Henry James in Hungary

Abstract

To call uneven the Hungarian reception of the works of Henry James would be an understatement. The start was rather promising. Roderick Hudson was published in Hungarian translation two years after it appeared in English, and in 1880 The American was published in installments in a daily newspaper. It is not easy to explain why it took almost ninety years for a Hungarian publisher to bring out more works by James. Neither the impressionistic essayists of the 1920s and 30s nor the later spokesmen of Marxism could do justice to the achievement of the American-born writer. His more sympathetic interpreters emerged with the rise of structuralist narratology, hermeneutics, reception-oriented research, and deconstruction. With the rapidly growing number of readers familiar with the works in the original, further reinterpretations may be expected. The conclusion is inescapable that the reception of the works of James proves how closely the understanding of literature is related to ideological and cultural trends.