Kazmer, Michelle M., Robert L. Glueckauf, Jinxuan Ma, and Kathleen Burnett. “Information Use Environments of African-American Dementia Caregivers Over the Course of Cognitive-behavioral Therapy for Depression.” Library & Information Science Research 35.3 (2013), pp. 191–199.
Kazmer, Michelle M., et al. “Distributed Knowledge in an Online Patient Support Community: Authority and Discovery.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65.7 (2014), pp. 1319–1334.
Latham, Don, and Jonathan M. Hollister. “The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in the Hunger Games Trilogy.” Children’s Literature in Education 45 (2014), pp. 33–46.
McKenzie, Pamela, and Philippa Spoel. “Borrowed Voices: Conversational Storytelling in Midwifery Healthcare Visits.” Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing 25.1 (2014). www.cjsdw.com/index.php/cjsdw/article/view/36
Savolainen, Reijo. “Asking and Sharing Information in the Blogosphere: The Case of Slimming Blogs.” Library & Information Science Research 33.1 (2011), pp. 73–79.
And Then There Were Many
Agatha Christie in Hungarian Translation
Brigitta Hudácskó
Trivia lists on book publishing seldom fail to point out that Agatha Christie is one of the highest-selling authors, internationally, of all time. It should come as no surprise then, that she has been—and still is—one the most popular crime fiction authors, with a long and varied history of publication and translation, in Hungary. If we examine the history of the Hungarian publishing market during the course of the past century, however, Christie’s apparent popularity is not necessarily such a pre-determined success story as it may seem.
During and after the years of World War II, up to the democratic turn of 1989, the publication of Western literature in general, and genre fiction specifically, was strongly discouraged and sanctioned by various political and cultural measures in Hungary. Of course, the extent and rigor of these sanctions changed over time, and these changes had direct effects on publishing (and translation) policies and practices.
The objective of this essay is twofold: after giving an introduction to the history of Hungarian publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, I would like to examine the progression of Agatha Christie translations, with a focus on the translation of realia and similar culture-specific items. The key word in my investigation is foreignness—meaning both the cultural foreignness of the crime genre on the Hungarian literary horizon and possible instances of linguistic foreignness apparent in the texts themselves.
The Case of the Missing Genre
Agatha Christie has been a relatively constant presence on the Hungarian literary scene since the 1930s. While other Golden Age writers were only sporadically translated, if at all, “hardboiled” fiction has also been popular, so we can safely claim that crime fiction in general has had an established readership in Hungary for decades.1 Despite this, the critical reception of translated or original popular literature in Hungarian had little if anything to say about detective fiction, prior to the twenty-first century.2 Despite the long history of reading detective fiction in Hungary and the relatively steady—in the recent decades ever increasing—enthusiasm for it, the production of original Hungarian works in the crime genre has never really matched the audience’s eagerness. There have been attempts, of course, but not many of these authors—who symptomatically often published under English pseudonyms—have managed to garner significant attention, and the critical reception of both Hungarian and international crime fiction has traditionally been lackluster.3 There are always unknown factors behind a genre’s success or failure at any given time or in a certain cultural setting, but some facts can be established with relative certainty in the case of Hungarian crime fiction. The most significant of these known factors probably is that historical developments did not always look favorably upon genre fiction. The first Hungarian translations of Agatha Christie novels appeared in 1930,4 but a few years later the financial and cultural circumstances generated by the events of World War II hindered the publication of popular fiction and from the 1940s, under the communist regime, crime fiction was strongly discouraged. In his volume on the Hungarian publishing industry of the time, István Bart examines translation politics as a part of cultural politics, and points out that “[translation politics] effect the social standing of individual languages and may even affect the successful enforcement of human rights, especially when these policies are practiced by the state.”5 Of course, cultural and translation policies are not only of national importance, nor are they merely state-regulated: in Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos discusses the global flows in translation, as well as central and peripheral languages, touching upon the relationship between language and the empire:
A truly dominant language that has a great army and a well-filled treasury behind it … is the one tongue from which you do not ever need to translate. People just learn it, because without it their prospects are blocked. English does not dominate the world in the way that Latin did, because it is massively translated into vernaculars. Translation is the opposite of empire.6
Bellos also points out that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed on explicitly anti-imperialist grounds, which, among most other areas of life, influenced translation politics within Soviet Russia and in other countries of the Eastern block. However, “only translation could serve as a public alibi for what was in most other ways a classic instance of imperial expansion.”7 These “anti-imperialistic imperial efforts” had severe effects on the translation politics of socialist countries, Hungary included.
