The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.11.1.0137
ISSN1755-6333
Autores Tópico(s)Narrative Theory and Analysis
ResumoF. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was first published in Hungarian in 1962 in a collection entitled Újra Babilonban (Babylon Revisited) that included a selection of short stories. The translation was by Elek Máthé, who had also translated into Hungarian fiction by Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Irving Stone, among others. Máthé's Gatsby was republished on its own, in a separate volume, first in 1968 and numerous times afterwards, most recently in 2012, by a smaller Hungarian publisher, Alinea, which primarily specializes in issuing books related to the themes of “Money, Economics, and Business”—a niche that reveals a great deal about the firm's interpretation of the primacy of finance in the novel. Two thousand twelve also saw the long-awaited new translation of Gatsby appearing courtesy of perhaps the most prestigious Hungarian publishing house of belles lettres, Európa Kiadó. This imprint had been responsible for publishing Máthé's translation of Gatsby as a separate novel in 1968. More recently, it had issued a new series of the complete collected and retranslated works of F. Scott Fitzgerald fancily advertised with an art deco design, an independent logo, and huge banners and posters. The translator in charge was the publisher's prominent in-house translator István Bart, who has produced about 80 percent of his literary translations (from Walter Scott to Cormac McCarthy) for Európa Kiadó, and who has excelled in recent years in the praxis, theory, and meta-levels of translation. Bart has also written and edited volumes like an American-to-Hungarian Cross-Cultural Dictionary (followed by French and German equivalents), exercises for students for translation from/into English, essays about contemporary American cultural life, and even a book about the art of book production. Thanks to Bart and Európa Kiadó, Hungarian admirers of The Great Gatsby are now the beneficiaries of a unique situation—extremely rare in their country—of having two translations of the same novel simultaneously available. Usually in Hungary a re-translation appears many years after a previous translation has gone out of print.Before turning to a comparative analysis of the two translations, I would like to provide a brief historical overview of the changing evaluation of the novel in Hungary. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002), edited by Ruth Prigozy, traces three major stages in the formation of the popular image of Fitzgerald and his work through the twentieth century. The first stage, of glamour and genius associated with the myth of the legendary couple, the beautiful hedonist intellectuals F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald celebrated by the mass media of Roaring Twenties America, is mostly missing from the Hungarian critical reception due to the belated translation of the novel. (The first publication on jazz by Hungarian musicologist Antal Molnár, published in 1928 under the title Jazz band, condemned the jazz era and jazz music as destructive of both morals and good taste.)The first serious Hungarian literary critical reflections on Fitzgerald date from the early 1960s, coinciding with Máthé's translation. They are the products of the gradual advancement of American studies in the Hungarian academy, enabled by prominent figures like László Országh, compiler of the first and still-authoritative English-Hungarian, Hungarian-English dictionary, author of the groundbreaking Az amerikai irodalom története (A History of American Literature [1967]), and contributor to Az amerikai irodalom a XX. században (American Literature in the 20th Century [1962]). Both of these books devoted sections to Fitzgerald and Gatsby. (In 1978, Országh was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II an Honorary Commander of the British Empire for his promotion of English culture and literature in Hungary.) The analyses of Fitzgerald by Országh and two other Hungarian critics of the era, Miklós Kretzoi and Mihály Sükösd, reflected what The Cambridge Companion refers to as the second stage of Fitzgerald's critical reputation, one marked by notions of failure and doom that dominated American commentary throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. This stage was heavily influenced by the publication of Budd Schulberg's best-selling novel The Disenchanted (1950) and Arthur Mizener's scholarly biography The Far Side of Paradise (1951), both of which depicted Fitzgerald as an alcoholic who died a has-been and a largely forgotten writer.The 1960s Hungarian critical reception is replete with gloomy biographical sketches that blame the author's failed life(style) for his failed artistic career. They also regard Jay Gatsby as an autofictional embodiment of the tragic failure of an American dream that promises financial and professional success. This unanimous view was reflected in