In this paper I will outline a research project on the cultural importation of genres into Hungary which is based on polysystem theory and Descriptive Trans
lation Studies. I will describe the changes of the cultural situation since 1989, the position of translated popular literature in the changing Hungarian literary poly
system, and will formulate the basic questions and hypotheses necessary to carry out such a research1. Since the aim of this paper is not the analysis of the data pre
sented later on, which are merely illustrations or possibly a sort of ‘state of art’ at this stage of research, instead of going into details about these, and many other oc
currences I will formulate some hypotheses about the transfer of popular genres in general, and of science fiction and fantasy in particular.
As may be well-known, popular mass literature as genre system, in such a way it has been established in the West, was almost non-existent in Hungary during the communist era. The publishing houses were subsidised by the state and had their clear specialisation: this was the case, for instance, of Európa Kiadó in canonised world literature, Móra Ferenc Ifjúsági Könyvkiadó in children’s literature, Szépiro
dalmi Könyvkiadó in Hungarian literature, Corvina Kiadó in art books, et cetera.
Due to communist ideology these publishing houses were not profit-oriented at all, they planned a list of books to be published every year, and when having these lists accepted by the authorities they could afford to spend much time and money to achieve high quality. This may also explain the relatively high number of published copies (20,000 to 100,000). It did not really matter whether or not they could sell their books, their explicit and professional task was indeed to spread the officially canonised and approved literature.
However, during the eighties it was more and more tolerated to publish Western popular literature, and some of the publishing houses tried their hands at making the Hungarian readership familiar with different - previously neglected, or com
pletely new - genres from the West. For instance, Móra Kiadó had an enterprise, called Fabula, which published westerns2 and the novels of Jules Verne for the youth.
The attempt failed like the introduction of comic strips to the Hungarian market
-1. For the methods used in this research consult Even-Zohar (1990) on polysystem theory, Toury (1995) on pseudotranslations, Robyns (1990) on genre importation, Nord (1994) and Pym (1995) on text analysis
2. For instance, Max Brand and Louis L’Amour
Anikó Sohár
Fabula published the Hungarian version of the Larousse comic strips Bible in 8 volumes: the first volume was sold in 50,000-60,000 copies (novelty!), the fifth only in 15,000 and the seventh and eighth were just published to complete the se
ries though a huge deficit was foreseen. The latter failure can be explained by the different traditions in visuality, and possibly in reading habits; and it seems to be rather probable that the former is due to other new genres, namely to the populari
ty of science fiction and fantasy. Contemporary science fiction, which had only one series published by Móra, presumably substituted for the more traditional youth literature. This only science fiction series (1969: Kozmosz Fantasztikus Könyvek [Cosmos Fantastic Books], since 1985: Galaktika Fantasztikus Könyvek [Galaxy Fantastic Books]) had a quite wide circulation, from 40,000 up to 80,000 copies per volume, until 1989. However, one has to be aware that science fiction, being not part of the official cultural value system, was just tolerated, and because of this social-literary position, the readership consisted of not only the youth, the students and the intellectuals with a technical-technological interest, that is the hypothe
sised usual readership of science fiction, but also of people opposing the officially established system, since it was a rather mild way ‘to tease’ the authorities, and meet otherwise unavailable views.
After the political changes in 1989 the best-seller authors, contemporary and of the previous decades, were translated into Hungarian. During the first 2-3 years al
most everything published was sold, which probably shows how an enormous pub
lic demand for such kind of literature was suppressed during the communist era.
Since 1989 the book market situation has been completely changed by different factors (e.g. the presence of international/foreign publishing houses and distribu
tion networks in Hungary). One of these factors is that hundreds of publishing houses (have) appeared on the market. Although the fluctuation is rather high, most of them just published a couple of books, then vanished, but new ones have come to existence all the time. For instance, according to the Hungarian National Bibliography, 124 publishers have published one or more science fiction book since 1989.
