Languages of Exile and Community in Dezső Kosztolányi's Esti Kornél Cycles

Authors

  • Adriana Varga Indiana University, Bloomington

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2011.31

Keywords:

Kosztolányi, modernism in Hungary, narrative theory, translation theory, culture and language, Esti Kornél

Abstract

An avid translator, the poet, novelist, essayist and journalist, Dezső Kosztolányi believed in linguistic relativism, the uniqueness of each language-created world view, and the impossibility of translation. Paradoxically, one of his main concerns was to express in fiction various encounters between individuals belonging to different linguistic and cultural communities, and to explore whether communication between them was at all possible. It is exactly this double bind—this status of finding oneself between two or more cultures and languages—that the Hungarian novelist explored in many of his works, particularly in his last fictional writings, the Esti Kornél cycles: Esti Kornél (1933) and Esti Kornél Kalandjai (The Adventures of Kornél Esti, 1936). Several of the Esti Kornél episodes are linguistic explorations of the encounter between “self” and “other,” when these two often belong to different cultural and linguistic communities. The result of estranging language during such encounters leads to a better understanding of language and the context that created it—just as, in translation, the loss and, therefore, the presence of the original’s linguistic form is most acutely felt and understood by the translator.

Author Biography

Adriana Varga, Indiana University, Bloomington

Adriana Varga received her doctorate degree in Comparative Literature from Indiana University. She is currently conducting research on the Hungarian Modernist author Dezső Kosztolányi, as a member of the HAS-ELTE Online Critical Edition Research Group. Her research and publication interests include Modernism, narrative theory, postcolonial theory, reception aesthetics, translation and translation theory, inter-arts poetics, and diaspora and immigrant literatures. She is currently working on a comparative study of the modernist novel in the interwar period and she is editing a collection of essays entitled Virginia Woolf and Music. She is a Fulbright-Hays scholar and the recipient of other awards for academic research and teaching.

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Published

2011-01-01

Issue

Vol. 4 (2011)

Section

General Articles

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