Fruzsina Kovács

From Canada to Hungary: symbolic capital in the translation flow of Alice Munro’s literary work published in Hungary between 1989 – 2014

In his field theory, Pierre Bourdieu placed the literary field into a larger context, in the fields of economy and power, where the agents of the cultural production, while accumulating symbolic power, take various positions in the field, interact with each other according to the norms of society, but also according to their presuppositions and interests (Bourdieu, 1996). The national literary fields—as Bourdieu claims—strive for autonomy and the production and circulation of cultural goods operate alongside two coexisting principles, according to the rules of the market and according to an inverse logic, according to the economy or better say the anti-economy of ‘pure art’.

In this paper, I am going to analyse the effect of symbolic capital attached to the Hungarian translation of Alice Munro’s oeuvre from the point of view of translation sociology with special regard to the nature of symbolic capital accumulation, its sources and agents, among others the author, the Hungarian translators, the publisher, the critics, with attention to the cultural capital produced by marketing strategies and the media, the effect of the visual representations, and finally I am going to discuss the value of prizes, awards and cultural events in the contemporary publishing industry in order to trace any translation repercussions in the Hungarian literary field.