René Maran in Hungary

Comments on the New Edition of Batuala

Abstract

René Maran’s famous novel (Batouala, 1921, Goncourt Prise), in which almost fifty years before Chinua Achebe’s key novel (Things Fall Apart, 1958) we can see the white colonialists through the native blacks’ eyes, was discovered in 1922 by Dezső Kosztolányi, excellent Hungarian poet and novelist, actually the chairman of the Hungarian Pen Club. He translated the Maran opus into Hungarian immediately, and it was published the same year by a Budapest publishing house. Even, this work at a later stage left certain traces in the Hungarian literature and culture history. The present study aims to collect and review the available philological data of these literary phenomena.