The “own” vs the “foreign” in the German translation of Pavol Rankov’s novel Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny

Abstract

The paper deals with cultural phenomena – realia and precedent phenomena – in the novel by contemporary Slovak author Pavol Rankov: Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny [The Holy Butcher of Šamorín and Other Stories from the Time of the Lesser Danube War, 2016] and in its German translation Der Kleine Donaukrieg (2022). The novel depicts a fictional war between Slovakia and Hungary, with its specific feature being the clash of several cultures and linguo-cultural spaces (Slovak, Hungarian, Roma, Czech) on the linguistic and extra-linguistic levels. The paper presents an interpretative probe into the analysed novel as well as a theoretical definition of the types of cultural phenomena in translation communication, focusing on the ambiguity of the rendering and definition of the “own” and “foreign” in a literary text. In the comparative analysis of the original work and its German translation, we focus on the interpretative, receptive and translational specificities of realia and precedent phenomena reflecting the Roma and Slovak linguo-cultural space.