Much of this issue is concerned with cities: their provenance, their inhabitants, how they are perceived and modulated. Budapest is at the focus of this but other cities too are involved, including first century Rome and Jerusalem and nineteenth century Leeds . They are treated in a novel, essays and articles and book and film reviews.
CITYSCAPES
Greater Budapest developed at an astonishing pace during the last third of the nineteenth century and now contains almost a quarter of the country's population. This section looks at the capital's history and how it was and is viewed, with a side glance at how Leeds Town Hall sustained an architect serving a sentence in Budapest 's Central Prison during the early fifties.
Leeds Town Hall
by Victor Határ
"I spotted on the cover of one issue a colour picture of a building complex ... a splendid monstrosity. Of a caption or clue, there was no sign. For weeks on end, that issue of the journal became my mandala - an object of meditation." The writer and broadcaster, long resident in England , here describes the effect one of most striking of English public buildings of the nineteenth century had on him in his "design office", a cell on death row in Budapest and how he accidentally came across it many years later.
Budapest Beyond Good and Evil
by Gábor Gyáni
Pest , Buda and Óbuda were united in the 1870s, and the next forty years saw its population triple in size to over a million inhabitants. Previously it had been extremely variegated in its ethnic and denominational make-up, of which only the Jewish and German groups have been properly studied. "At the time the city was being unified, the tone was set by a long-standing German ethno-cultural tradition. Yet within a very short period of time a massive tide of overwhelmingly Hungarian-speaking newcomers arrived."
Professor Gyáni, who has written extensively on Hungarian social and cultural history over the last century, here examines the Magyarization of the capital and the attitudes of the National-Christian right towards it. After discussing the political demographics of the periods before and after the Second World War, he turns to the reactions the city inspired, from loathing to stimulation and alienation.
Your City, My City, Their City
Reflections on Budapest Guidebooks
by Nicholas Parsons
"Competing images of the city, some consciously, some unconsciously, reproduced by the compilers, illustrate in hindsight the framing of an urban identity, but also ideological manipulation and the creation of touristic clichés - one might say, the struggle for the city's soul and the right to project it."
The Vienna-based author, who has published guides to Hungary and Austria , describes the treatment of the Hungarian capital by a number of guides, whether main series or stand alone. Of the latter, he is especially taken by guides written by insiders for outsiders; he sees András Török's Budapest . A Critical Guide as a successor to the writer Antal Szerb's "whimsical and gently ironic love-letter"(1935), A Martian's Guide to Budapest, 1935 (published in full in this issue) .
He points out that the guidebook writer is caught between a normative approach to sights and a non-prescriptive approach, describing how some resolve this tension. For some, particularly during the Kádár era, suppression of the actuality was one way out - though not as blatant as in Malcolm Bradbury's hilarious pastiche of the old Eastern-bloc-published guidebooks, Why Come to Slaka?.
The section is complemented by two more pieces: Antal Szerb's delightful A Martian's Guide to Budapest and article on it and its author. Our film critic's review is concerned with a remarkable new animated feature film, centred and named after Budapest 's VIIIth District.
Antal Szerb, the Inquisitive Martian and Budapest in the 1930s
by Géza Buzinkay
Antal Szerb's two novels, The Pendragon Legend and Journey by Moonlight, have recently been published to resounding success in Italy, Germany and England .
Géza Buzinkay introduces Szerb, best known in Hungary as a literary historian, critic and essayist, along with his much-loved guide, first published seventy years ago. He reflects on the ironies of the changes time and war have wrought on some of the places Szerb dwells on: "Buda's jewel, the Romantic-style Karátsonyi Palace , was razed at this time. When the counts died out, the palace had been sold and pulled down. The new owner, the German Reich, planned to build a school on the site. As a fitting illustration of the twists of history in this part of Europe , instead of a Nazi German building, a Socialist-Realist-style ministry in the Soviet mould was erected here in 1951."
A Martian's Guide to Budapest
by Antal Szerb
"The Chain Bridge is infernally long. But you must try it once, Sir, and you won't regret it. Stroll, with a woman on your arm, across to Buda and then stroll back again - possibly with the same woman."
