A lehetségestől a valóságosig. Tanulmányok a német irodalom, kultúra és a műfordítás köréből

The volume brings together thirty writings composed over the course of thirty years and is divided into three parts. The first two sections, “Literature - Culture” and “Literary translation,” contain scholarly studies. “Literature - Culture” begins with an examination of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s relatively early novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) and continues with discussions of German Romanticism and Friedrich Nietzsche, who had a considerable influence on the writings of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, among others, whose oeuvres are the focus of some of the subsequent studies. The section concludes with a summary study of the works of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The second section deals with complex issues of literary translation, beginning with a general introductory essay on Martin Luther’s translations of the Bible, followed by a discussion of the difficulties of translating Nietzsche into Hungarian and concluding with a discussion of German translations of Mihály Babits’ poem “Esti kérdés” (“Evening Question”). The third section, “Smaller, Essayistic Studies” (afterwords, critical reviews), contains writings that are of interest to wider readerships, for instance some of the afterwords to individual volumes of the Hungarian Hermann Hesse biographical series.