Folk, modern, oriental, dramatic or communist: Translating Tagore into Hungarian

As acquaintance with Indian culture, apart from the Orientalist concept of India as an ancient civilisation, was limited amongst East Central Europeans of the early twentieth century, there was an enhanced freedom in imagining Tagore in these cultures. In the early 1920s Tagore was a prophet with a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bangha, I
Other Authors: Robinson, S
Format: Book section
Published: BRILL/Rodopi 2016
Description
Summary:As acquaintance with Indian culture, apart from the Orientalist concept of India as an ancient civilisation, was limited amongst East Central Europeans of the early twentieth century, there was an enhanced freedom in imagining Tagore in these cultures. In the early 1920s Tagore was a prophet with a spiritual message and in the 1950s he became an anti-imperialist thinker with progressive social agenda. The article examines Hungarian approaches to translating the first best selling author of living India. Most renderings tried to reach back to an original be it the English prose or the Bengali verse versions. However, the idea of reflecting an original was problematic since it was either very difficult to decide what the ‘original’ was when a poem circulated in several versions, or when only a clearly derivative version was accessible for further translation. This resulted in a particularly wide range of Tagore translation strategies based on patterns already existing in Hungarian literature.