Országh's portrayal of Fitzgerald as a careless squanderer burdened by a mentally ill wife, a writer prevented from achieving his full artistic promise by a premature death caused by alcoholism, and a personality hampered by a frail magic that could not shine bright for long (“Bevezetés” 311–12). In Miklós Kretzoi's evocative account, despite being granted a glimpse of glamour, exploring New York with his stunning young wife like naughty kids on the loose in an enchanted city, Fitzgerald was soon forced to turn his fashionable flappers and philosophers into brute capital; he acquired money by writing easy and witty pieces, all the while grinding his teeth with dissatisfaction, and ended up like an aged, disillusioned, old actress who could not leave behind the role of the dancer-soubrette in which she was cast in her youth. Like the actress, he was doomed forever to dance a danse macabre on tired, varicose-veined legs, in constant pain and disillusion, behind a mandatory pretended smile (269–70).The chapter on Fitzgerald by Miklósné Kretzoi in Az amerikai irodalom a XX. században (American Literature in the 20th Century) begins with a particularly picturesque depiction of the tragic end of the author's life, seeing him as a moral cadaver, an outmoded ghost of times past that people looked through as he stumbled among them with eyes clouded by alcohol and an awkward, apologetic smile on his face. All this time he was polishing with relentless craftsmanship the fragments he wished to fit into the colorful and artistically truthful mosaic he worked on crafting in the final years of his life, The Last Tycoon (265). Echoes of this dark authorial image prevailed in some later criticism, too. György Tibor Szántó's “Utószó” (“Afterword”) drew a parallel between creator and character, suggesting that the authenticity of Fitzgerald's characterization was because of his similarity to Gatsby. Szántó saw Fitzgerald as the superficial man of the Lost Generation who earned fame through playboy debaucheries, found the great moments of his life in alcoholic delirium, fast cars, luxury shopping, sexual licentiousness, and spendthrift habits, and who smoked despite his weak lungs and drank prodigiously despite what Szántó called his digestive problems. In Szántó's sinister retrospective vision, Fitzgerald smoked endlessly, drank intemperately, and gathered himself together each night with difficulty to go fight at the barricades of local bars and pubs. His oeuvre was discontinuous, disrupted like jazz, and lacked any serious achievement. He only improvised, scribbling many pages of writing, returning to the same topic yet never reaching closure. He lost his compass and could not find his way in the wilderness of the Jazz Age; he sensed that the inhuman and ruthless twentieth century's only innovation was jazz, but he could never play the music and so just took on its rhythm (208–9).Hungarian critics' early preoccupation with American studies in the 1960s was regarded as a rebellious, politically suspicious activity by the era's socialist regime. Neverthless, overtones of the regime's dominant Marxist ideology, constantly critical of capitalist consumer culture, lurk in American studies analyses of this period as they lament Fitzgerald's and Gatsby's failure to integrate properly into the labor market. Accordingly, The Great Gatsby was defined as a romance of/with money (Géher, “Egy megszakadt” 82), set in a Roaring Twenties erroneously associated with happiness at a time when the majority of the population struggled with financial difficulties in an unchallengeably frozen, unjust class system in which morals were undermined by corrupting interests in power and wealth (Országh, “Bevezetés” 24). Jay Gatsby is described as born on the wrong side of this divided system, in the shadows of misery instead of the bright side of money (Szántó 208); like Fitzgerald, he is prone to commit the greatest sin of hunting for easy success and illusory happiness instead of hard-earned satisfaction in serious work (Kretzoi 282). This envy of the empty world of millionaires infiltrating Gatsby's (and Fitzgerald's) worldview is only slightly offset by the novel's tenderly ironic recognition of the insupportable but inevitable moral decline in a meaningless era, of the American dream turned into a nightmare and disillusioned awakening (Országh, Az amerikai 311), a Quixotic struggle with windmills (Kretzoi 280). Critics agreed on the novel's authentic cultural-historical documentary values but were concerned about its failure to represent the real social issues (Országh, Az amerikai 311) that other members of the Lost Generation such as John Dos Passos excelled in problematizing. In Kretzoi's words, Fitzgerald's authorial image could never be canonically embellished into a Saint George fighting the dragon of capital because his aversion to the rich originated from the base envy of the disinherited poor relative and from a stubborn adherence to his artistic freedom and individual dignity (284).The critical