Mit ér a magyar próza, ha angol?
What is Hungarian Literature Worth in English?

The popularity of Szerb Antal’s fiction in English translation

Summary/Abstract: This study intends to find an answer to the question what makes Antal Szerb’s fiction popular in the United Kingdom in the first decades of the 21st century. First, it describes the sociocultural context in which the English translations were made by Len Rix and published by Pushkin Press in London, then, with the help of excerpts cited from Journey by Moonlight and Pendragon Legend, it offers a contrastive textual analysis that reveals the traces of what Lawrence Venuti calls cultural inscription. The study concludes that the domesticating strategies the translator applies result in and thus explain the differences between the Hungarian and the English texts in the examples cited, because instead of a literal translation, his wording of the English text is determined by the conventions of English prose and the expectations of his assumed English readers.

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