A view from the periphery
fictional genres in the world system
We are working with data about the published translations of Hungarian literary works into other languages. (In this earlier post, we gave an overview of the most basic observations.) We look for patterns in the data to learn about world literature—by which we mean not so much a particular set of texts, but rather, a mode of circulation: namely, the circulation of literature beyond its original context. (World literature in this sense is largely the function of literary translation.) So what does the system of translations look like if we explore it by following the publications of some Hungarian works?
The system from the center
In a post about the place of English among the world’s languages of translations, we mentioned how world system theory has been used to think about the unequal flows of translations as parts of a global system. Such an approach identifies languages as central or peripheral according to the volume of translation flowing from them to other languages. Like the model of the capitalist world economy on which it is very-very loosely based, the projected system of translations is dynamically responsive to political, cultural, as well as economic pressures—think of all the reasons why French may have been losing ground to English throughout the 20th century, as the latter was rising to a super-central position.
This model has much to recommend it, but using it to map world literature would be a challenging task. Unsurprisingly, there is no history of the world system of literature: there has been no Wallerstein of literary history (or Braudel), not for the period that began in 16th century, when the modern economic world system emerged, and not even for the last century and a half, when a global system of the commercial circulation of literature came into being.1 Substantive accounts in this vein tend to be written from the point of view of, and with a focus on, the center. Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters2 is Paris-centered—what is happening in the rest of the world, other than of course a lot of people looking longingly towards Paris, remains in the dark. Gisèle Sapiro’s Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur mondial?3 is similarly centered on France. While Casanova’s focus is on production, Sapiro attends to mediation and circulation—but she is still tracing shifts in global circulation by looking through the archives of Gallimard. Last but not least, and closest to our own research, Ioana Popa’s important Traduire sous contraintes: Littérature et communisme (1947-1989)4 is about how Eastern-European literature got translated into French during the cold war.
Looking at world literature as it affects and is affected by the center is of course a powerful perspective (it is the perspective of power by definition…) but it is not an all-seeing one. Not only do authors without a French publication remain invisible, even if they were translated into a bunch of other languages—more importantly, when viewed from Paris, the workings and roles of other, secondary, regional hubs are also impossible to discern. From the center, the rest of the world is one big periphery. (And then there is the anglophone world, and the story of how Paris loses its absolute centrality to New York.)
The system from the Central European periphery
Viewed from Central Europe, Paris was clearly the symbolic capital of the literary world. Other than Russian (under communism), French was the most important source language of literary translations into Hungarian through the 1960s. But when it came to being translated, for most Hungarian writers French was not the primary venue.
Literatures in small languages, like Hungarian, modern Hebrew, Romanian, or Dutch, for example, each have their characteristic embeddedness in the world system of translations, with different primary entry points among the central languages. For Hungarian, the most important entry point has always been German. As we have shown in an earlier post, German as a target language dominates the history of the world literary circulation of Hungarian literature, while the role of other languages fluctuates according to the larger changes in the world system—French for example rises to second place among target languages in the 1990s, after losing its dominant role among source languages globally.5 Publication in German has often been a first step towards a wider European public, towards translations, sometimes via German, into other European languages, without the author or work in question ever being translated into French. The position of English is interesting. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the English-language book market is already the largest, so it is not surprising that before WW2, English is already a consistently important target language for translations from Hungarian. But it does not appear to have been directing the flow of further translations, it was not a gateway language enabling further translations. Relatively many books appear in English—but whether they do or not, makes no difference to publication in other languages.
Hungarian literature in translation steadily expands through the interwar years. The cold war slows things down. Along with the languages of allied communist states, Russian becomes an important target language. Just how important, and whether it was more than that—did Russian direct the flow of translations, was it a gateway language within the Eastern Bloc—is a question for our next post.