shift in the Hungarian reception of Fitzgerald and Gatsby came three decades later with Zsolt Virágos's essay in the seminal collection Huszonöt fontos angol regény (Twenty-five Important Novels in English [1996]), which was designed for Hungarian students and scholars. The essay celebrated the novel's transcendent-mythical-fairy-tale-like connotations rather than its cultural- historical ones by describing it as the tragic and romantic story of a selfmade man on a spiritual quest for the Holy Grail, the love of a woman unworthy of him (182). This redefinition of the American dream in terms of romantic idealism gained canonical status via Enikő Bollobás's Az amerikai irodalom története (A History of American Literature [2005]), the second comprehensive study after Országh's 1967 book. Bollobás's proficiency in gender studies also brought her reading the closest to what is described in The Cambridge Companion as the third stage of the changing public evaluation of Fitzgerald and his work, which prevailed from the 1970s until today. This was largely inspired by the revisionist legend introduced in Nancy Milford's 1970 feminist biography, Zelda: “the American girl living the American dream,” a heroine-victim whose creativity was stifled by the patriarchal oppression maddening her and now revindicated by the women's liberation movement and feminist literary criticism. For Bollobás, the flapper embodying the transitoriness of youth is a tragic emblem of the male Bildungsroman, fusing the carpe diem and the ars moriendi traditions. She is the idealized vessel of male ambition—the token of his power and the emblematic subject and bearer of the romantic American dream of the constitutional right to happiness. The conjoined failure of idealism and materialism constitutes a fairy tale gone awry, in which the hand of the princess cannot be won back. Gatsby is the reincarnation of the first settler of the frontier about to conquer the feminized virgin territory of the United States, but he is also a philosophical figure driven by a desire for the totality of being; as a selfmade man, he also reflects the poststructuralist subject's complex identity construction (Bollobás 382–83). Éva Federmayer follows a similar line of thought on associating with Gatsby “power, politics, and heterosexual male desire seemingly sublimated into timeless aesthetic contemplation in a Kantian metaphysics of ‘purposiveness without a purpose’” so that “[d]esire becomes so universal that it ceases to be desire” (104).The tagline advertising the new 2012 Hungarian translation of Gatsby by István Bart seems to take up this central theme of impossible romantic love with the lines “Azt mondod, hogy a múltat nem lehet újra élni? Miért ne lehetne?” (144). These can be retranslated as “Do you say that the past cannot be relived? Why can't it?”, which sounds a bit more melancholic and tragically foreboding than Gatsby's original, wildly determined cry, “Can't repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” (Gatsby 70).1 The immediate contemporary Hungarian critical reception seems to have been highly responsive to the tagline's call by associating the text's meaning with romance, calling it a story about ecstasy and Ash Wednesday (Takács), about mad love and a dream that is too big to become real (Karafiáth), but not about fake-erotic but truly mysterious saxophone music that you can never fully comprehend and never get bored by (Tandori).The changing meaning of a literary work certainly depends on the social-historical context in which the interpretation takes place, but it is equally influenced by the translation; the latter acts both as a filter and a spotlight for transmitting highlighted original meanings. In Michel Viel's view— summarized in his essay on Gatsby in French—translations are microscopes that shed a new light on the original work of fiction. They enable readers to realize details concealed from direct observation in the source-text and make visible formerly invisible parts of the narrative (29). My aim in the following is to examine the visualization of this invisibility in Hungarian literary translations of Gatsby, focusing on the most prominent textual occurrences of the unsaid and the unspeakable.As the recently deceased translator, literary historian, and poet István Géher puts it, translators face a doubly impossible, absurd challenge. On the one hand, they must create an ideal text and authorial voice that has never actually existed (a Hungarian Gatsby, a Hungarian Fitzgerald). On the other hand, they are also trying to recreate something that already exists (Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) (Mesterségünk 236–37). Because the translator aims to fine tune the original text for another community of readers, Géher and Bart agree that a good way to adapt historically charged, culturally specific expressions, such as slang or colloquialisms, is to make use of the stylistic turns and linguistic registers of the target language's canonized literature that are