Suppressed, Supported, Suffered: Hungarian Publishing Up to 1989
In his overview of Hungarian publishing policies after World War II, Bart discusses how communist and socialist cultural policies were formed with the specific conviction and purpose in mind that literary representations have a direct effect on the reality represented and they also have a role in forming the audience’s mindsets, meaning that literature was both an end and the means to this end for policy-makers of the time. The governing power, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, was clear in its concerns regarding Western literature. In a directive issued in 1958, they expressed a fear that
if there is no party and state control, there is no socialist culture either, and in that case the reactionary bourgeois views can spread freely; and when the socialist consciousness weakens, breaking down the socialist economic-social bases will also become easier.8
In a directive from 1965, the party condemned mass culture as cultural garbage:
Each view that is capable of conserving such individualism, which presents the old relationship between society and the individual and disregards the needs and opportunities of the developing socialist community, is harmful for society and may also lead to painful conflicts within the individual’s life.9
The party directives were put into effect via the Publishing Directorate, which was founded in 1954. From that point on it laid down not only what was and was not desirable in literature in general, but among other responsibilities, it supervised and directed Hungarian publishing and book distribution, made annual plans for the national publishing industry, allocated the paper supplies and supervised libraries up until 1989; in short, it functioned as a ministry of publishing of sorts.10 The Directorate had several implicit behests but only one explicit guiding principle: publishing policies should at all times serve the interests of current foreign policies.11 This principle hardly made financial sense, as the political interests of the time favored works of Soviet literature, while the audience was less enthusiastic about these developments and would rather pay more for popular literature—which is exactly what happened.
To balance out the impossible cultural and political ambitions envisioned by the Directorate, the institution of “subsidy” was introduced in the publishing industry12: at its most basic, the subsidy system meant that successful, popular books had to be s
old for a higher price, the profit was subsequently channeled back to less prosperous publishers, ensuring that titles garnering meager public interest could still be published and perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle of financial insensibility. The subsidy system was also needed in times of paper shortage, when directives commanded publishers to cut back on Western literature and put a stop entirely to bestsellers.13 A well-known, albeit unofficial, contemporary slogan described the cultural politics of the time as the period of the three Ss, suppressed, supported, suffered, meaning that certain cultural products were obviously supported, such as Soviet literature, others outright banned, while the regime suffered the existence of cultural products of a third category: undesirable, albeit less harmful popular works, which could bring in profit to subsidize the production of further supported works.
The Case of Detective Fiction Under Socialism
Detective fiction clearly belonged to the third, “suffered” category: the social and cultural background to these stories was clearly unwelcome, but the significant public interest and the profit produced by this interest could not be disregarded. The case of detective fiction was quite simple: from the 1970s more and more very successful crime titles appeared on the market, so a counter measure was introduced. From that point on, only two publishing houses, Európa and Magvető were allowed to produce detective fiction, five titles each per year, with 90,000 copies per title, while other publishing houses worked within such thematic limitations and with so scarce paper supplies that they could not even consider publishing detective fiction.14 To get a better understanding of the hostility towards the genre, let us look at the opinion of a contemporary cultural influencer, which points out several supposedly unacceptable tendencies characteristic of crime fiction. The well-known cultural researcher, philosopher and university professor, Andor Maróti, who published and lectured widely on questions of education and culture, published an essay in 1961 titled “The Irrelevancy of the Adventure Novel.”15 In this essay—which could serve as an explanation for the decades-long hiatus in the publishing of crime fiction—Maróti details in what ways the genre-specific requirements of the adventure story (which, in his understanding, also included the genre of crime fiction) are incompatible with contemporary socialist values and cultural norms. In his view, the genre of crime fiction requires excitement, thrilling situations, black and white, flat characters and an extraordinarily brave hero, and the adventures serve as mere tools or plot devices to show off the hero’s amazing qualities which help him conquer the most astonishing difficulties and the most cunning villains. However, this kind of hero-centric, individualistic attitude had no reason for existence or relevance at that time in the given social and cultural discourse, which strongly discouraged both endeavors motivated by individualistic ethics and the allegedly cheap thrills provided by adventure stories, favoring instead narratives of more educational value.16
