This is the sixty-first and last issue edited by Miklós Vajda, who came to the then New Hungarian Quarterly as literary editor in 1964. During the years leading up to 1989 the "back of the book" under his control managed to reflect the continuing vigour of a society and literature which were, to say the least, skeptical of "existing socialism". He became editor in 1990 and reverted the journal to its pre-war title of The Hungarian Quarterly. In all this time Miklós Vajda has played a pre-eminent role in the mediation of Hungarian literature (and in particular its rich twentieth century poetry) through British and American poets and himself has been a major translator of contemporary American and British drama.
The editorship now passes to Zsófia Zachár, who joined the staff in 1983 and has been Deputy Editor since 1989. Miklós Vajda will become Editor Emeritus and continue editing the literary side of the journal.
ATTILA JÓZSEF (1905-1937)
Almost half of this issue is given over to Attila József, Hungary's major poet of the first half of the twentieth century, whose centenary falls this year.
We offer here in this section his poetry, an account of his life and work, two short autobiographical prose pieces, a memorial poem (written five years after his suicide) by his friend Gyula Illyés, another memorial written at the time by the novelist Sándor Márai, a notorious incident in his life written up by Dezso Kosztolányi and Tibor Déry, in the form of a short story and a memoir respectively, an attempt to place him in the twentieth century canon by the American poet Frederick Turner and, finally, an essay and two poems by the young poet Anna T. Szabó, indicating József's abiding influence on new generations of writers.
We begin, naturally, with the poetry.
Poems, translated by Daniel Hoffman, George Szirtes and David Hill
New translations of seven poems by three poets, English, American and Anglo-Hungarian, who have concerned themselves with the translation of modern Hungarian poetry. "Night on City's Edge" (Külvárosi éj) is translated by the David Hill, "You Made Me Be a Child Again" (Gyermekké tettél) and "Reckoning" (Számvetés) by Daniel Hoffman and "So Finally Now I Have my Home" (Ime, hát megleltem házamat) by George Szirtes.
Finally Now I Have My Home
by Anna Valachi
Anna Valachi has published extensively on Attila József, in particular on how he saw the interaction between psychotherapy and his own writing. Here she provides a short but detailed account that links his life and work.
The last of three surviving children abandoned by their father, he and one of his sisters were placed into care by their mother with a peasant family who treated them as free labour and informed him that there was no such name as Attila; he was reunited with his mother and other sister at the age of seven but was left with a sense of rejection and abandonment for the rest of his life. His mother had to take in laundry and clean for other households to keep the family together and died when he was fourteen; he managed to acquire an education, publishing his first book of poetry when still a schoolboy, went to university with the help of his lawyer brother-in-law and guardian. He suffered his first nervous breakdown in 1929, after the parents of the girl he first loved prevented them from marrying. Always on the outside, abrasive and touchy in personality, the story of his life is one of destitution and a series of rejections (frequently self-imposed), whether by women (including his psychotherapist, inspiring "You Made Me Be a Child Again"), fellow-writers and even the illegal Communist Party (which was later to treat his expulsion as a taboo subject). There was a general recognition by his peers that he was a writer of genius, which they instantly expressed after his death by suicide.
The article is complemented by photographs.
Suicide? Curriculum vitae. Two prose pieces
by Attila József
Two short autobiographical pieces, one describing an attention-getting attempt at "suicide" at the age of nine ("It did not even bother me that in the end the old women did not talk about me but were moaning about how expensive potatoes were.") and the second an autobiographical sketch written when seeking a job in the year he died ("I consider myself to be an honest person; I think I am quick on the uptake and an assiduous worker.")
Five Years Later
by Gyula Illyés
Attila József's remains were ceremoniously reburied five years after his death in an honorary gravesite in Budapest's principal cemetery. His friend and fellow poet Gyula Illyés wrote this tribute at the time. (In Daniel Hoffman's translation.)
The Poet's Grave
by Sándor Márai
The reburial also drew this memorial from a novelist and near contemporary whose own place in the Hungarian canon has been triumphantly reaffirmed in recent years.
Twenty Questions (Short Story)
by Dezsö Kosztolányi
A famous incident in the poet's life has been much referred to: a more than usually reticent József had the information that his companion had attempted suicide wrangled out of him by others in the company through the parlour game of Twenty Questions. Among those who wrote it up was the poet and novelist Dezsö Kosztolányi, who made it the subject of this, one of his semi-autobiographical short stories.
