Folia Hungarica 12: Madách Az ember tragédiája és finn fordításai a nemzeti kultúrák, az irodalmi recepció és a fordításelemzés tükrében

The dissertation examines Madách's The Tragedy of Man and its Finnish translations. The analysis takes into account hermeneutic, reception-aesthetic and poetical-rhetorical aspects, and explores attitudes towards alterity and the unfamiliar within the threefold process of comprehension, interpretation, and translation.

Focusing on The Tragedy of Man and its translations by Otto Manninen and Toivo Lyy, the Hungarian and Finnish literary systems are
compared with respect to the relations between author, text and recipient and the open and dynamic system of correlations within the text; points of intersection are sought between the different systems.

In the analysis of the Hungarian literary system, assessments concerning the genre and interpretations of The Tragedy of Man are analysed in terms of the poetical categories of generic norms and conventions, that are part of the process of creating meaning and comprehension, such as hubris and catharsis. The Finnish literary system is analysed with respect to the notion of national culture and the creation of a national canon, and the potential for the Hungarian culture to play an exemplary role in this process. The analysis is conducted in part via the translations themselves, and in part via the generic interpretations of tragedies with a similar theme. The translations by Otto Manninen and Toivo Lyy, the first of which is incomplete, are discussed in terms of their reception, and the reasons are explored for Lyy's contradictory strategies of translation.

This large-scale comparison of literary systems reveals that the intersection of these systems has been minimal. For the Finns the salient aspect is Petőfi’s passionate, exotic and revolutionary attitude, which is singularly missing on the part of the untypical, "traditional" Hungarian Madách.