Katherine Mansfield’s Early Translations and Reception in Hungary

Abstract

Katherine Mansfield’s very first entree into Hungarian literature is misleading in a number of ways. This is how the publicity for the publication of her first short story in Hungarian translation reads: ‘French prose writers: “A Cup of Tea” written by Katherine Mansfield’, and ‘[t]ranslated from the English by L.I.’.1 Sadly there is no means of tracing the story of the publication back to 1930, or of discovering why she was considered a French writer, whose texts — at least according to the editor of the journal, paradoxically — were available in English, so that ‘A Cup of Tea ’, according to the publicity, had to be translated from English. If she had used her paternal surname, Beauchamp, and if the title of this short story did not indicate such a stereotypical English occasion as partaking of tea, one could better understand how an unknown, young female short story writer could come to be considered as French. One can only speculate why she was assigned French nationality: whether the editor (or translator) who stumbled upon her story also learnt that she had lived in France, or was not English, and arrived at a misleading conclusion. These are intriguing questions without any obvious answers and thus her first introduction into Hungarian remains a puzzle.