No Judgment (Excerpt from a memoir)
by Tibor Déry
A Communist who went into exile after the collapse of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, later imprisoned for his role in the 1956 Revolution (and amnestied after world-wide protests from the likes of André Gide, Arthur Koestler and T.S.Eliot), this leading novelist published his memoirs in 1969, "conjuring up" several of his deceased acquaintances to his garden and engaging them in conversation. Here he too refers to the Twenty Questions incident.
Attila József Among his Peers. A Personal Assessment
by Frederick Turner
"Nobody has taken us so deeply into the waking nightmare - and strange delights! - of the suffering child in all of us. Moreover he brings a sensibility sharpened by those experiences at the edge of it all to bear on the public terrors of his time: the monster ideologies of left and right, the inhuman sufferings attendant upon the advent of industrial economics, the moral and historical threat to all meaning posed by material determinism, the challenge of the newly discovered labyrinth of human psychology ... And withal he gives us a beautiful and hopeful view of a future from which he himself is barred."
Himself the co-translator (with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath) of a volume of Attila József poems (The Iron-blue Vault, Bloodaxe, 1999), the American poet makes an attempt ("doomed to failure") to compare Attila József with certain poets of other twentieth century traditions: Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, Borges, Celan and Pasternak. An indication of the astonishing range of József's poetry is that it bears on various points of theirs, thereby validating his claim to be treated as one of their peers.
Poetry in the Night
by Anna T. Szabó
"But my life changed there and then as we stood the benches up again. I no longer saw night and poetry through the eyes of romance or revolution ... Attila József taught me gravity once and for all: the sheer beauty of it."
An outstanding poet of the younger generation, the Transylvanian-born Anna T. Szabó describes her first encounter with the poetry of József at the age of thirteen when one of her classmates read "Night on City's Edge" out for her as they tidied up their classroom after lessons were finished.
Two of her poems here are indicative of the influence József continues to exert. (In George Szirtes's translation.)
City in a Suitcase
by Endre Lábass
An excerpt from the forthcoming Moonfaced Traveller, by an author best known for his photographing of Budapest over many years. Illustrated with the author's photographs of the city he carries in his suitcase.
The Lisbon Enigma
by János Gács
The recent resounding rejection of the new constitution of the European Union by voters in France and Holland, both founding members of the Union, underlines the public's sense that their leaders are taking them too far and too fast into the unknown.
The author, an economist who has published widely on the economics of transition and EU integration and has been professionally engaged with EU issues for many years, here gives an account of a spectacular misjudgment on the part of the EU's heads of state and government, the so-called Lisbon Process.
"... in essence it expresses the belief that progress cannot be made in many EU areas without co-ordinated leadership at the EU level. The unspoken corollary of this is that these questions should be brought within the scope of EU competence," is how János Gács describes the implications of the decision taken in 2000 to launch a programme that would see the Union outstripping America in competitiveness within ten years, setting numerical goals in areas such as employment, research and development, education, social protection and the environment. Unlike other ambitious and complicated projects undertaken by the Union, the Lisbon Process was not preceded by lengthy preparations and professional discussion. Again unlike other major moves (enlargement, introduction of the euro, for example) there is no awareness of it among the public nor has it been subjected to academic or media scrutiny, all this reminding the author of central planning as practiced by the COMECON countries before 1989.
A Melancholy Colourist: Munkácsy in the World
by Ilona Sármány-Parsons
"Apart from Liszt, Munkácsy was the only Hungarian who "made it" internationally in his own lifetime and who became accepted as a great artist, a celebrity, a cult figure of and for the nation."
A major retrospective of the works of Mihály Munkácsy has been running in the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, this spring and summer, an exhibition which took years to curate, given that a third of his work has never been exhibited before and is in private hands, most of it abroad. The Vienna-based art historian sees it as the opportunity to reconsider Munkácsy's role within Hungarian painting and to ponder the implications of this revaluation for our broader perception of Hungarian art.
She sets out the parameters of the twentieth century discourse of art history as regards the international canon and in particular the Hungarian canon, with its emphasis on the autonomy of visual representation from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, precisely when Munkácsy was at the height of his career. She examines the relationship between Munkácsy and his dealer, Charles Sedelmeyer, outlining the mechanisms of the art market of the time. The great merit of the exhibition's curating and catalogue is that, for the first time, the social and market contexts in which the artist was received in his own days are highlighted, thus rescuing "a great painter from ideological prejudice, from ahistorical misconceptions - and, above all, from unjustified neglect."