In fact, approximately one fifth of the existing publishing houses are active at the moment3 and presumably only half of them will survive 1995. Until the 1st of January 1995 the self-governments (the Hungarian name of town/district councils) gave a permission to sell the books in the street to almost all small distributors, which meant that it was possible to buy these popular books everywhere, for in
stance at underground stations. There were no less than 9 stalls selling books at the busiest station (Deák tér), where the existent three underground lines meet.
That is obviously one of the reasons why the attractive, colourful cover has got such an importance, an international habit previously unknown in Hungary, it has to catch the attention of people passing by. In 1995, when most of these permis
sions were withdrawn, the small distributors either had to rent a shop, which was highly expensive in Budapest, or risk selling books illegally. It seems probable that only this factor reduces sales enormously.
The second element of the changes concerning the book market is closely
relat-3. As the Hungarian National Bibliography demonstrates it
ed to the general economic situation in Hungary, namely to the lack of capital.
The big distributors demand 45 per cent from the publishing houses when buying books, which of course raise up the prices. They can afford doing that since the book shops, lacking capital, cannot invest any money in buying and storing books.
Hence the publishers either wait for their money for at least 3 months, while the book shops are selling the books and can retail, or they are forced to accept the terms of the big distributors, which pay promptly.
The third factor of why the book market has to face a crisis is the present situa
tion: the market of popular literature seems to be filled to overflowing. Let us dis
regard the high inflation and continuously worsening financial situation of the av
erage Hungarian which obviously influences their reading habits, and concentrate on the publishers and distributors. Some publishing houses were so eager to earn money in short-term campaigns that they published far too many best-sellers; this explains the fact that sometimes 5-6 or even more novels of the same author (for instance Danielle Steel) were put beside one another decreasing the chance of sell
ing any of them. One of the Hungarian science fiction writers published 26 books of his in one year, and since then his novels have been unmarketable. It is also re
flected by the number of copies: at this moment 10,000 is considered to be very satisfactory (for instance the last Ed McBain novel published4 5 in Hungarian had 8,000 copies and was completely sold in a week).
There are approximately a dozen authors whose novels are published in 30,000 copies (for instance Stephen King), and two, outstandingly popular Hungarian au
thors, Leslie L. Lawrence [Lőricz L. László] and Vavyan Fable [Molnár Éva]. The former is a university professor, who writes detective stories, thrillers, science fic
tion, in his case the first edition is about 80,000-90,000 copies generally sold in a month (second edition 40,000-50,000 copies); the latter’s genre is the detective story with a strong impact of environmental concern and romance, her novels are published in 60,000-70,000 copies. It is interesting that there are usually no sec
ond editions, even when it is not impossible that a second edition would also sell well. Also, if a novel of any popular genre is not sold completely in a month (due to the lack of storage capacities), it is very likely that the big distributors will refuse to buy that author’s next book1 Taking all these into consideration the average num
ber of copies in science fiction, which spreads from 6,000 to 15,000, shows the popularity of the genre, though the Hungarian market just starts to make differ
ence between science fiction and fantasy (e.g. the books published by Valhalla Páholy, one of the publishing houses specialised in these genres, are labelled as
£SF’ or ‘fantasy’), and the latter appears to be better-selling.
After 1989 more than one hundred publishers6 published SF and fantasy (105 in Budapest, 19 in the country), 27 publishing houses only Hungarian authors
-4. December 1994 ,
5. According to several editors, e.g. Mr Ferenc Halmos (Gesta) and Mr Miklós Héjjas (Valhalla Páholy)
6. These numbers provided by an ongoing PhD research are only informative. Sources:
Hungarian National Bibliography, The Bibliography of Fantastic Literature in Hungary from the beginnings to 1991, list of novels published by Valhalla Páholy
Anikó Sohár
private editions are not included in these numbers. The number of published works and the contribution of Hungarian authors are shown in Table 1.
Table 1.
year Total Hungarian pseudonym
1989 80 30 11
1990 107 44 17
1991 88 19 6
1992 97 14 8
1993 109 14 13
1994 89 16 13
1995 87 28 26
A very interesting phenomenon (also appeared in the twenties-thirties, for in
stance in France, but in Hungary as well) is that some authors of popular genres (see the aforesaid Leslie L. Lawrence and Vavyan Fable), and even some transla
tors use pseudonyms; the authors opt for English names, the translators mostly for Hungarian ones.