contemporaneous with the text being translated (Géher, Mesterségünk 234; Bart 16). The problem, however, is that these turns and registers do not have one-to-one equivalents. The style of the Roaring Twenties is a specifically American phenomenon, so slippages of meaning necessarily surface in the attempt to domesticate it in a non-American context.As one example, the simple address “old sport” that Gatsby so often uses has different connotations (and thus allows, in the long run, for different textual interpretations) in the two Hungarian translations. The phrase “öreg bajtárs” (50) in Máthé's 1962 translation,2 meaning “old comrade” or “old brother-in-arms,” evokes a shared military past and a shared experience of virility, patriotism, tragedy, and triumph as the foundation of a bond between the two men. The word “öregfiú” (64) in Bart's 2012 translation, meaning “old chap” (literally “old boy”), is a less democratic, more intimate, and more patronizing term of endearment, suggesting how Gatsby gently forces his friendship on Nick. Neither Hungarian expression bears the connotations of upperclass fraternity that the English term does.Whereas both Hungarian words could have been used in 1920s Hungarian literature and life, “old comrade” sounds archaic today as do many other word choices in the 1962 translation. These include phonetic transcriptions of the English words “löncs” for “lunch” and “nörsz” for “nurse” (123) and the use of words like “daddy” (121) instead of a Hungarian equivalent. The latter did not so much mark the translation's foreignization strategy, defined by Venuti as retaining information from the source text and thereby breaking the conventions of the target language to preserve original meanings (20). Rather, these word choices are discursive indicators of refinement widely used by the Hungarian upper-middle class during the lifetime of translator Elek Máthé, who was born in 1895 and was nearly seventy when he translated Gatsby. The respectful, formal form of addressing someone (önözés) had a similar status in Máthé's time and translation, but its transformation into first name interactions in Bart's modernized text version also affected the meanings of characters' interpersonal relations. The most frequently emphasized point in connection with the 2012 retranslation of the novel was its satisfying the pressing need for a modernized text to replace the outmoded, obsolete, previous translation. One of the most prominent contemporary specialists in Hungarian literary translation, István Géher, has argued that the warranty period of a translation lasts for about fifty years (“Ujjaim”). This is the exact time span between the two Hungarian translations of Gatsby. This brings into focus the dilemma of translation studies. Can the stylishness of a past era be expressed only by means of reference to fashionability standards contemporary with the current readership? And does not the modernization of meanings risk depriving the source text of its historical flavor and authenticity?Of course, we know that translations are always simultaneously interpretations as well, both reinforcing and reflecting the changing canonical status of a text. The most disturbing mistranslation in Máthé's 1962 text might have to do with his over-strenuous effort to communicate to the Hungarian audience Gatsby's disillusion with what Fitzgerald saw as the “meretricious” quality of the American dream. For example, Jay Gatsby's original introduction of Meyer Wolfshiem to Nick—“he's a gambler…. He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919” (Gatsby 47)—was translated by Máthé as “tőzsdespekuláns…. [Ő] robbantotta ki tizenkilencben a nagy tőzsdekrachot” (76), or roughly, “he's a stock-exchange stag responsible for sparking the big stock market crash of 1919.” Máthé probably presumed that Hungarian readers would be more familiar with the serious financial effects of the stock market crash of 1929 than with the American baseball championship a decade earlier in which the Chicago players conspired with gamblers to lose the games. The translator here commits a serious mistake given the fact that the “big stock market crash” took place four years after the publication of Gatsby, and seven after the events of the novel.Perhaps the most inevitable loss of meaning comes with historically charged, culturally specific terms—particularly ones related to fashion, style, and slang—which resist translation and can only be conveyed through some inventive and imaginative thinking: “pompadour” (Gatsby 60) becomes in the 1968 Máthé translation “felfelé fésült frizura” (“upward coiffure” [97]) and “tüskefrizura” (“spiky hair” [123]) in the Bart 2012 translation to suggest trendiness. “Castle Rackrent” (Gatsby 55), an allusion to Maria Edgeworth's novel of an Irish family's decline, is simply “elvarázsolt kastély” (“an enchanted castle” [112]) in the 2012 Bart translation and more inventively “a kóbor szellemek kastélya” (“the castle of vagrant ghosts” [88]) in the 1968 Máthé translation. Fitzgerald's “Adam study” (Gatsby 59) becomes, in the 2012 translation, “egy klasszikus eleganciával berendezett dolgozószoba” (“a study-room furnished with classical elegance” [120]) and “17. század-beli, angol stílusú fogadószoba” (“a seventeenth century English style reception room” [94]) in the 1968 translation; “moving her hands like Frisco” (Gatsby 27) becomes “szólótánc” (“a solo dance” [43]) in the 1968 translation and “kígyózó taglejtésekkel, tánclépésben kiperdül” (“spinning into dance with serpentine moves” [55]) in the 2012 translation. The “gypsies” (Gatsby 27) at Gatsby's parties are referred to with wonderful alliteration as “lidérclángként lebegő leány” (“a girl fluttering as a marsh fire” [43]) in the 1968 translation and as “pillangók” (“butterflies” [a euphemism for prostitutes; 55]) in the 2012 translation; finally, simple phrases like “my girl” (Gatsby 17) have slightly different connotations when translated in 1968 as “nőismerősöm” (“my female acquaintance” [26]) or in 2012 as “a barátnőm” (“my girlfriend” [34]).One of the biggest challenges a literary translator faces is the appropriate adaptation of metaphors from one language into another. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's now-classic Metaphors We Live By (2003) convincingly demonstrates that metaphors, besides shaping the way we communicate, also shape the way we think and act. Moreover, metaphors structure our most basic understanding of our experience of being or existing in culturally specific ways. They not only reflect but also constitute cultural models and prove to be significant cognitive mechanisms of speakers of that language.Zoltán Kövecses's 2000 cross-linguistic analysis on metaphors of emotion further complicates our understanding of metaphors as patterns of thought. He argues that metaphorical language, cultural aspects, and human physiology function in an integrated system; since metaphors of emotion arise from recurring embodied experiences grounded in biological-physiological processes of the human body interacting with the external world, there is also a universal aspect to their particularities. The most prominent example is that throughout various languages the global “master metaphor” of the inherently metaphorical notion of emotion is force.This idea is vividly illustrated by the concluding metaphor of Gatsby where the poetic trope of a romantic fight to pursue one's dream against all odds and circumstances—reminiscent of Tennyson's Ulysses's adventurous efforts “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—is preserved more or less intact in both the Hungarian translation and retranslation. The original image of the relentless internal struggle encapsulated in Fitzgerald's line as “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Gatsby 115) is geographically externalized and expanded—albeit in a somewhat catachrestic manner—onto land and water in Máthé's “Így törjük a csapást, hajtjuk hajónkat előre, szemben az árral, hogy a végén mindig a múltba érkezzünk” (“This is how we force our way onto a path, as we row our boat ahead, always to arrive in the end back in the past” [190]). Similarly, the struggle of progress is emphasized in an intensity that matches the extreme futility of the fight, due to the very elusiveness of dreams and the careless disinterestedness of society, in Bart's “Mi azonban fáradhatatlanul evezünk tovább, szemben az árral, mely szüntelenül visszasodor bennünket a múltba” (“But we keep on rowing tirelessly against the current that sweeps us back ceaselessly into the past” [236]). Inevitably lost in translation, however, are the original's alliteration and the affective charge and corporeal stakes of the forceful effort that takes place through heartbeats by Fitzgerald's use of the verb “beat.”Grasping the universal particularities of metaphors is especially challenging in the case of the translation of literary texts distinguished by poeticity or other forms of linguistic inventiveness that make an author's style unique. The translator must use his “interpretive instinct” to decide whether a metaphor in a text is: (1) a fixed figure of speech, an idiom easily recognized by all speakers of the language of origin, and one that the translator should find a just as automatically decodable equivalent for in the target language, or (2) a unique product of the author's creative imagination meant to provoke surprise by linguistic inventiveness rather than reassuring with the recognition of familiarity—hence, a figure-of-speech the translator can adapt into another language through relying on the universal ground of imagination. In the latter instance, the translator can try to reach an effect similar to that of the original either by (1) inventing metaphors of his own he believes to be more intelligible for the target-language readers, or by (2) mirror-translating the source text in the hope that its invitation to unusual cognitive/emotional/imaginative mechanisms holds the same element of surprise and charm on a transnational