Specific Character of the Folklore Translation: After the Material of Hungarian and Slavic Languages

Abstract

The translation of fiction and folklore works has its own specific character. It covers poetry and prose, lyrics and drama. Modern translators use the advice and creative heritage of their predecessors, in particular Maksym Rylskyi, who has combined scientific and folkloristic activities with translation from Slavic and non-Slavic languages, made a number of valuable comments on the issues of translation, its adequacy, transmission of the national identity of works, etc. Attention of the other translators and researchers has been also drawn to the issue of the translation of folklore works into Hungarian and Ukrainian. É. Grigássy, Zs. Rab, I. Petrovtsii and others are among them. They testify that besides the language competence, this work requires certain extralinguistic knowledge of ethnology, history, local studies, etc. They talk about two main dangers in such translations: on the one hand, it is the leveling of the national flavor of the work, its transformation into one’s own work; on the other hand, the text should not sound foreign, but should be natural and easy to read. The translation of various genres and types of folklore has its own specificity. Thus, significant difficulties arise when translating the Slavic heroic epos into Hungarian, the volumetric form of dumy and byliny, their epicness, dynamism, etc. Reproduction of the flavor of folk songs is demonstrated in the article exemplified by the translations of Hungarian calendar and love songs into Ukrainian. Then the authoress presents a number of samples of her own translations from the bilingual collection Hungarian Folk Fairy Tales of Uncommon Beauty, commenting the transmission of realia, proper names, phraseological units, language formulas – initial, medial and final. Despite certain doubts about the ability to translate folklore works into very different (not close) languages successfully, it can be said with certainty that it is possible, but this process requires, in addition to deep linguistic and discourse knowledge, extralinguistic, as well as poetic skill and talent of the translator.