This is partly due to the lack of prestige, in other words to the peripheral situa
tion of popular genres (Even-Zohar 1990). It is hypothesised that the ‘imported’
literature has higher prestige when introducing new genres; according to several editors, it would be impossible to sell a book of any popular genre if a Hungarian name was printed on the front cover. There are several books in which the writer gives his/her name as that of the translator. Some authors do not adapt only a pseudonym, or even several, but also fictitious English title (rarely corresponding with the Hungarian one), fictitious publisher, fictitious date of first edition, ficti
tious date of translation, sometimes a preface or epilogue written somewhere out
side Hungary (for instance in Montreal, or Lugano, or Concord, New Hampshire, USA). These novelists form a group relating their novels to the same, elaborately worked out imaginary world upon which a fantasy role-playing game is also based.
Actually, one of the clues, which has helped me to identify the authors as Hunga
rians, was the game book itself.
This phenomenon is not unique at all. There are other, more loosely connected writers, who also share imaginary worlds, and/or borrow characters from one an
other, for instance “John Caldwell” utilises a magician, Moonlight Thief (Holdfény- tolvaj), in his Chaos series who was invented by “Robert Knight” (seeToury, 1995).
It is remarkable that both most relevant groups are formed around the two pre
sumably most important publishing houses specialised in SF & fantasy7 and the authors, or at least most of them, have been translators specialised in SF & fantasy
7. Since then I have discovered that the above mentioned two publishing houses (Valhalla Páholy, Budapest and Cherubion, Debrecen) are affiliated companies of AVALON Kiadói Csoport which owns two other (and possibly more) publishing houses: King and Pendragon.
for a long time, even before 1989, and they are also involved in publishing. It is therefore no coincidence that they have been able to introduce and to make fanta
sy popular in Hungary when previous attempts failed. Their popularity is shown by the fact that several of their novels already had a second edition (for example, John Caldwell’s The Priest of Chaos, or Wayne Chapman’s Banners of Flame and Blood Season).
The translations themselves are full of paradoxes, and provide an excellent do
main for research on contemporary society. Of course, the above-mentioned liter
ary/social position itself can be ‘blamed’ for the attitude of some publishing hous
es, which considers publishing popular, mostly translated literature as a useful but despised means to achieve high profit, sometimes in order to publish ‘high’ litera
ture, putting the money earned this way to ‘respectable’ use. This allows the hy
pothesis that the translations will be ‘faithful’ to the original texts, since it is easier, cheaper and quicker and since popular literature almost did not exist before, there are no established target models to which the translated texts can be adapted (of course, omissions may go together with very scrupulous syntax, and they do, actu
ally8). Due to the previously mentioned attitude of publishing houses the texts seem not to correspond to a single, well-defined model, “how to translate these genres into Hungarian”, therefore a rather high fluctuation between norms and translation strategies can be observed, especially in science fiction (see Sohár, forthcoming). However, these strategies are not established even within a series, differ from each other remarkably in every single case.
The language use and style of science fiction tend to be quite revolutionary, radical (sometimes also in ideology) - for instance new and/or differently used metaphors, similes, coined words, loan-words, especially from English seem to show a preference for slang and taboo words as well as for the most current and vi
tal topics (see, for instance, William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels). It is not clear, however, to what extent such distinctions apply to science fiction as such, the topic should be investigated more thoroughly9.
8. For example, in the Hungarian translation of Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic. Most of these omissions are culture-related; the translators left them out since they were obviously not intelligible for the average Hungarian reader and the translators could not find an “equivalent”.