After the cold war, there is again an upsurge in translations into English, and English becomes the most important source language for translations appearing in Hungarian, but Hungarian authors’ first step towards global circulation is usually still a German translation. German is often the first step even if a German publication is no longer needed to sell the author to publishers in other markets.6 László Krasznahorkai’s most recent novel to be published in translation, Herscht 07769, came out in Heike Fleming’s German translation in 2021, the same year as in Hungarian. Dóra Várnai’s Italian followed in 2022, Ottilie Mulzet’s English appeared in 2024. A French translation is not yet forthcoming.
So the system turns out to be be a polycentric, multi-tiered structure rather than a simple hierarchy of center and periphery, based on size. In this system of translation flows, not all roads lead to Paris or New York—and it is interesting to see which ones do and which don’t. Obviously, not all Hungarian authors are translated into the same languages. But we can go further: the gateway language they pass through and the languages they succeed in are often reflective of the work or of the place of the author in the domestic literary field.
Two models: Füst and Gárdonyi
Milán Füst and Géza Gárdonyi wrote their novels four decades apart, but their books were translated into dozens of languages around the same time, from the late 1950s through the 1980s-90s. The trajectories of their works in translation trace two very different routes through the same configuration of the world system.
Milán Füst is a paradigmatic case of the 20th-century “world author,” as described by Sapiro’s book. His only novel, The Story of my Wife: Reminiscences of Captain Störr7 is a strange modernist work, a first person narrative that manages to remind readers both of Svevo’ Zeno’s Conscience and Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses. It came out in Hungarian in 1942.
The French translation of Élisabeth Berki and Suzanne Peuteuil was published by Gallimard in 1958. Polish, Croatian, German (1962), Dutch, Slovenian, Slovak, Spanish, Czech, Romanian, Swedish, and Lithuanian translations followed, often in several editions, the German published first by Rowohlt in West Germany, and then by Volk und Welt in the GDR (1973). An American translation by Ivan Sanders appeared in 1987, issued in 1989 as paperback by Jonathan Cape in London and by Vintage in New York. This is the paradigmatic 20th century world-literary trajectory: consecration by the most prestigious Parisian literary publisher and by one of the period’s most important German literary publishers, prompting translations across Europe. The English translation is relatively late, and it has limited effect—although it still precedes the Estonian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Italian versions, with all the other translations already in circulation, it is unclear whether the existence of an English edition made any difference to the decision to publish these.
The series of translations of Füst’s delirious, tortured and funny high modernist novel trace the paths of high-prestige circulation via the system’s centers characteristic of the second half of the 20th century—it illustrates the model explored by Sapiro’s Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur mondial. In the same period, other types of writing follow completely different translation patterns, reaching just as many languages and potential readers, but do so without relying on mechanisms of consecration by the institutions of the Atlantic center.
Géza Gárdonyi is the 14th most translated Hungarian author according to our database, which includes 17 of his works in 30 languages, in a total of 129 editions. He wrote romantic novels around the turn of the last century. By our standards, they are young adult (YA) novels—working with our data reveals just how much of what got translated is, retrospectively at least, genre fiction. Their dissemination was not informed by the prestige of aesthetic value, the way the translations of Füst’s novel were. Nor was it propelled by a commercial logic—the other pole defining the field of 21st-century global circulation. Instead, the translations of Gárdonyi’s novels were driven by a cultural-political agenda.
Four of Gárdonyi’s novels appeared in more than three languages. Az a hatalmas harmadik (1903; “That mighty third one”), a novel about a contemporary love triangle, was published in French in 1912, in Croatian in 1926, in Italian in 1934, and in Turkish in 1946—a pretty unremarkable trajectory. This is the only French translation of Gárdonyi. For various reasons, it seems unlikely that any of the later translations are actually prompted by it.
The other three are historical novels: Egri csillagok (1901; Eclipse of the crescent moon: a tale of the siege of Eger, 1552), set during the period of Hungarian-Ottoman wars; A láthatatlan ember (1902; Slave of the Huns), about an enslaved Thracian scribe in the court of Attila the Hun; and Isten rabjai (1908; “Prisoners of God”), a novel about St. Margaret of Hungary, a 13th-century Dominican nun, daughter of King Béla IV.
