Experiences of strangeness in the prose of Éva Berniczky

Abstract

This paper presents some of the characteristic features of Éva Berniczky’s prose. Berniczky is a Hungarian writer living in Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia, who regularly publishes in journals that define the Hungarian literary canon. Yet her presence in literary history compilations is not obvious: neither the Hungarian, nor the Transcarpathian regional literary canon has accepted her works lightly. In this paper, the experiences of strangeness in her short stories and in her one novel to this day, Méhe nélkül a bába (The Midwife Without a Bee), are discussed in terms of two problematic issues. In the first part, the interplay of cultural differences is brought to the fore, namely because, in reading the collected short stories in Szerencsegyökér (The Root of Fortune aka Mandragora), we have noticed that Berniczky’s writing is fundamentally characterised by the linguistic representation of multilingual and multicultural communities. We start from the premise that a significant part of the writer’s oeuvre to date is based on the interplay of cultural differences, introducing the reader to a world that in literary theory is best described in terms of the familiar or the familiar stranger. In the case of the novel, the problem of the found text, a postmodern topos, comes to the fore: the identity of the female narrator-translator is altered in the process of interpreting the diary of a foreign woman which appears in the novel. The act of translation reflects on the translator’s own life, experiences and perception of the world. This is why the paper emphasises that the novel Méhe nélkül a bába (The Midwife Without a Bee) represents, with particular linguistic sensitivity, how translation from one culture or language to another can become a process that defines and shapes (female) identity in a multilingual and multicultural region. The intimate relationship between the translator-narrator and the found text also emphasises that a more «credible, more truthful» translation is not enough to accurately reproduce the source text, something else, something more is needed.