Bellos defines “translating down” as an instance of translating “toward a vernacular with a smaller audience than the source, or toward one with less cultural, economic, or religious prestige, or one not used as a vehicular tongue.”21 Translating crime fiction from English to Hungarian is certainly an instance of translating down, and even though it has been established previously that English does not necessarily function as a truly dominant language, in general practice it will require substantially less effort from the translator to familiarize the target language audience with the cultural reality of English than in the case of “translating up” to English from a peripheral language. However, if we consider the specific case of translating Agatha Christie to Hungarian during socialism, we can understand this familiarizing process as hindered or altered variously, due to the lack of or restricted access to cultural resources (both on the side of the translator and on that of the reading public), changing publishing policies, and changes in national ideology, which affected each edition differently.
Furthermore, translating popular fiction is always a complex issue: from the publisher’s point of view as well, popular fiction is often considered momentary both regarding the cultural reality it depicts and in its perceived literary shelf-life, and if there are limited funds to be distributed, it is not always the first priority, when it comes to assigning time and manpower to—and there is always the pressure of time to publish a piece while it is still in the center of public attention. Time is of the essence for the translator as well, as s/he must be aware of the social and cultural reality of the book in question to be able to render the pieces of realia and do it against the clock, of course. These issues all factor in to various degrees in Hungarian translations of Christie novels, as well as in the translations of the novel chosen for investigation.
For the purposes of this essay I have examined three Hungarian translations of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Between them, these texts touch upon practically all of the problems mentioned so far, as well as providing a typical example of the evolutionary process of Hungarian Christie editions. The first Hungarian edition, appearing shortly after the original English publication in 1939, was translated by the critically acclaimed fiction writer, Lola Kosáryné Réz, with the title Valaki csenget … (“Someone Rings the Bell…”). A revised translation by Katalin Csanády appeared in 1975, and was later used by several different publishing houses in a range of editions. Finally, as part of Európa’s extensive efforts to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Christie’s birth by retranslating and republishing a number of her works, it was rendered again, by Judit Gálvölgyi, in 2012. An exhaustive linguistic and/or statistical analysis of words changed and lexical or cultural items mistreated in each of these texts is beyond the scope of the present chapter, but examining a number of symptomatic loci in the text may tell us a lot about the fate of cultural items in translation and about the evolution of Christie translation as well. In the focus of this short case study stand instances of cultural or linguistic foreignness—foreign in any sense of the word—and the treatment of foreignness in the three Hungarian translations.
Considering foreignness, we might invoke Umberto Eco who, in his volume Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation, discusses two basic approaches toward cross-cultural translation: one of these is “foreignizing,” where the translator strives to make the reader aware of the foreign and mediated nature of the text. The other is domesticating, where all possible attempts are made to bring the text closer to home and make is sound familiar to the target language audience.22
Whether they prefer foreignizing or domesticating, one of the issues translators of fiction face is the question of dialects and accents, just as in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas: the novel contains two instances of foreigners speaking English and their unique usage is marked in the text. The first is the detective Hercule Poirot, with his consciously overcomplicated and circumstantial phrases and French interjections. The second, the Spanish Pilar Estravados, who speaks fluent English, but with a slight accent. Translating these speakers’ dialogue can be problematic, since Hungarian is not a language that easily lends itself to dialectic use—and even if it did, the problem of “foreign-soundingness” poses its own set of difficulties. In the English original one can get a feel for Pilar’s foreignness by the grammatically correct, but slightly off-kilter structures she uses. For example: “My mother was English. That is why I talk English so well” and “I drove in a car all across the country and there was much destruction. And I saw a bomb drop and it blew up a car.”23 These remarks appear in the very first scene where readers encounter Pilar on a train. Rendering Pilar’s idiolect in Hungarian poses considerable difficulty, since Hungarian is a language with few regional dialects that are generally recognizable, and even to those who can discern them, there are hardly any cultural connotations attached to dialect beyond geographic region. Hungarian, then, is by no means a language that easily lends itself to expressing different accents and dialects, especially when they are supposed to connote foreigners speaking the language.