The historical novel as a genre is of course the product of romantic nationalism. Its political valences shift over the history of its circulation. Once it is commercialized, it becomes—especially in its romance version—a crucial middle-brow genre. Historical romances have the inherent popularity of genre fiction, while also valorized by their role in national-cultural uplift. These two functions, entertainment and ideology, narrative pleasure and the shifting cultural, pedagogical, and propagandistic agendas of the nation state, supplement each other as the forces that propel the genre’s circulation.
Gárdonyi’s three historical romances only had a few translations into any language during the interwar years. It was not published in French—historical novels rarely were, and these are late examples of the genre anyway. From a world-literary perspective, they were set to become obsolete like Az a hatalmas harmadik, until their world-literary trajectories were changed by two interventions.
The first of these was the publication of A láthatatlan ember in German translation (made by Gárdonyi’s son) in 1941 by a Budapest publisher. Bulgarian (1942), Dutch (1944), Spanish (1944) and Turkish (1946) translations were promptly made from the German. How citizens of states allied with Nazi Germany understood a novel about a Greek scribe, who eagerly follows the Huns on their disastrous and devastating campaign into Gaul, and tries to get integrated among Attila’s people (there is a romantic thread of course), only to be finally rebuffed by their incomprehensible death cult—how this story could be allegorized after the Third Reich invaded France, and what its political appeal was in a Hungary entering the war on the side of Germany, in German-occupied Bulgaria and Netherlands, or in German-allied Francoist Spain, is something worth pondering.
Then for over a decade, nothing happens—it is Egri csillagok that prompts further translations of A láthatatlan ember as well.
Until the 1950s, Egri csillagok only had a 1926 Finnish translation. In 1955-56, it came out in Russian, Bulgarian, and Slovak—a wave of translations clearly encouraged by the Hungarian government. The promotion of Egri csillagok as a national classic marked a turning point after the strictly contemporary, socialist-realist canon of the Stalinist years. Egri csillagok became a representative text of Hungarian literature, the book about the fight for national independence. For decades, this novel about Hungarian us vs. Ottoman them, “we few, we happy few” joined in a desperate fight against the (mighty and dishonest) oriental enemy (this is NOT the novel by Gárdonyi translated twice into Turkish…), was (and maybe still is) required reading for twelve year olds.
Its publication in Russian opened the way for translations into the languages of the Soviet Union (Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian). Other socialist countries (Bulgarian, Slovakian, Romanian, German, Czech, Polish, Cuban Spanish, Vietnamese) followed. The Hungarian foreign language publishing house Corvina kept the German translation in print throughout the Cold war period and beyond. In 1991, they also published an English translation.8 Since then, there have been Greek as well as Dutch versions, and in 2007, Egri csillagok also appeared in Chinese in Shanghai, bringing its translations up to 20 languages.
The circulation of Egri csillagok also gave Láthatatlan ember a boost: a German translation was published in Budapest and Leipzig in 1959, followed by Cuban Spanish, Polish, Czech, Flemish, English, Turkish (this second time from the original), Polish, Czech, Estonian, Romanian, etc., a total of 17 languages. The English translation was first published in 1969 by Dent (London) and Corvina (Budapest), a joint venture signaling a concerted effort on the part of the Hungarian state to push the novel’s circulation.9 While it has not been reprinted in the UK since the 1973 Puffin edition, the Hungarian foreign-language publishing house Corvina has kept bringing out new editions. In the 21st century, Gárdonyi is only occasionally published in new translations, but Corvina has kept Egri csillagok and Láthatatlan ember in print in German as well as in English until recently.