Although Maróti’s characterization rings truer for the dime novel than for Golden Age crime fiction, there are two points worth closer examination here. First of all, it seems like a valid argument that the individualistic ethics present in Western detective fiction had hardly any tradition in Hungary, and, on the other hand, the law-enforcement agencies did not share the respect and moral prestige that we can observe in multiple crime stories featuring the Scotland Yard officials. If anything, law-enforcement was often the butt of jokes in crime narratives and in everyday discourse—and not in the way as the Scotland Yard is occasionally depicted as slightly incapable in the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. In certain cases in these stories, the police merely lack the means which would enable them to solve specific crimes, while the liminal status of Sherlock Holmes, Poirot or Miss Marple makes it possible for amateur detectives to reach better results. For example, Holmes has access to his Irregulars who collect insider information for him, while Poirot and especially Miss Marple are able to casually socialize with those involved in a criminal case, which would be impossible for the police, although, of course, not because of their incompetency. In the specific cultural context in question there is a history of downright incompetent policemen in Hungarian fiction and especially on television, which is probably a reminder of and a jab at all the atrocities Hungarian citizens had to suffer at the hands of the corrupt law-enforcement agencies during the communist and socialist times, and even earlier than that17: the dishonorable status of the police officer was not entirely the product of communism, as even a 1928 source mentions the impossibility of a police officer becoming the hero of an adventure novel, since “the secret police is the most despised agency of Hungarian political life. When authors introduce a ‘mole’ into their stories, its only function is to serve as a villain.”18 Bálint Varga, on his quest to explore the beginnings of Hungarian crime fiction, also points out the dubious situation of the police officer all through history: during the time when Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy the institution of the detective was established, which of course did not necessarily equal the role of the informer, but the collective consciousness certainly equated the two. So Hungarian authors first could not feature police officers because these officials did not exist (up until the second half of the nineteenth century), and when they finally emerged, their questionable activities did not make them attractive or popular subjects of fiction.19
However, it was not only the unwelcome presence of the policeman that hindered the emergence of Hungarian crime fiction: the ever-present indicators of the British class system in Golden Age novels were entirely alien in an allegedly classless socialist society, with its entirely different social registers and formulae. The “everything rotten to the core” sentiment of hard-boiled crime fiction might have appeared more familiar to the reader (and, moreover, to the author) of the time, but this approach would not have been suffered under any circumstances by the authorities governing Hungarian cultural politics.
However, the very coziness of the Golden Age detective story seemed homely, and its non-threatening foreignness made it possible for Agatha Christie to establish herself on the Hungarian market. Between 1930 and 1944, twenty-three of her novels were published, but after 1945—and the discursive turn the end of the war brought about—classic British detective fiction was marginalized. For Christie, specifically, it meant that between 1945 and 1960 only three of her novels were published, and only after 1960 did a so-called “Agatha Christie renaissance” begin, which is still going strong even today. In technical terms it means that most of Christie’s works are in print at all times, and not only in the form of reprinted earlier editions, but also new editions. With these, new translations are published each year. The progression of these editions clearly reflect the reception crime fiction has received in Hungary, and also the double critical standard which we can, on occasions, still notice when it comes to detective and/or popular fiction.
Even though some of Agatha Christie’s works have been published by lesser known houses or by those who have since gone out of business, such as HungaPrint, her main publisher in Hungary is Európa Kiadó, probably the biggest and certainly the most prestigious of Hungarian publishing houses. On the one hand, the approach of the smaller publishing houses reflected a general opinion—that of the reading public and that of academia—that detective fiction should be forgotten as quickly as the momentary pleasure it provides. These books were published in paperback, on cheap paper, with notoriously negligent—and presumably quick—translations. At the same time, though, Európa took an entirely different approach when they started publishing Christie in hardback.20 Their more considered translations indicate an attempt to launch Christie into the canon of serious literature in Hungary.
At this point we should take a look at Christie’s position in the Hungarian literary canon. In international criticism she is generally regarded as a “middlebrow” author, but this category has been historically missing from the Hungarian tradition, leading to a number of different approaches in publication. E
urópa, for instance, has done a lot to present Christie as one of their highbrow authors, but, surprisingly, from 2010 to 2011 the publishing house collaborated with Népszabadság, a leading Hungarian daily paper, to launch a series of twenty-five Christie titles, which one could buy with the paper every fortnight. This edition came out in paperback, on cheap recycled paper, effectively writing Christie back into the dime novel tradition, into the masses of popular authors.
This move may seem as a destruction of idols, especially coming from a house which had previously taken great pains to canonize Christie. However, some context is useful: in the same offer, on weeks when the Christie volumes were not on sale, one could buy the works of the most popular crime fiction/humor/adventure writer Jenő Rejtő, who is still hardly recognized by academia—despite his immense popularity—and who was almost without exception published in the typical yellow paperback style. We could interpret this gesture as one devaluating Christie, as she had been dragged down from her pedestal as a serious writer; but maybe the fact that her works were being published alongside the critically under-appreciated Rejtő oeuvre elevated the status of the latter. By the same token, I would argue that Christie was democratized once again—once more available to the reading public. This publishing maneuver amply illustrates the still somewhat dubious Hungarian attitude towards crime fiction and Christie’s unique position within it.
Translating (and) Foreignness: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 20
