Lóránt Czigány
The Passionate Outsider: Professor George Cushing
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By his appointment to a full lecturership in Hungarian in 1953, Dr Cushing became the first full-fledged British-born teacher of Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, indeed, at any other establishment of higher education in the British Isles. [...]
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Professor Cushing spent his life uneventfully, as befits a scholar, commuting peacefully to the School from his Kent home which was first in Sevenoaks, later in Chislehurst. He never left the School, apart from a brief sabbatical in 1983. From the mid-1960s he was able to reestablish his connections with his colleagues in Hungary. He became a Recognized Teacher of the University in 1965, reader in 1967, and was finally promoted to a professorship in 1978, at the age of 55. For his inaugural lecture, delivered on December 11th, 1979, he chose to speak about the 20th-century Hungarian novelist, Zsigmond Móricz. For the academic year 1979-1980 he accepted the duties of Acting Director of the School, and after his retirement in 1986 he was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus. By this time he was also an honorary member of the International Association of Hungarian Studies. He died in hospital after a long and frustrating illness at the age of 73, on April 12th, 1996, at Sydenham, near London.
Cushing's main contribution to the cause of Hungarian literature abroad is un- doubtedly his work as a translator. This is the field where his attention to minuscule detail paid real dividends. He worked slowly and laboriously, sparing no efforts to find the best equivalent of obscure dialect words which are an enigma to most native speakers, to follow up riddles inherent in colloquial phrases, which are the insider's pleasure and the outsider's curse. As Cushing always followed the original Hungarian text closely, he proved to be a reliable translator, an author's dream come true. He never experimented with the translation of modern poetry, let alone avant-garde texts which prompt a translator's imagination to run riot.
After the first visit of the poet Gyula Illyés to England in 1963, Cushing embarked on a programme of translations with Illyés's Puszták népe (1936), a work, which, in the words of its translator, "can perhaps be best described as a lyric sociography", People of the Puszta (1967), followed by a biography of Petõfi, substantially enlarged by Illyés for a new edition (Petõfi, 1973). Cushing was convinced that the prose-works (his Úti levelek in particular) of this 19th century Hungarian poet had been neglected by native critics, and proved his point by a selection of Petõfi's prose in a contribution to Rebel or Revolutionary? (ed. by Béla Köpeczi, 1974). In The case of Endre Ady, who was perhaps solely responsible for the renewal of Hungarian poetry at the beginning of this century, critics have never disputed the qualities of his journalism. Cushing's translation of a selection by Erzsébet Vezér proved again that this prose holds its own in English (The Explosive Country, 1977).
Cushing's other translations include a meticulous retranslation of Ferenc Molnár's Játék a Kastélyban (1926), usually staged in English speaking countries in P.G. Woodehouse's version, The Play's the Thing, on which Tom Stoppard was able to base his adaptation, Rough Crossing (1984), thereby providing Molnár with a new lease of life.
Cushing's most useful work as a translator is to be found in Old Hungarian Reader (ed. Tibor Klaniczay, 1985) in which his unique qualifications in linguistics came in very handy. Most of the materials presented therein were in his translation, including texts from the Latin, which Cushing was singularly well-equipped to handle. After this excursion into old Hungarian literature, Cushing returned to modern authors with a selection of short stories by Zsigmond Móricz, Seven Pennies (1988) and Géza Gárdonyi's Egri csillagok (1901), translated as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (1991), a tale of the 1552 siege of Eger by the Turks, in which his knowledge of Turkish and things Turkish acquired while in the Near East during the Second World War provided him with extra insight. He managed to complete the translation of two more novels before his death. Rokonok (Relatives, 1932) by Móricz and Színek és évek (Colours and Years, 1912) by Margit Kaffka, perhaps the most outstanding Hungarian woman novelist.
Cushing's output as a translator compares favourably to the most prolific English translator of Hungarian literature, R. Nisbet Bain (1854-1909) of the British Museum Library, who produced ten volumes of Jókai alone and one volume each of Károly Kisfaludy and Kálmán Mikszáth. The quality of Cushing's translation surpasses that of Bain who depended upon the German text and later abridged his version according to his own or the publisher's, Messrs. Jarrold's, caprice.
Cushing was an old-fashioned scholar in the best possible sense of the term, a rara avis in a world where fashionable theories, hastily formed and based on ill-conceived ideas or superficially digested data, are the order of the day. What he may have lacked in boldness of vision was amply made up for by his penetrating insight and relentless pursuit of philological ambiguities. The Times editorial obituary (April 17, 1996) claimed him as one of the last surviving specimens of a dying breed, the eccentric English bachelor professor, "who might be found in the pages of some Victorian or Edwardian novel". This may be so, if a lifelong passion for one of the lesser known literatures of Europe is regarded as an eccentricity. Cushing's articles and studies were, however, far from eccentric, he tackled controversial issues with an original approach, or described subjects which needed the innocent eye of an outsider.
To mention just a few examples, his treatment of the Hungarian Enlightenment (The Birth of National Literature in Hungary, 1960), Problems of Hungarian Literary Criticism, 1962, Books and Readers in 18th-Century Hungary, 1969, or a refreshingly balanced view of the critical activity of József Bajza (1958), and The Irreverence of Petõfi (1974) are all marked by originality of approach. His contribution to EOS: An Inquiry into the Theme of Lovers' Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry (ed. By A. T. Hatto, 1965) is a real gem, unearthing pieces of unnoticed alba-songs in Hungarian folk poetry; there is no specific term for this type of verse in Hungarian. Many of his articles concern British-Hungarian cultural contacts (e.g. The Cultural Scene in Hungary - Yesterday, 1984). One of his major projects was to write on 18th century Hungarian memoir-writers, of which he only managed to publish a few excerpts.
His interest in linguistics is responsible for the adaptation of Péter Hajdú's handbook on Finno-Ugrian Languages and Peoples (1975), an essential guide in English to Finno-Ugrian studies, and at least one article on morphological oddities (e.g. ehetnékem van/volt = I have/had a desire to eat) elegantly explained. (The Desiderative in Hungarian, 1963). He produced the first analysis of the earliest Hungarian grammars for English lay readers (those of Zsigmond Wékey, 1852, and of János Csink, 1853) in The Two Earliest Hungarian Grammars for English Students, 1977. His growing interest in Finno-Ugrian folklore is responsible for splendid pieces on the cult of the bear in Ob-Ugrian folklore (1977) and on the traditions of heroic poetry of the Ob-Ugrian people (1980).
He was a master of writing concisely for encyclopaedias: anybody who has had to produce a clear, judiciously balanced portrait of a major writer in about ten lines can appreciate the enormous difficulty of this genre.
Cushing was a modest man and a very private person, somewhat reticent, occasionally verging on shyness, who carried his learning lightly and seemed to have all the time in the world for a good discussion with students and colleagues alike. His lively blue eyes contained a glimmer of impish humour, always on the lookout to snap playfully at unsuspecting customers. With his closely cropped, thinning hair and gold-rimmed spectacles he bore a certain resemblance to his one-time master, János Horváth (of which he was secretly proud). A somewhat larger than life, fictionalized portrait of Cushing was drawn by Miklós Gyárfás in a series of short stories, Picking tanár úr Budapesten (Professor Picking in Budapest, 1957), applying an equal amount of gentle mockery and genuine fondness to this sprightly little man who had decided to devote his whole life, for better or worse, to champion the unrewarding cause of Hungarian literature.
Lóránt Czigány
is the Hungarian-born author of The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, 1984. He lives in London.
