I have spent forty-two years working on this journal, a span of almost two generations that included the consolidation, and later the rotting away, of a hideous political system, and the rebirth of the country fifteen years ago. During those years there have been a hundred and seventy issues bearing the marks of my work in one way or another; on the cultural sections before 1990, and on the whole of the journal since. But always, first and foremost, on the literary pages.
Now I feel the time has come to step aside.
Political necessity brought about the founding in 1936 of this Englishlanguage quarterly (in the middle of Europe of all places!). Again, in 1960, a very different political elite felt it had to explain away to the West its past and present, knowing only too well it rested on lies. The first Hungarian Quarterly had been a decent albeit naive plea in disguise (delivered out of the all-engulfing shadow of Nazi Germany), for help, understanding and future forgiveness.
The second, The New Hungarian Quarterly, was a cynical attempt at gaining some international credibility and respect.
For a jobless young man, a translator not so much by choice as by necessity, being selected by Iván Boldizsár, the editor, as someone who might be able to raise the standards of the journal's cultural sections, was a godsend. Being educated, politically suspect and jobless was no joke in the years after 1956. These were times when I had to carry publishers' contracts on me, so I could prove to any policeman I was not some idling truant, a "parasite on society" or a counter-revolutionary conspiring to overthrow the system once again. Some neighbours actually reported me for walking the dog in bright daylight, when all decent workers were building socialism at work. I was more than once summoned to the station to explain to uniformed thugs what on earth I was actually doing in the first place. Imagine their disgust and incomprehension when I confessed to being a freelance translator of Goethe, Eichendorff, Thomas Hardy, Sherwood Anderson, or to adapting Dickens for children's radio, or to transplanting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from its fourteenth-century north-west-midland English into modern Hungarian. (What?!) Looking back on all those years I spent as literary editor from 1964 to 1990,
I find not much to be ashamed of. Naturally, nothing could be published without the consent of the editor, but he was influential and indispensable enough to the regime to allow me to choose work by the best writers and artists, thereby not only lending credibility to what was intended to be a propaganda journal, but making the authors grateful. He made this possible by publishing party leaders' and ministers' unreadable pieces about socialist achievements and an ever-brightening future at the front of the journal. This too earned him gratitude, kudos and privileges.
Strangely enough, this period was a heyday of Hungarian poetry, when members of the older generation, like Kassák, Illyés, Szabó, Jékely, Kálnoky, Zelk, Weöres, Vas, Somlyó, Nemes Nagy, Rákos and Pilinszky were still very active, though struggling with self-censorship, as everybody else, while poets like Juhász, Nagy, Kormos, Csoóri, Gergely, Orbán, Tandori, Petri, Rakovszky, Várady and others of the younger generations were asserting themselves-names, I am sure, readers of this journal remember. I don't think it was a dishonest deal I made when, making use of Iván Boldizsár's vanity and thirst for success, I seized the opportunity to publish the best of what these had to offer, observing, of course, the gradually mellowing taboos Kádár's socialism could not afford to eliminate completely. I am proud that I was able to persuade some fine British and American poets to translate their work, for it is my firm conviction, and long experience, that only poets should and can translate poetry, and only into their own language. This is the only way the translated poem can come through with real authenticity, find a place in the English-language canon, and gain an afterlife in the oeuvre of those who translated it. I have tried my best to make this a generally accepted principle, rendering the dull or abominable work of non- English, non-poet, Hungarian enthusiasts redundant.
In the sixties and seventies, Csurka, Konrád, Esterházy, Nádas, Kertész, G. Kardos, Bodor, Spiró, Kornis and many more made their appearance beside the highly respected Örkény, Déry, Szentkuthy, Németh, Magda Szabó, Mándy, Ottlik and Mészöly, starting a new era in Hungarian fiction. Most of these are now wellknown in Europe, especially in Germany, and some even in the US.
The Quarterly played a good part in this. And apart from being an important outlet for poets and writers, it has been a source of indispensable material not available elsewhere in English on history, sociology, films, music, theatre and the arts. My colleague Zsófia Zachár, now my successor, has been a close ally in all this since she came aboard in the early eighties. After the historic changes in 1990, we depoliticised the journal. Enjoying financial support from the government of the day (touch wood: so far none of the four has even tried to interfere with the contents of the journal), we believe we have produced a wealth of interesting material and a good read.
I am pleased to say that I will be editing the literary pages once again, and I hope that The Hungarian Quarterly will continue to flourish in the hands of