OTTÓ ORBÁN (1936 - 2002)
"If one has a past like mine, it is easy to be a poet ...": Ottó Orbán, after long and excruciating years of illness, died as this issue was being prepared for press. He acknowledged an extraordinary range of influences on his poetry (from English alone, his translations included Chaucer, John Donne and Ginsberg). He called these influences his unique blend of style.
We publish in this issue his last sequence of poems, an interview and tributes to him from two of the American and English poets who have translated him.

The Witching Time
Poems by Ottó Orbán
In the month of his death, May 2002, Orbán published "The Witching Time", a sequence of fifteen poems, in the journal Holmi. George Szirtes translated most of this sequence.

An "Interview"
by Ottó Orbán
As a visiting professor in Minnesota, Ottó Orbán was interviewed for the university's journal; a new version was prepared by Orbán and by the American poet Jascha Kessler, published as a preface to Our Bearings at Sea, a volume of his translations from Orbán's poetry. The interview lays bare the family and social beackground which led to his writing: "My poems, whether they derive from my childhood or not, tell a Hungarian story ..."

Within, Beyond and Under: Remembering Ottó Orbán
by George Szirtes
"Beyond the friendship there is the point at which his poems opened their doors for me ... Through the doors I saw a version of swaggering comedy that led by a series of twists and jolts into tragic vision ..." The Hungarian born English poet reflects on his friend Otto Orbán as a man and poet.

Otto
by Bruce Berlind
"God is chasing me [with] a creative horde of his angels, I am writing like crazy ..." Ottó Orbán wrote to his friend and translator Bruce Berlind at a time when the virulent form of Parkinson's Disease had incapicitated him for a normal life. The American poet pays tribute to "The Everlasting Spirit Distillery", the joint enterprise of poetry.

The Smell of Prison, Part Two
by Adám Bodor
"At long last I had the chance to see it from the inside ..." comments the novelist and short story writer on his arrival in the Gherla prison in 1953. Sentenced to five years for a political crime, the teenage Bodor found himself incarcerated in Transylvania's most notorious prison along with a wide selection of other "politicals".
This is the second of three extracts from the remarkable autobiography recently published (in the form of an interview with the poet Zsófia Balla, a fellow Transylvanian). Here Bodor describes the conditions (ten to a cell, four bunks), the kapos (the most vicious being a former Iron Guard leader), the "Association of Conscientiously Communist Prisoners" and their "reeducation" programme for their fellow prisoners, unexpected kindness from other guards and his early release from prison, this latter "a true Eastern European tale".

Sándor Márai and His World
by Agota Steinert
Born into an established family of the old Hungarian order in 1900 in the town of Kassa, now Kosice in Slovakia, Márai is a writer who has most recently received critical accolade in Germany, Britain, Italy and the United States as his books became available in translation. Although he spent most of his life abroad, he refused to write in any language other than Hungarian, nor would he permit his books (pre-war successes in Hungary) to be republished until Hungarian soil was free of the last Soviet soldier. He is considered a master stylist of the Hungarian language.
As an editor, Ágota Steinert launched the first post-war edition in Hungary of Sándor Márai's works. She writes on the permanent influence of his early years in Kassa, his devotion to the service middle-class and the values under which he was brought up, linking these to an oeuvre which encompassed fifty works over a long life.

A Short Márai Reader
A short selection from Herbal, a collection of aphorisms and reflections; from the multi-volume Diary which spans almost fifty years, and Confessions of a Bourgeois, the great semi-autobiographical memoir which unmatchably conjures up life in the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and an extract from The Work of the Garrens.

Kossuth: Vain Hopes of a Much Celebrated Exile
by István Deák
The Professor of History at Columbia Univerity briefly weighs the importance of Kossuth's celebrated journey to the United States of America, conveyed by a frigate of the U.S Nany specifically despatched to bring this "defender of Liberty" to the land of the free.

"...to fix the attention of the whole world upon Hungary..."
by Tibor Frank
Professor of Histrory at ELTE, Budapest, Frank Tibor traces Kossuth's 18 months in America. He recounts the triumphal receptions, his celebrated oratory, the ambiguities of the political response to his pleas for immediate intervention in the cause of liberty, the attempt to raise substantial amounts of money for the Hungarian cause through a bond issue. All of this took place amid the political stirrings that led to the American Civil War; Professor Frank's article includes some gems of research and is accompaniedby daguerrotypes and even a fervently bad poem by Walter Savage Landor

Institutional Barriers to Growth
by András Nagy
"There was a widely held belief that adopting the institutions of developed market economies would be a relatively simple process and that this would solve the problems of developed technological backwardness and economic inefficiency within a short time."
András Nagy here describes how Hungary, along with other post-communist countries, have found this adaptation far more difficult than had been thought. The factors he describes include the heritage of the past, the evolution of self-interest within the pre-1989 economic order (with concommitant super-legal processes and corruption), alienation from the state, the spread of the black economy, corruption and state capture, and clientelism. A longer version of this article is available on www.iiasa.ac.at /Publications/.

Contemporary Art and the Market
by Katalin Aknai and Anikó Erdősi
Accompanied by twelve pages of colour plates, these two specialists in 20th century and contemporary art trace the changes that have taken place in the art scene since the 1980s. They give a broad outline of the history of art collecting and trading through the century, the vicissitudes of artists trying to place their works abroad in the seventies, the development of private galleries in the 80s and afterwards, and describe two notable arrivals on the scene, A.P.A. and MEO, which indicate that the Hungarian scene is drawing closer to the Western. The authors feel, however, that the isolation has not ended yet.

Saul and Paul
by Miklós Györffy
Péter Eszterházy: Javított kiadás (Revised Edition). Budapest Magvetö, 2002, 281 pp.
Eszterházy's Harmonia caelestis was the critical and popular success of last year's publishing season. (See HQ No. 159 for a review.) That novel involved a family history, a central figure of which was modelled on the author's own father. Just after the novel was completed, the novelist legally acquired the secret police dossiers relating to his family. They reveal that his father had for many years been an agent for the secret police. This review provides more detail and reflects on this ultimate post-modern twist to the original work.

Master Works, Master Releasings
by Paul Griffiths
The music of György Kurtág was celebrated through a major event in London in the April of this year.

A New National
by Tamás Koltai
Our regular theatre reviewer describes the background to the building of a new National Theatre, opened this March, detailing the history and political ramifications of the whole project, along with the professional reservations on it.