Category Archives: Hungarian SFT Month

Hungarian SFT: An Overview

Hungarian speculative fiction in English translation has been around since the early twentieth century, with more than thirty novels, collections, and stand-alone stories. From the Gulliver’s Travels-inspired stories of Frigyes Karinthy to the Kafkaesque absurdity of Ferenc Karinthy, and from the hard science fiction of Péter Zsoldos and Botond Markovics to the horror of Attila

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Hungarian SFT: Peter Sherwood on Translating Hungarian SF

“Translating (SF) from Hungarian” by Peter Sherwood My first translations from Hungarian appeared in my school’s magazine in the late 1960s and the most recent last month, so I have quite a lot of experience and thus quite a lot to say, about translating from Hungarian into English. And I taught Hungarian at universities in

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Hungarian SFT: Austin Wagner on Three Hungarian SFF Authors

Hungarian Speculative Fiction: The Three Pillars by Austin Wagner When it comes to writing about Hungarian speculative fiction for an English-speaking audience, an enormous problem rears its ugly head before the first sentence can even be typed out – namely that very little speculative fiction written in the last fifty years has been translated from

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Hungarian SFT: Novels (Part I)

The Nightmare (1916) by Mihály Babits, translated by Eva Racz (Corvina Books, 1966). “A Nightmare, the English title of what the original translates as The Stork-Caliph in reference to an 1826 German fairy tale in imitation of Arabian Nights-style fables, is a story of psychological fantasy (… it belongs rather to the Decadent tradition of spiritual alienation

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Hungarian SFT: Novels (Part II)

The Sinistra Zone (1992) by Ádám Bodor, translated by Paul Olchváry (New Directions, 2013) “Entering a weird, remote hamlet, Andrei calls himself “a simple wayfarer,” but he is in fact highly compromised: he has no identity papers. Taken under the wing of the military zone’s commander, Andrei is first assigned to guard the blueberries that

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Hungarian SFT: Collections

Tales from Jókai by Mor Jókai, translated by R. Nisbet Bain (Jarrold & Sons, 1904) Mixed collection of nine stories plus a biography of Jokai by Bain. Includes the novella “City of the Beast” (1856), a gaudy and highly dramatic account of the end of Atlantis; and three graphic contes cruels: “The Justice of Soliman”

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