Jezična šetnja u šumi Striborovoj Prijevod Priča iz davnine Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić na mađarski jezik
A linguistic walk in Stribor’s forest: A translation of Tales of Long Ago into Hungarian

Summary/Abstract: Tales of Long Ago by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić was first published as far back as 1916. Eight years after the Croatian original, the English translation appeared. Shortly after that, translations into Swedish, Czech, Russian and German came out. Despite the fact that Tales of Long Ago is the most published and translated collection of Croatian prose, we still had to wait a very long time – almost half a century – for the Hungarian translation to appear. A Novi Sad-based publishing house called “Forum” released it only in 1965, under the title Rég múlt idők meséi, and the translation was done by István Bodrits. After that, the Institute for Publishing Textbooks and Teaching Aids from Novi Sad published the Hungarian translation of the Tales two more times (in 1979 and 1982) as one of the required readings for the sixth grade of elementary school. In fact, in both cases it was the same, unaltered, original translation by Bodrits that was published. In her paper, the author talks about the distinctive fairy-tale world which Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić created – heavily inspired by Croatian oral folk literature and Slavic mythology – only in this case set in an intercultural, Hungarian context. As George Steiner explained in his proposed model of translation, the intended message is transferred from the source language to the corresponding message of the target language. However, languages differ and this transfer must be done carefully so that the same message is conveyed in the target language as well. The paper discusses how successful István Bodrits was in this respect while translating Tales of Long Ago into Hungarian.

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