence at the age of 78 when she brought a forgotten masterpiece of European literature to international attention.

The Transylvanian Trilogy, written by her father Count Miklós Bánffy, is a warts-and-all portrait of the decline of the Hungarian nobility in the period preceding the Great War. The three novels, They Were Counted (1934), They Were Found Wanting (1937) and They Were Divided (1940), had been bestsellers in Hungary but were later banned by the communist regime.

When they were reissued in Hungary in the 1980s, they became bestsellers again, and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen took steps to confirm her ownership of the copyright, and began the first translation into English. But her efforts ground to a halt, and she sought the advice of her friend Patrick Thursfield, who observed that Hungarian, even at its most elegiac, is a staccato language, and that what was required was a creative adaptation, rather than a translation. Although he did not (at first) speak a word of Hungarian, together they worked up her literal rendering into something more fluent, trimming away the original’s repetitions and inessential details to keep the length in check.

When the books belatedly appeared in English, the first in 1998, critics were enraptured. “Of the many joys of reading, the greatest is surely finding an author of whom you had never heard and yet who speaks to you as if addressing a friend,” wrote Michael Henderson in The Daily Telegraph. The TLS called Katalin Bánffy-Jelen and Patrick Thursfield’s translation “flawlessly readable”, and in 2002 they won the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Miklós Bánffy, meanwhile, was hailed as “the Tolstoy of Transylvania”, and his trilogy – also known as The Writing on the Wall – is now considered one of the classics of 20th-century European literature.

Katalin Bánffy was born on June 5 1924 in Budapest. Her father, Count Miklós Bánffy de Losoncz, scion of one of Hungary’s oldest aristocratic families , had in 1916 organised the coronation of the last Habsburg emperor, Charles, as King of Hungary. Bánffy was Hungary’s foreign minister in 1921 when its citizens were grappling with the devastating reality of the Treaty of Trianon, which vastly reduced the country’s territory and population, and, most traumatically, ceded Transylvania to Romania.

In April 1943 Bánffy made valiant efforts to take both Hungary and Romania out from under Axis influence. As a result, two years later, the retreating German Army looted, bombed and and set alight his country house, Boncida, known as the “Versailles of Transylvania”.

Katalin’s mother, Aranka Varadi-Weber, was an actress at Budapest’s National Theatre and came from a distinguished literary family. She had been married to an eminent Hungarian physician, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1924. She was not married to Miklós Bánffy at the time of Katalin’s birth and indeed they would not marry until she was 15.

The reason often given for Miklós Banffy’s decision not to marry Aranka earlier was the supposed objection of his father, Count György Bánffy, to his son’s marrying outside of the nobility. This seems rather unlikely because György Bánffy died in 1929 and Miklós did not marry Aranka Varadi-Weber until 1939. He eventually adopted Katalin, entitling her to the Bánffy name.

Katalin left her native Hungary in 1947, just two years before the Communist Party organised purges against the Hungarian nobility which forced many of her class into internal deportation, often accompanied by degrading brutality. She was in her early twenties, and newly married to Ted Jelen, an American naval attaché in Budapest. (Hungary, by then, had no connection to the sea, but the Allied countries had played to the nostalgia of the wartime regent Admiral Horthy, an old naval man who loved talking shop.)

They settled in Tangier and soon became an integral part of the city’s exotic expatriate community in the place then known as “an oriental Cheltenham”. Her circle in Tangier encompassed, at various times in her life, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, the designer Yves Saint Laurent, the novelist Paul Bowles, the English eccentric and remittance man par excellence David Herbert, the photographer Cecil Beaton, the painter Francis Bacon and the Sixties dandy Christopher Gibbs.

Life in Tangier for the young Hungarian countess was a world away from the horrors of postwar Budapest, which had seen one of the longest sieges of the Second World War. Not long after arriving in her new home she befriended the pet-obsessed Countess Phyllis de la Faille. On her first visit to the de la Faille villa outside Tangier, Katalin confessed she was “only slightly surprised” to find its chatelaine surrounded by 35 dogs, 37 cats, 129 birds and countless fish in various receptacles.

This did not deter her from accepting an invitation from Phyllis de la Faille and her Belgian husband Count Henry de la Faille to make the near-5,000-kilometre journey by motor car with them from Tangier to Cairo. The road trip took two months, taking them through Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

Along the way Phyllis de la Faille collected various other animals to add to her Tangier menagerie including a monkey and a boa constrictor. When the snake escaped from its basket and slithered around inside the car during the return journey, Phyllis told Katalin reassuringly: “Don’t worry darling, we fed it the hind leg of a goat before we left Cairo.”

Katalin also encountered some colourful, if dubious, connections to her old Hungarian world. One such was David Edge, a mysterious character even by Tangier standards. He has entered Tangier lore as an English aristocrat and gay lover of a Hungarian bishop from whom he claimed to have inherited a vast fortune and the prelate’s pectoral cross, which he wore to parties in his house in the Casbah, receiving his guests fro​m a gilded throne.

The reality, as in the case of many Tangier residents of the period, was far less glamorous: Edge was the son of an English butcher who had confected an alluring personal history so that he could observe Tangier society through the prism of a champagne glass.

In the early 1990s, part of the Bánffy estate at Boncida was returned to Katalin Bánffy-Jelen under the restitution terms then available from the Romanian government after the collapse of communism. The house, presently under restoration, is now under the care of the Transylvanian Trust and featured on the World Monuments Watch List of the 100 most endangered sites in 2000.

She retained a pied-à-terre at Boncida but her house on the Old Mountain in Tangier remained her primary residence, where she was cared for by several loyal Moroccan old retainers.

She is survived by her daughters Elizabeth and Nicolette. A son, David, predeceased her.

Countess Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, born June 5 1924, died February 14 2025