9. Romance as genre appears to be the only exception regarding language use and style. In the instructions for translators used within an international publishing house specialised in ro
mances there is a strong emphasis on pure and grammatically correct use of the language, for instance it is suggested that the translators should avoid using foreign words or loans (such as alternative, discipline), and recommends some solutions to the most frequent problems. The recommended sentences are closer to the literary language use than to the everyday speech, though it can be stated that the language use in popular genres, apart from romances, is gener
ally closer to colloquial usage. It is also stressed that the translator has to omit or rewrite those paragraphs which could be offensive from the point of view of morals. The translations should not be either too intellectual or extreme in any sense of the word. At any rate, publish
ing houses specialised in popular genres, with the possible exception of SF & fantasy, seem to have a rather low opinion of their readership, while on the other hand they appear to favour the
Anikó Sohár
Another consequence of the previously mentioned elitist, and at the same time, rather profit-oriented mentality is that the published popular literature generally has a very attractive, colourful cover but is printed on paper of rather poor quality and is usually full of misprints, and bad hyphenation, sometimes empty lines/pages and unnecessarily different characters make the readers surprised.
Having investigated the most characteristic books, series and publications in science fiction I would risk the statement that every single translation differs from the others in one way or another; for instance all volumes of every trilogy or series were usually translated by different translators, sometimes even published by dif
ferent publishing houses. Since there are some translators specialised in translating science fiction & fantasy (in this period only 24 of the 197 translators, who dealt with science fiction novels, translated 4 or more books), we can observe some marks of their personality in their translations, but it would be rather misleading to sup
pose that these marks are related to a model, or to precisely prescribed norms.
Nevertheless, regulations can be observed which may lead to precise norms for
mulated by the translators and publishers in the future. First of all, the selection of SF & fantasy novels to be translated shows a clear tendency, apparently shared by all publishers involved, from an international assortment to a merely English-Ame- rican one as Table 2. shows.
Table 2.
year UK/USA Hungarian Together Total
1989 25 30 55 80
1990 52 44 96 107
1991 65 19 84 88
1992 80 14 94 97
1993 95 14 109 109
1994 66 16 82 89
1995 59 28 87 87
A second regular criterion is the text length, for instance Valhalla Páholy obvi
ously favours books with approximately three hundred pages (number of books with pages between 290 and 310: 77, published by Valhalla: 58), the publishers in Debrecen prefers novels about 180 pages9 (42 of the 60 books with pages between
180 and 190)10, et cetera.
most banal, commonplace style. It is worth mentioning that these publishing houses, and more and more the Hungarian ones specialised in publishing popular literature, have a follow-up of the needs and wants of their audience (e.g. there are questionnaires on the last pages of popu
lar magazines). These instructions mean that romance as such aims at approaching the status of “high” literature using only accepted, well-established, commonplace patterns and style.
10. see The bibliography of fantastic literature between 1989 and 1995, unpublished.
Another regularity can be observed examining the genuinely translated titles.
Naturally, most of them are loan translations. However, non-translations (such as Terror, 1984, Christine), slightly11 or completely12 different titles also occur with a considerably high frequency (123 cases out of 280, non-translation: 22; slightly different: 48; completely different: 53).The tendency is to shorten the original title and/or to highlight an essential feature such as a proper name. The same holds true in the case of fictitious translations, there are mirror translations (13), slightly different ones (8, either omitting or adding something to the “original” English ti
tle) or they definitely do not correspond with the “translated” Hungarian titles (9, such as Blood Season - A Halál Havában [In the Month of Death], or Banners of Flame - Észak Lángjai [Flames of North]). There is only one non-translation in this category, namely Paranoia by “Kyle Sternhagen”.
It seems that, at least in the case of Hungary, popular literature rather heavily depends on pseudotranslations which are nevertheless perceived as genuine trans
lations by the reader. Its extent differs in many ways regarding the diverse genres (for instance the majority of thrillers are imported when the most successful novels of romance and fantasy are Hungarian products).
The translations are apparently not ‘faithful’ despite any sensible assumptions concerning the costs. Obviously, the more culture-specific the original, the less
‘faithful’ the translation will be. Although the striking divergence in the lay-out, covers, or in the treatment of paragraphs (multiplied or merged), et cetera, tends to be, at least partly, related to the Hungarian literary traditions, some cases are inex
plicable upon cultural reasoning13 Another element which determines the amount of differences is humour (see the cases of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams).
Together with the previously mentioned preference for a certain text length it indi
Together with the previously mentioned preference for a certain text length it indi