In this instance, however, the problem does not arise from an accent or a dialect itself, but from an idiolect, a unique—and here slightly non-standard—personal use of language, which manifests itself both on the level of vocabulary and in the sentence structure. In Pilar’s case, her idiolect is mostly characterized by avoiding contracted forms (“You are not English, no?”; “That is so, is it not?”; “No, I do not love you”) and by frequently using “yes” and “no” instead of proper tag questions.24 For the Hungarian translator, this may appear problematic, since—due to the agglutinative nature of the language—contracted forms do not exist in Hungarian, and instead of context-dependent tag questions Hungarian uses the word “ugye” in every instance this grammatical structure is applied. Still, rendering this idiolectic usage should not be impossible in Hungarian, but interestingly—perhaps worryingly—none of the translations manages to capture it, and Pilar speaks perfect Hungarian—or, on occasion in Csanády’s translation, she expresses herself not only perfectly but more exquisitely than the idiolectic characteristics present in the original English text would allow. The decision not to render a character’s idiolect in translation may be explained away in such cases when individual language use is of no or little significance in the whole of the text, and its lack does not diminish the enjoyment or interpretation. In the case of Pilar Estravados, however, this does not seem to be case: Pilar is supposed to be a daughter of an English mother and a Spanish father, she was raised as bilingual, therefore she may speak English with native proficiency. After all, she herself says, “I am really very English indeed.”25 Later, however, it turns out that Pilar is not who she is supposed to be: she is a Spanish citizen, who merely travelled together with the late Pilar, and after the girl’s death, she claim her identity and presented herself as Pilar to the girl’s family. Therefore we could regard her language use as a clue betraying her true identity—and in this case, the loss of the idiolect in translation does hinder interpretation, as the Hungarian reader is denied a significant clue pertaining to the mystery.
Bellos discusses the issue of the inherent “foreign-soundingness” of translated texts, and quotes the philosopher Jean d’Alambert, who says that “the way foreigners speak [French] is the model for a good translation,” as this way the target text contains “the added flavor of a homeland created by its foreign colouring.”26 In the case of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, however, the question is not only whether or not the translated text should sound foreign to the reader as it is, but also what happens to those utterances that already bear a certain “foreign-soundingness” in the original. We have already seen in Pilar’s case that this “added flavor” is lost here, and we can witness the same phenomena in the translation of Poirot’s circuitous style as well. Poirot likes to emphasize his foreignness in his phrasing as well, and not only with the application of French interjections: for instance, in his interrogations he makes a
habit of using statements as questions, such as “You had been telephoning?” or “You had been away a long time?” or “You came for a short visit—or a long one?”27 Once again, while not shockingly ungrammatical, his utterances are stylistically marked. Translating these sentences poses further problems, as there is no specific word order for the interrogative in Hungarian—and word order in general is more flexible than in English—so the translator needs to find another way to circumnavigate Poirot’s speech patterns. Another characteristic feature of Poirot’s language use is raising (usually) the subject of the sentence to the level of a fragmented clause or even individual sentence, such as “The bullet wound, the cut throat, the crushed-in skull? It is there your preference lies?”28 or “So this case, it will make a big stir?”29 While the solution of the issue regarding the interrogative word order may be problematic, rendering the emphasized subjects in Hungarian should be straightforward. Yet, all three translators seem to have decided against this: the questions are rendered as questions, or—on rare occasions—as mere statements. Along with the neglect of characters’ “foreign-soundingness,” this indicates that translators have carried the “domesticating” approach so far that Christie’s characters have become more familiar—and more easily digestible—to Hungarian readers than they appear in the English original. In Poirot’s case, however, the French interjections act as saving graces in the text, as they remain untouched (Gálvölgyi’s version even provides the Hungarian translation of the French expressions), while in Pilar’s case hardly anything remains to indicate her idiolect.
