6. Relying on Paratexts

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Placing the author and the work in the context of national and world literature was an important part of the reader’s reports. However, since the reviewers had no access to literary criticism from the West, they often relied on the paratexts that were surrounding the original texts (Genette, 1997: 23–32), such as the blurb on the cover or the foreword. The primary role of these accompanying texts is to help the source text readers position Atwood and her literary work on the Canadian and the English-American book market. We find seven references to the blurbs of the original volumes in the reports. In 1974, for example: “The blurb describes her as the greatest Canadian poet of our time. In Hungary, as far as I know, she is unknown”, or in 1982, “In this case, we can take the words of the blurb literally: ‘few authors have such talent to read the soul of the characters as Margaret Atwood’”. The first readers thus took the blurbs to be a reliable source to contextualize Atwood for the Hungarian publisher. One of the reader’s reports also makes reference to the foreword of Ferenc Takács which was published along the Hungarian translation of Surfacing in 1984. The reports are paratexts themselves, or more precisely – to use Genette’s term – epitexts, texts that are texts accompanying the literary piece, so in a way they are subordinate to the text, yet, since they review the text, they have a certain “power”. In the case of the reader’s reports, the texts draw on the paratexts produced earlier in the source culture to initially frame texts for the Hungarian publisher in the decision-making process.1
1 For the role of censor’s reports as paratexts during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain on Czech literature, see Vavroušová (2016: 135–156).
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