Translating Non-Standard Language: Andrea Camilleri in Hungarian

Dóra Bodrogai
 

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Andrea Camilleri has gained significant success in the last decades with his works written in a special language: his own version of Sicilian, an idiolect created on the base of Italian with the ever-heavier involvement of Sicilian dialect, which makes it hard to understand not only to readers of different mother tongues but also to native Italian speakers. In this way, he heavily involved his Sicilian cultural heritage as well and brought it closer not only to an Italian but a worldwide audience. The author confirmed that this special language was used in his home, it was a sort of slang used by parents and kids, and that the dialectal part corresponded to the emotions, while the standard Italian was used for official discourse (Demontis, 2001). Some have seen his use of dialects “as a vulgar attempt to pander to his readership” (Russi, 2018 citing Cotroneo, 1998; Merlo, 2000), while others have attributed functions to it.

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In Camilleri’s novels, not only the diatopic but also diastratic and diaphasic variations are characteristic, which is another factor the translator must take into consideration. Camilleri’s special use of language has been analysed on numerous occasions (Storari, 2004; Arcangeli, 2004; Sottile, 2019; Matt, 2020), but Hungarian translations have not yet been at the center of attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining aspects of the Hungarian translations of two Camilleri novels, Il cane di terracotta and La forma dell’acqua.

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La forma dell’acqua is Camilleri’s first Montalbano novel, published in 1994 by the small Sicilian publisher Sellerio. The novel introduces the key figures, like Montalbano himself, and establishes the location in Vigàta, Sicily. The second Montalbano novel is Il cane di terracotta (1996, Sellerio) and to date, it remains one of Camilleri’s most translated novel. According to Caprara, it has been translated into 27 languages, La forma dell’acqua is second on this list with 26 languages (Caprara, 2019). On the other hand, according to the website vigata.org, which collects all resources connected to Camilleri and keeps a very updated bibliography, the most translated novel is La forma dell’acqua (33 languages), meanwhile, Il cane di terracotta remains second on the list with 31 languages (Vigata.org – Traduzioni).

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

It is not difficult to see why Il cane di terracotta was so successful among the audiences: while Montalbano tries to deal with the arrest of one of the most-feared criminals, Tano the Greek, he stumbles upon a fascinating, half-century-old mystery: two lovers are found in the closed-up part of a cave in a layout that resembles a ceremony or ritual. The story involves the Egyptian and Greek heritage as well as Italian history: Camilleri confirmed that he got the idea of the story after having read the Egyptian play The People of the Cave, inspired by the Quran, while the cave as an allegory can already be found in Plato (Vigata.org – Il cane di terracotta – Edizione per la scuola).
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