On the Translation of Nadezhda Teffi’s Prose into the Hungarian Language: Two Eras — Two Points of View

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of translation of Nadezhda Teffi’s translation into the Hungarian language. First, the author describes the historical context demonstrating the interest of the Hungarian media of the 1910s–1930s towards Russian émigré life in general and the writers of the Russian literary abroad in particular. The article reviews Hungarian sources mentioning Teffi’s name, e.g. books, scholarly articles, media articles, i.e. short stories by Teffi published in the Hungarian media in her lifetime, such as The Black Iris , The Shop Assistant , The Demonic Woman , The House Painter , The Flyer (in German); The Story of an Eyewitness (in Hungarian). After making general theoretical observations on the translation from Indo-European languages into Hungarian, the author offers a review of major aspects of translation from Russian into Hungarian providing examples on different levels (grammar, stylistics, and cultural realia). The author refers to two pieces of Teffi’s fiction: The Story of an Eyewitness published in a Hungarian periodical soon after its publication in Russian (1933–1934), and The Funny in the Sad published in a modern collection of Russian émigré short stories (2014). Both stories focus on the problem of contrasting perception of the same event by different people and the ways of conveying the event in a newspaper or in a personal conversation. The author examines various levels of the translated texts, i.e. levels of the plot, lexis and grammar, semantic, stylistic, and pragmatic levels pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of both translations. The conclusion of the research concerns different degrees of translation equivalence of the abovementioned pieces.