The pattern of the publication of Gárdonyi’s novels in translation is remarkably different from the case of Füst. Unlike highbrow fiction, aspiring for admission to the elite club of the art novel of the late 19th and of the 20th century, historical romance does not necessarily pass through prestigious literary publishers, and does not necessarily reach the kind of global audience highbrow fiction does. In the 20th century, its dissemination was guided by the political landscape. In Western Europe, they occupied a market niche as middlebrow or YA entertainment, while in eastern Europe, their publication was either aligned with the regime’s agenda of cultural representation, or, on occasion (the 1941 Hungarian-published translation into German might have been such a case), sought to present a national-oppositional alternative to the official position. Either way, they are too blatantly and predictably ideological to fit our expectations for high literature. Unlike Füst’s novel, they don’t belong to the world of fiction to which Edwin Frank’s recent Stranger than Fiction10 is a good Baedeker (although he doesn’t mention Füst). But if we take seriously the definition of world literature as a mode of circulation, these much-translated YA novels are squarely in the category. Not only are they part of what people read around the world, they also play an interesting role in the world system of translations. Tracing them reveals a political dimension of that system unmapped by observers from the center.11
There are of course important studies with the ambition to think on a global scale—none of them quite provide what we have in mind here. In addition to Casanova and Sapiro discussed above, Alexander Beecroft’s An ecology of world literature focuses on production, not translation / circulation. David Damrosch’s What is world literature? is about circulation beyond the original context—but it participates in the tendency of American academy to offer a suggestive series of case studies instead of a systematic account. Sheldon Pollock’s The language of the gods in the world of men is about a pre-capitalist world, and a world different from the one which went global from the 16th century on (although anyone working on medieval and early modern European should read it for its perspective on the workings of a cosmopolitan language and vernacularization).
On economic models used to imagine world literary circulation, see
, “Five Economies of Weltliteratur: Designs for Circulation” Journal of World Literature 7 (2022) 202–233. Capitalism is not the only game.Pascale Casanova: La republique mondiale des lettres (Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1999.) 492 p. ISBN 2020358530. English edition: The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2004.) xiii, 420 p. ISBN 067401345X.
Gisèle Sapiro: Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur mondial? Le champ littéraire transnational ([Paris] : EHESS : Gallimard : Seuil, [2024]) 469 p., ill., charts (Hautes études, 0291-4026) ISBN 9782021568554
Ioana Popa: Traduire sous contraintes. Littérature et communisme, 1947-1989 (Paris : CNRS, 2010.) 589 p. (Collection "Culture & société") ISBN 9782271068095
The concluding chapters of Gisèle Sapiro’s book are suggestive about the larger shift of which this is a symptom.
Editors, like the members of the Swedish Academy, need to get at least somewhat acquainted with the works they are considering, and in doing so they often rely on mediating languages—but they might be less scrupulous when it comes to signing up the most recent big book of an already successful author.
Milán Füst: The story of my wife. The reminiscences of Captain Störr. A novel. Preface by George Konrád, translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders. (New York : PAJ Publications, 1987.) xiii, 336 p. ISBN 155554018X
Géza Gárdonyi, Eclipse of the crescent moon: a tale of the siege of Eger, translated by George F. Cushing (Budapest: Corvina, 1991).
Slave of the Huns, translated by Andrew Feldmar, (London: Dent, 1969) and (Budapest: Corvina, 1969). These are two issues of the same edition.
Edwin Frank: Stranger than fiction. Lives of the twentieth-century novel (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.) xx, 451 p., ill. ISBN 9780374270964, 0374270961
More about that in a forthcoming post.
Translation gives books curious multiple lives -- often in different timelines. Without easy access to books in Polish after I left the country, I found myself in a difficult position. With envy I followed Polish book reviewers on social media who collected older editions often from well-known but discontinued curated series. Having only just discovered Magda Szabó a few years ago I was envious how much more of her books had been available in Polish translation for years.
It's a very interesting essay about the globalization of literature. However, as a translator, I think more about how language is lost in translation. Nabokov's Mashen'ka, already in the title, lost love, tenderness, closeness, and intimacy when he had to translate the title of his first novel by the ordinary, not meaning anything - Mary. It became a level lower in English spoken literature.