Abstract
Katherine Mansfield’s very first entrée 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.
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Notes
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Egy csésze tea’, trans. by L. I., Pásztortuz. Szépirodalmi és Muvészeti Képes Folyóirat, 16: 21, 19 October 1930, pp. 488–90.
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in David Lodge, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 196–210.
Her reception up until the 1970s almost unanimously considered her works without any cultural context. See, for example, Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study in the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963);
H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey (Boston: The Writer Inc., 1961);
T. O. Beachcroft, The Modest Art: A Survey of the Short Story in English (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Boldogság’, trans. by Mária Ruzitska, Új Idok, 43: 11, 14 March 1937, pp. 377–9;
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Tejszín’, trans. by Mária Ruzitska, Új Idok, 43: 15, 11 April 1937, pp. 550–1;
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Rosabella elfárad’, trans. by Alice S. Hajós, Pásztortuz. Szépirodalmi és Muvészeti Képes Folyóirat, 23: 13–14, 15–31 July 1937, pp. 275–6;
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Babaház’, trans. by Andor Németh, Szép Szó, 5: 2, September 1937, pp. 126–34;
Katherine Mansfield: ‘A légy’, trans. by Alice S. Hajós, Pásztortuz. Szépirodalmi és Muvészeti Képes Folyóirat, 24, 3, March 1938, pp. 175–8.
For example, instead of ‘Nanny went out of the room with the bath towels’: ‘Bliss’, in Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Short Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, p. 94), we have the equivalent of ‘Nanny went into the bathroom’ (‘Boldogság’, Új Idok, 43: 11, 14 March 1937, p. 377).
Gusztáv Abafáy, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, Erdélyi Helikon, 9: 1, September 1936, p. 711.
Antal Szerb, Az angol irodalom kis tükre (‘The small mirror of English literature’), (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Társaság, 1929).
Antal Szerb, Hétköznapok és csodák. Francia, angol, amerikai, német regények a világháború után (Budapest: Révai, 1936), p. 139.
Antal Szerb, A világirodalom története [1941] (Budapest: Magveto, 1987), p. 881.
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Külvárosi legenda’, no translator, Vigilia, 16: 4, April 1951, pp. 198–200.
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Séllei, N. (2015). Katherine Mansfield’s Early Translations and Reception in Hungary. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_3
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