However, Pilar and Poirot are not the only characters with hints of foreignness to them: there is also Stephen Lee, a son of the victim, who has just returned from South Africa, meaning that there are occasional pieces of South African realia about him, and on occasions he finds himself searching for the correct word to use in a conversation. One the very first page on the novel readers experience him musing about the people at the station: “People! Incessant, innumerable people! And all so—so—what was the word?—so drab-looking! So alike, so horribly alike!”30 Interestingly, the word “drab” becomes “szürke,” that is, “grey” in both Csanády’s and Gálvölgyi’s version, thus Stephen’s search for the correct word seems unmotivated as he appears to settle for a less expressive adjective. We can see more progress in the treatment of realia in his case, however: where the first translation has him reminiscing about the “veldt,” a word referring to certain wide open rural spaces of Southern Africa, the 1975 version renders it as “préri” (prairie), while the 2012 version leaves it as “veldt,” which, though not as easily understandable in Hungarian as “préri,” manages to capture the South African allusion, while also retaining some of the original words, is in accordance with Bellos’ suggestions for “foreign-soundingness.”
While the choice of “préri” to substitute “veldt” may appear debatable, it is a less intrusive maneuver than the one we encounter in Lola Kosáryné Réz’s earliest translation. Edit Dömötör in her analysis of the aesthetic and structuralist interpretation of crime in Hungarian popular literature points out that Kosáryné Réz augments her translation with an interpretative description at the end of the novel, when the identity of the culprit is revealed.31 The murderer turns out to be Superintendent Sugden, who has so far led the official investigation and he ends the final confrontation with the following furious utterance, referring to the murder of Simeon Lee: “God rot his soul in hell! I’m glad I did it!” which exclamation concludes Part Six.32 The following excerpt is a direct translation of Réz’s Hungarian version:
There was a deadly silence. Then Sugden suddenly jumped up. He hit the table with his fist and cried in an inhuman voice:
“I’m glad I did it! I’m glad!”
He ran into the others, while his eyes were rolling back into his head. With great difficulty, he was finally contained. By the evening, he was already locked up in a lunatic asylum, heavily medicated, sitting on a hospital bed and looking in front of himself with a distorted smile on his face.33
The liberties taken by the translator here clearly go beyond the decisions suggested by any foreignizing or domesticating approach, by presenting the murderer as a madman instead of an intellectual killer carrying out a coldly planned crime. While it was a common translational and editorial practice at the time to remove such elements of novels—especially in the case of popular fiction—which did not move the plot forward, this extension of the original ending does not seem to be in accord with contemporary translation practices.
We can find the reason for this maneuver once again in the cultural atmosphere of the era: the idea of depicting the common criminal as a hero who bravely confronts authority was revolting, as a criminal obviously has no other aim than his/her personal (and financial) advancement. Depicting the criminal as an intellectual being, who has planned out his/her deed with a cold head and did not act out of mere moral depravity in a moment of murderous passion would—according to the cultural influencers of the era—glorify the criminal, which would suggest a distorted—and probably also glorified—image of crime to the audience.34 The intellectual element is therefore removed from the crime, and the criminal loses his/her glamor and becomes “common.” Translation often aided and abetted this initiative and helped depict the murderer as a madman instead of a coldly calculating, intellectually driven entity.35 This gesture, however, can be viewed as one entirely opposing other translational acts which brings the text closer to the reader: by presenting the murderer as a mentally ill person, the translation alienates the reader and hinders feelings of excessive sympathy with criminals—which is, of course, in accordance with the above mentioned cultural directives of the era. The two other translations, fortunately, were no longer influenced by such cultural initiatives, and they render the final words of Sugden in a literal translation of the original passage, with no additions whatsoever.
