F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was first published in Hungarian in 1962 in a collection entitled Újra Babilonban (Babylon Revisited) that included a selection of short stories. The translation was by Elek Máthé, who had also translated into Hungarian fiction by Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Irving Stone, among others. Máthé's Gatsby was republished on its own, in a separate volume, first in 1968 and numerous times afterwards, most recently in 2012, by a smaller Hungarian publisher, Alinea, which primarily specializes in issuing books related to the themes of “Money, Economics, and Business”—a niche that reveals a great deal about the firm's interpretation of the primacy of finance in the novel. Two thousand twelve also saw the long-awaited new translation of Gatsby appearing courtesy of perhaps the most prestigious Hungarian publishing house of belles lettres, Európa Kiadó. This imprint had been responsible for publishing Máthé's translation of...
The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment
Anna Kérchy is senior assistant professor at the University of Szeged. She holds a DEA in semiology from Université Paris VII, and a PhD in literature as well as a post-doctorate degree in translation and interpretation from the University of Szeged. She is the author of Body-Texts in Angela Carter. Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View (2008), editor of Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings (2011), co-editor of What Constitutes the Fantastic? (2010), of The Iconology of Law and Order (2012), and of Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and Enfreakment (2012). Her research interests include gender studies, body studies, the post-semiotics of embodied subjectivity, corporeal narratology, intermedial cultural representations, Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, women's writing/art, and children's literature. Her current book project focuses on the unspeakable and unimaginable image-text in Lewis Carroll's Alice tales and their postmodern adaptations.
Anna Kérchy; The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 October 2013; 11 (1): 137–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.11.1.0137
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