A delightfully whimsical and idiosyncratic look at his native city by an author who eschews the obvious and displays his erudition lightly. The illustrations and some of the initials are from the essay's first publication in book form. The translation is by Len Rix, who is the translator of Szerb's two novels.
And Yet It Moves
Áron Gauder and Erik Novák's Nyócker and the Revival of Hungarian Animation
by Erzsebét Bori
Our film critic provides a brief survey of the history of Hungarian animation and the crisis it has passed through since 1989 before going on to look at the highly successful animated feature which has carried off prize after prize at international festivals: "The story is set in Józsefváros, the eighth district of Budapest (hence the title Nyócker, from nyolcadik kerület). This central city quarter emerged in the nineteenth century when new immigrants came to the rapidly developing city, and was inhabited by workers, by the poor and by the dubious. ... The image of Józsefváros (Joseph's City) - a construct of facts, actual conditions, prejudices and city legends - still has a hold on the popular imagination."
*
A Grand, Elaborate Story
Interview with György Spiró on the Novel Captivity
by Magda Ferch
The author here discusses his new novel, set in Rome, Jerusalem, Judea and Alexandria during the first century. He speaks of the period and his subject , the tribulations of a short-sighted Jewish boy from Rome's "Yonder" quarter (Trastevere) at the time of Christ's crucifixion and the emergence of Christianity. He explains why he chose to use a modern demotic idiom and the importance of "narrative credibility".
Captivity
Excerpts from the novel
by György Spiró
Playwright and novelist, György Spiró turns again to an historical theme for his recently published novel. In Ivan Sanders's translation.
A Short-Sighted Seer (György Spiró)
by Miklós Györffy
This review is devoted entirely to the György Spiró novel excerpted in this issue.
*
Palaces on the Danube
by Tamás Szőnyei
In a location far removed from the historic heart of the city, two new buildings stand on what was a more or less abandoned site on the left bank of the Danube: the National Theatre and the Palace of Arts, which houses the National Concert Hall, the Ludwig Museum and the National Dance Theatre. Tamás Szőnyei describes the history and background to their erection.
Three in One
The National Concert Hall, the Festival Theatre and the Ludwig Museum
by Tamás Torma
While the new National Theatre has drawn harsh criticism as a building, responses to the Palace of Arts have been extremely positive, especially to the superb National Concert Hall. With photographs.
Austerity and Exuberance
Contemporary Music at the Budapest Autumn Festival
by Paul Griffiths
Paul Griffiths's most recent book is the Penguin Companion to Classical Music. He came to Budapest for this year's Autumn Festival and here reviews a major work by Zoltán Jeney and Helmut Lachenmann, the latter being celebrated in the year of his seventieth birthday. He also comments favourably on the National Concert Hall and the Festival Theatre.
*
Poems by András Imreh, translated by David Hill
A lawyer by training, András Imreh is working on his second collection. He has been called the poet of the every day.
*
Death in Bayreuth
An Unknown Document about the Death of Franz Liszt
by Klára Hamburger
In 2004 the Hungarian Franz Liszt Society was presented by papers originally belonging to Jolán Gerster who had been one of the founders and guiding spirits of the original Hungarian Liszt Society, which ceased to function during the 1944-45 siege of Budapest . Klára Hamburger describes how the society acquired some relics of Liszt from Dr Hans Schnappauf, son of Bernhard Schnappauf, who was Liszt's attendant on his deathbed. The document in question is a typescript made by Jolán Gerster of the elder Schnappauf's report (the original autograph has disappeared), An Account of the Last Day, Death and Burial of the Abbé Dr von Liszt, which we publish in full.
*
Foreign Laughter
by George Szirtes
The Anglo-Hungarian poet and translator takes a wry look at the tribulations of finding himself translating two novels from Hungarian into English (by writers as radically different as Sándor Márai and László Krasznahorkaiat the same time) and co-editing (An Island of Sound, with Miklós Vajda, our literary editor) a major anthology of Hungarian writing.
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