The Goncourt Prize-winning “roman nègre”. About Kosztolányi’s Hungarian translation of René Maran’s Batouala

Tábor, Sára (2014) The Goncourt Prize-winning “roman nègre”. About Kosztolányi’s Hungarian translation of René Maran’s Batouala. Hungarian Studies, 28 (1). pp. 139-153. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

In 1921, René Maran became the first black author to receive the Prix Goncourt for his novel, Batouala. Just one year later, Dezső Kosztolányi translated the work to Hungarian. At the beginning of the 20^th century, most Hungarians were unfamiliar with the culture of the Black Continent, and they could not even distinguish between Africans and African American people. Therefore, Kosztolányi not only had to deal with linguistic problems, but he also needed to introduce a completely new culture, otherwise unknown to the wider public. This essay presents the social and political differences between the Hungarian and the French audience, and by comparing the original work and the translation, it examines the linguistic techniques and the translational strategies Kosztolányi used to adapt the work to the expectations of the Hungarian readers.

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