To Be a Gypsy and a Poet
Károly Bari

In this fine essay the forty-five year old poet and painter explains what it means to live with the double predicament of being a Gypsy and a poet. He is one of those Hungarian Gypsies who, by a combination of outstanding talent, determination, and luck, have overcome the handicap of belonging to a depressed and marginalized ethnic minority (6 per cent of the country's population), to achieve recognition as acclaimed creative artists. He examines the preserving power of traditions and their use for the poet today. Tradition as communal heritage can be a source of inspiration, an aid to the imagination. The Gypsy poet, however, represents a tradition that is alien for the majority, for it is rooted in a distant culture. There is hostility toward the Gypsies, combined with ignorance and prejudice, that have to be overcome. To be a Gypsy and a poet is a tall order, he concludes. Two directions offer themselves to the poet who is the child of a scorned people: one aims for the heights, the other descends to the depths. "The more profound his knowledge is of life's lower end, the higher his poetry will reach."

(It should be noted that recently a volume of Károly Bari's poems, Winter Diary, has been published in English translation by Mercury House in San Francisco. The translations are by Dezső Benedek, Endre Farkas and Laura Schiff. This bibliophile volume, a collectors' item printed in a limited edition of 500 copies, is illustrated with colour reproductions of paintings by Károly Bari. The pictures are scenes from Gypsy folk tales rendered in a unique style that corresponds to the surrealism of the tales.)

My Anguish Set Me on My Way

Poem by Károly Bari

(Translated by the American poet Daniel Hoffman)

The Economic State of the Nation
Györgyi Kocsis--Anikó Szántó

The drastic austerity programme, known as "the Bokros package" after the finance minister who designed and introduced it in March 1995, has paid off; it stabilized the economy, and now a modest, 2-3 per cent growth is being predicted for 1997 by both the government and most analysts, something also the Hungarian public will be able to feel the effect of. The Bokros programme, however, was based on means that cannot be permanently applied, namely customs surcharges on imports, income from privatization, and radical cuts in budgetary spending.

Customs surcharges are to be lifted completely by mid-year, privatization income is bound to decrease significantly as the process nears completion, and budget austerity, while important for the equilibrium, cannot be made permanent if investments are to increase and growth is expected. Exports,, the driving force in the economy, is in a particular position, the authors explain. The Hungarian economy, they maintain, is struggling in the Bermuda Triangle of equilibrium, inflation and growth. The article, also featuring two tables of interesting macro-economic indicators, concludes on a warily optimistic note: it can be hoped that stop-go cycles in the foreign trade balance, characteristic of the Hungarian economy, will be less indicative in the future and will eventually come to an end.

How to Be a Magyar
Nicholas T. Parsons

The writer, an English cultural historian specializing in Central Europe, author of The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians (1994), makes use of a great deal of historical, cultural and socio-logical fact, as well as personal experience and an intimate knowledge of Hungary and its people, to present a witty outsider's portrait of this country and its inhabitants. Avoiding the slippery soil of nation-characterology and the platitudes travel journalists, guidebooks and tourist brochures depend so much on, he discovers and reveals the threads of permanence that are woven into the fabric of the past and the present of this nation. The string of major disasters that studded the past 1100 years is more than enough to explain the Hungarians' eternal pessimism, as well as their feeling of being victims, underdogs and always misunderstood. Parsons examines and deconstructs the curious Hungarian custom of the reburial, an act of post mortem administration of justice to those the nation was not allowed to bid farewell to in proper fashion at the time of their death. Family life and the place of women in Hungarian culture and society are also subjects where Parsons identifies attitudes, customs and traditions that he sees as Hungarian. The delightful essay ends with a humorous examination of that complex phenomenon: Hungarian identity.

Café Budapest

The Hungarian capital once boasted four hundred coffe houses; some sources even say there were six hundred around the turn of the last century, a huge number for a city that was still relatively small, with less than a million inhabitants. A section of The Hungarian Quarterly's present issue is devoted to that peculiarly Central European and Austro-Hungarian institution, the coffe house.

Café Budapest
Lajos Nagy

The novelist and short story writer Lajos Nagy himself lived the typical life of the Budapest intellectual between the wars, spending most of his time in coffee houses, writing his stories, meeting his friends, discussing life and politics.

So did many of his contemporaries, like Ferenc Molnár the play-wright, Gyula Krúdy the novelist, Frigyes Karinthy the humourist, and many others, poets, painters, actors, musicians, et al. Nagy was eminently suited to write the definitive novel about a way of life that is now a thing of the past. Café Budapest, published in 1936, is a sharply observed, brilliantly ironic portrait of the types that gathered in the Budapest coffee house and ate and drank, chatted, gossipped, courted, discussed, wrote and read there, practically spending their waking life in that home from home. The story is about a bunch of enthusiastic young literati, full of grand ideas, who want to start a paper. The main problem is, of course, money, and who should be chief editor. At the beginning it is an ultra-left, Trotskyite paper they are about to start, under the gentle supervision of a police detective pretending to read a newspaper at the next table. By the end, after many meetings and discussions, they manage to obtain some support but what they are about to start is a right-wing journal --no wonder, considering the period. The excerpts from the novel show Nagy at his ironic best.

The Importance of Taking Coffee
Wilhelm Droste

The author of this essay on the Austro-Hungarian coffee house, its place in society, its function and the philosophy behind it, teaches German at Eötvös University in Budapest. He presents the coffee house as a relic of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, then goes on to provide a brief summary of its origins, the various foreign influences that combined to produce its peculiarly Central European character. The history of the coffee house is part of the history of culture, as a great part of culture itself was actually born and nurtured in the coffee house . We are given a description of the various sorts of coffee that can be ordered in a Vienna coffe house, and the customs that are still de rigeur in these venerable institutions that were, alas, removed from the Budapest cityscape as "strongholds of the bourgeois way of life" during the decades of Socialism.

Corrective Coffee

is an interview with the daughter of the man who before the war owned and ran the Café Japan, a famous Budapest coffee house, which was a meeting place for a certain group of writers and painters and is the equally distinguished Writers' Bookshop today. She herself used to work there and knew most of the regulars among the guests. Her from-behind-the-counter description of the guests, the waiters, the kitchen staff, the food and drinks available there, the way they were prepared, ordered, served and consumed, provides fascinating reading.

The issue is illustrated with a number of period photographs giving glimpses of coffee house life as it once was.