level.The poetic nature of Fitzgerald's prose has always been praised by Hungarian critics; however, no in-depth stylistic analyses followed the brief acknowledgments of his narrative's lyricism (Bollobás 383), his free-flowing poetic style (Országh, Az amerikai 312), and the subconscious musicality of his language (Kretzoi 284). Nor has anyone ever questioned the translatability of his figures of speech into Hungarian. Zsolt Virágos even claimed that the language of The Great Gatsby was reminiscent of Mark Twain's easy, idiomatic prose and thus was not a particularly challenging task for translator Elek Máthé (176). In the few examples that follow I wish to show the contrary—that is, I call attention to the pitfalls that the Hungarian translations confront while employing two different kinds of strategies in trying to convey Fitzgerald's metaphors. Both Máthé and Bart attempted the translation technique of domestication, but in my view, while both came up with exciting solutions, neither of them achieved fully satisfactory results.Both Máthé in 1962 and Bart in 2012 played down the poetic power of Fitzgerald's text by neutralizing his original metaphors' sensuous stimulation, vivid emotional investment, and corporeal immediacy; instead they both “refamiliarized” the poetic prose into conventional idioms or translated them literally, thereby depriving them of their lyrical power. A few examples: Fitzgerald's original, highly poetic image of “walking into a deep sleep” (Gatsby 53) is transformed by both Hungarian translators into the much more conventional and literal “mély álomba merültem” (“falling fast asleep” [1968, 86; 2012, 109]); Fitzgerald's impressive image of “a gorgeous scarcely human orchid of a woman” (Gatsby 67) becomes in Bart “egy megdöbbentően orchideaszerű nő” (“an astonishingly orchid-like woman” [137]) whereas in Máthé she is reduced to “feltűnően kicicomázott nő” (“a pompously over-decorated woman” [109]). Fitzgerald's marvelous synesthesia “the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate” (Gatsby 58) is “a kankalin aranysárga áradása” (“a golden flow of primrose” [118]) in Bart and simply “aranysárga árvácskák” (“gold-yellow pansies” [94]) in Máthé; the original metaphor identifying Nick's house as an “eyesore” (Gatsby 5) becomes a “pörsenés” (“blister” [11]) in Bart and the metaphor is totally abandoned in Máthé where it is “dísztelen” (“undecorative” [8]). Fitzgerald's “frosted wedding cake of a ceiling” (Gatsby 7) is made literal in Bart as “az esküvői torták cikornyás cirádáival díszített mennyezet” (“ceiling decorated with the frosted sugar arabesques of wedding cakes” [15]) and in Máthé appears as the even more prosaic “fehér gipszmintákkal borított mennyezet” (“ceiling with a white plaster pattern” [11]); Fitzgerald's description of Daisy's “opening up in a flower-like way” (Gatsby 15) reads in Bart as a “képes egy pillanat alatt kinyílni, mint egy virágszál” (“capacity to open up suddenly like a single flower” [30]), while Máthé abandons the image entirely in his “derűs jókedve megint visszatért” (“a return of her cheerfully good mood” [23]). Fitzgerald's poetically polysemic “roaring noon” (Gatsby 44), charged with multiple sensory (thermal, tactile, auditory) implications, is separated into two distinct components in Bart's “Rekkenő dél” (“sultry noon” [91]), which emphasizes the heat, and Máthé's “a teljes déli forgalom dübörgése” (“the roar of full noon traffic” [74]), which stresses the noise.In Bart's 2012 take on Gatsby, he seems to have overplayed his translatorial role. Instead of trying to render or reconstruct Fitzgerald's original metaphors, he often completely reimagined them, at times in a far-fetched, associative manner, thereby imposing his personal interpretation on Fitzgerald's poetic text. The most troubling revision Bart made was attributing a maternalistic, matrophiliac quality to the emotions between Daisy and Gatsby. Daisy's clandestine, romantic exclamation to Gatsby, “I'd like to just get one of these pink clouds, put you in it and push you around!” (Gatsby 60) is translated with an emphasis on the vehemence of her passions in Máthé's “Elcsípnék egy rózsaszín felhőt, ráültetném magát, és húznám magam után” (“I'd like to catch a pink cloud, make you sit on it, and drag you with me!” [97]), whereas in Bart her statement takes on an oddly matronizing overtone by saying “Szeretnék elcsípni egy ilyen rózsaszín felhőt, belebugyolálnám magát, és föl-alá tologatnám, mint egy kisbabát” (“I'd like to catch one of these pink clouds, wrap you up in it, and cradle you up and down as if you were a baby! [literally, ‘push you up and down’ with a verb clearly evoking moving a baby carriage]” [123–24]). According to Kövecses, in Bart's translation emotions are metaphorized in terms of movements, but instead of being violently carried away by a streetcar named desire—as in a later, equally passionate American love story—we get hit here by cozy, saccharine babble a
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