The epithets ornans in Sándor Petőfi’s mock epic poem A helység kalapácsa [‘The Hammer of the Village’] and in its translations

Abstract

The epithets ornans in Sándor Petőfi’s mock epic poem A helység kalapácsa [‘The Hammer of the Village’] and in its translations

Observing literary names and fictional name translations is essential in applied onomastics, contrastive stylistics and literary comparatistics. This paper examines the significance and characteristic function of the proper names and epitheta ornantia in the mock epic poem entitled A helység kalapácsa [‘The Hammer of the Village’], both in the source language text and in the Russian and English translations of the poem. The Petőfi text contains a multitude of epitheta ornantia, either in conjunction with proper names in fixed noun constructions or dispersed throughout the text. The latter adjectives serve as substitutes for proper names. The Russian and English versions of the proper names with epitheta ornantia are mainly equivalent to the source language versions. The proper names are primarily unaltered. In Russian, they are either transliterated or translated in meaning. The epitheta ornantia are usually word-by-word translations, sometimes with additions or omissions.