While the present investigation has allowed only a glimpse into the history of Agatha Christie’s presence on the Hungarian literary scene, it has shed light on the effect of cultural politics on translation practices and on the production and consumption of detective fiction. While even during the time of socialism there were not any direct authoritative instructions regarding translation practices, merely general directives concerning publishing policies, these directives had a severe influence on everyday translating practices, with—sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental—consequences on not only what could or could not be published, but also how the published and translated works could be interpreted. Even though her works have also been affected by various political maneuvers, Agatha Christie still appears to be an exception in the Hungarian history of crime fiction publishing: despite all historical and cultural disturbances, her works managed to remain not only popular and in print, but constantly revised in better editions as well, finally granting her a place in the Hungarian highbrow canon.
Notes
1. Crime fiction was first mostly considered a subgenre of adventure fiction, and adventure fiction has a more established history in Hungarian literature. Cf. Edit Dömötör, “Az eltitkolt gonosztettet a szél is kifúvja?”: A magyar bűnügyi irodalom ismeretelméleti megközelítése (Budapest: E. Dömötör, 2011).
2. This is not to say, of course, that there has been no critical attention paid to detective fiction at all. The attempts have been few and far between, but one of them, for example, is Tibor Keszthelyi’s A detektívtörténet anatómiája [The Anatomy of the Detective Story] (Budapest: Magvető, 1979).
3. The twenty-first century, however, has brought about several changes: on the one hand, two distinct and highly successful crime writers appeared on the scene, both writing historical fiction: Katalin Baráth, whose novels could be compared to those in the middlebrow tradition, and Vilmos Kondor, whose Budapest Noir has been published in several languages, English included (London: Harper, 2012). On the other hand, several academic volumes have been published on crime fiction,
such as volumes written or edited by Krisztián Benyovszky: Bevezetés a krimi olvasásába [Introduction to Reading Crime Fiction] (Dunaská Streda: Lilium Aurum, 2007) or A jelek szerint: a detektívtörténet és közép-európai emléknyomai [The Clues Suggest: The Detective Story and Its Traces in Central Europe] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2003).
4. Titles translated in 1930 included The Big Four (Légrády Brothers), The Secret Adversary, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and The Murder on the Links. The last three were published by Palladis, in a series called “Pengős regények” [Penny novels].
5. István Bart, Világirodalom és könyvkiadás a Kádár-korszakban (Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2002), p. 9.
6. David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 205. Emphasis original.
7. Ibid., p. 206.
8. Bart, Világirodalom és könyvkiadás a Kádár-korszakban, p. 22. Translation mine.
9. Ibid., p. 26. Translation mine.
10. Ibid., p. 17.
11. Ibid., p. 14.
12. Ibid., p. 23.
13. Ibid., p. 25.
14. Ibid., p. 28.
15. The Hungarian title of the essay is “A kalandregény időszerűtlensége,” which directly translates to “The Ill-Timed Nature of the Adventure Novel.” However, my translation of the title captures the themes of the essay more precisely.
16. Dömötör, Az eltitkolt gonosztettet a szél is kifúvja?, p. 75.
17. An example of this phenomenon may be Hungary’s (so far) only attempt to produce its own martial arts themed cop show, inspired by films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Although it was cancelled several years ago, the show Linda (1983–89) has reached an iconic status and is still widely popular with Hungarian audiences, probably because of its very oddity which makes it stand out from the not too lengthy line of Hungarian crime series on television. As Renáta Zsámba notes in her analysis of Linda, the eponymous protagonist of the series and the show itself do not fit the Hungarian tradition because the individualist ethics featured in the series had had no roots in the socialist culture. In a similar vein, the titular character, the young and tomboyish Linda appeared to be the only competent police officer among all her older male colleagues (despite her being only a trainee), while the majority of the senior officers were untalented, idiotic characters, who spent their time eating out or drinking beer. This kind of characterization of authority figures clearly indicates a softening in ideological and representative discipline.
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 21