Reading Attila József, Antal Szerb and Sándor Márai Abroad
by Dóra Sindelyes
This is a summary account of the publication abroad and critical response to three significant twentieth-century writers. The author reports on how the response can be affected, as in the case of József in German, by deficiences of translation or by difficulties of transposition from one culture to another, as in the case of the reception in Romance-language countries to Szerb, Since his death in America in 1989 (after some fifty years of exile) Márai has enjoyed enormous posthumous success, initially at home and since 2002 abroad too; in his case, foreign reputationhas largely been based on the novel Embers, first published sixty years ago and not considered in Hungary as his strongest work.
The article is complemented by side-pieces on recent presentations of Hungarian writing abroad (including those in which The Hungarian Quarterly was involved and the Moscow Non/Fiction Book Fair, dealt with elsewhere in this issue), Hungarian Websites for Literature in Translation and on the Hungarian Book Foundation.
Moscow, Moscow...
by Zoltán András Bán
The arts editor of the weekly journal Magyar Narancs provides a wry personal account of Hungary's highly successful presence at the Moscow Book Fair of this year and his adventures in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic, whose population is linguistically related to the Magyars but whose greater claim to fame is that it is the land of the Kalashnikov.
Bookless in Russia
by Ádám Bodor
The author of Sinistra District provides an even wryer account of his experience of the Moscow Book Fair, where he found he was dealing with, in effect, a pirated edition of his own book, was escorted to readings where there was no copy provided and found himself abandoned on mid-podium by both his moderator and interlocutor.
A Martyr of Science
Ervin Bauer (1890-1938)
by Miklós Müller
"His life was that of a typical Hungarian intellectual of the beginning of the twentieth century, framed by the First World War, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, followed by a search for a new home where he could live quietly and fulfill his scientific dreams." Still honoured in his native Hungary and in the Soviet Union's successor states, the biologist is remembered through "Bauer's principle" of the permanent inequilibrium of living matter.
Born into an intellectual family (his elder brother was Béla Balázs, Bartók's librettist and film theoretician, the subject of another article in this issue), he moved in literary circles (the young Georg Lukács was one of his friends) and married the well-known writer Margit Kafka, who died in 1918 of the Spanish flu. He left the country after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic with his new wife, the mathematician Stefánia Szilárd, publishing the first version of his major work on biology in Germany before eventually settling in the Soviet Union in 1925, where he was appointed to important academic posts and regarded as a major authority by his fellow scientists. Caught up in the purge waged against biologists, he and his wife were arrested by the KGB in August 1937 and executed in early 1938.
Professor Müller of the Rockefeller University in New York outlines the work and influence of a scientist whose dream of theoretical biology was similar to Einstein's goal in physics: to create a single equation that encompasses the "Essence of Nature".
Bluebeard's Castle
The Birth of Cinema from the Spirit of Opera
by Nicholas Vázsonyi
Béla Balázs is best known as one of the most influential of film theoreticians of the last century. Less known is the fact that he wrote the libretto of Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle as well as the scenario for his ballet The Wooden Prince. The one-act opera begins, before the curtain rises, with a speech from a Prologue - a speech frequently omitted from productions and recordings.
Professor Vázsonyi of the University of South Carolina offers the complete text of the Prologue with a literal translation and a close reading, pointing out the ambiguities in the original Hungarian which have been lost in the standard German and English translations. With the music sounding at the point where the Prologue's "eyelash-curtain" is up, it pulls "the listener in, like a camera slowly zooming in for a close-up. Text and music combined thus suggestively draw our gaze through the surface of the Prologue's eye where the unfolding drama of light and sound appears on the screen of his retina... We see only what is mediated through his eye: the lens of the camera."
Linking the libretto with Balázs's later work in theatre and cinema, Nicholas Vázsonyi goes on to analyze the libretto as a whole and provides us with a rich and intriguing reading of a great opus by Bartók.
Apocalypse Yesterday and Today
by Miklós Györffy
János Térey: A Nibelung-lakópark (Nibelung Residential Park).
Magvető, Budapest, 2004, 441 pp.
The thirty-five-year-old author, one of the rising stars in Hungarian writing, made his mark with a verse novel Paulus based on Pushkin's Onegin. Our fiction reviewer devotes his entire column to his latest work, "a gargantuan verse drama trilogy, which is sub-titled 'a fantasy inspired by Richard Wagner'." He finds this modern rewriting of The Twilight of the Gods linguistically and substantially astonishing with multiple layers of meaning and motifs, incorporating many other strands from the Ring and German-Scandinavian mythology into a construct which Thomas Pynchon would favour. Miklós Györffy also refers to the stage version (reviewed in HQ 176) for the light it bears on the work.
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