“Foreignness Is a Safe Shield.” Translation as Cultural Transmission in Andrea Tompa’s Home

Winner of the PEN Translates Award and included in the longlist for the Dublin Literary Award, the English version of Andrea Tompa’s Haza [Home] (2020), translated by Jozefina Komporaly and published by Istros Books in 2024, adds intriguing questions to the infinitely rich cultural, thematic, linguistic, and stylistic tapestry of the original. Of autobiographical inspiration, Andrea Tompa’s novel presents various patterns of emigration and explores the ethical, epistemological, and psychological implications of changing places, whether in the form of leaving or returning home, cutting all connections or incessantly searching for the roots, lust or lost, moving forward or looking back, condensed in the most abstract formula, i.e. moving from A to B. While Hungarian readers can precisely decipher the hidden local references, identifying the main locations of the novel in Budapest and the Transylvanian city Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár, the novel subtly plays upon withdrawing the possibility of referential reading, extending the experience of emigration in time and space and looking at it as a fundamental human experience. In what ways does/may the reading experience of the book change through the English translation? What are the implications of transferring it into another language that is itself one of the main “protagonists” of the highly metatextual and multilingual essay novel? How can the “foreignness” of the foreign language be preserved when the new linguistic text and context is provided by that foreign language itself? The paper looks at the challenges of translation both in linguistic and cultural terms. On the one hand, it focuses on how the main challenges of the text, i.e. gender, names, specific lexical items, intertextuality, ekphrasis, multilingualism, metalinguistic reflections, and differences of Hungarian language use over political boundaries, are solved in translation. On the other hand, it looks at broader questions of translation as cultural transmission, as “a multilayered cultural transfer with a partially unpredictable effect” (Kappanyos 2013, 28). The paper aims to highlight that ingenious translatorial decisions introduce a new dynamic into the (con)textual diversity of Andrea Tompa’s universe.