Exorcizing the Ghost of Herder: A Community-Based Approach to Translating Hungarian Literary Texts
Exorcizing the Ghost of Herder: A Community-Based Approach to Translating Hungarian Literary Texts

Summary/Abstract: Hungarian literary texts in translation have been consistently successful in the Czech Republic in the past 25 years, as the Magnesia Litera prize for the best translated book in 2024 awarded to Marta Pató’s translation of László Szilasi’s A harmadik híd [The Third Bridge] and a whole range of other Czech prizes awarded to translations of Hungarian texts illustrate. This decades-long success story contests assertions that Hungarian literature is relatively unknown internationally due to its weak translations, untranslatable expressions, and cultural specificity. The essay revisits Mihály Szegedy-Maszák’s (2003) article on this topic as a text that is symptomatic of a range of persistent beliefs about the factors that hinder the successful translation of Hungarian literary texts. Besides criticizing several such claims about translation quality and national specificity, however, it also advocates for a change of focus on supranational and subnational communities and the multilingual, multicultural, and multiethnic nature of cultural spaces, and it calls for a new approach to both studying and translating “small” literatures.

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