Who Was Alexander Lenard?

An Interview with Klára Szerb*

 

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László Rapcsányi: We have you to thank for making Alexander Lenard's name and work known.

Klára Szerb: Thank you for crediting me with discovering Sándor Lénárd for Hungary. But it isn't that simple. A lot of people knew him, even if his circle was narrow. After 1945, he became the physician to the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Sándor Weöres¹ and his wife,² and János Pilinszky³, who lived there at the time, and many others like Ágnes Nemes Nagy⁴ and Balázs Lengyel,⁵ they all knew him.

When I looked him up, the entry said that he was a physician, writer, poet and translator, who was born in Budapest in 1910 and left Hungary in 1938, at the time of the Anschluss.

That's an error. Lenard left the country in 1918, and never lived here again. His family moved to Austria-he was still a child at the time. At the time of the Anschluss, he emigrated from Vienna to Rome.

Where he became physician to the Hungarian Academy in Rome?

That was later, much later, from 1946 to 1949. And after 1949, at the time of the Korean War, he moved to Brazil, I suppose when the threat of a Third World War seemed to loom heavily over us.

How did you come to know him?

In a very amusing way, I must say, by pure chance, through a series of fortunate coincidences. In 1965 I received a huge package, a hand-written translation of Antal Szerb's A királyné nyaklánca (The Queen's Necklace), without a single line of explanation to accompany it. I checked the name of the sender: Lenard, an unfamiliar name. The return address was Blumenau-only much later did I notice that this is in Brazil. I skimmed through the translation and liked it enormously. As I had already signed a contract for The Queen's Necklace with Hildegard Grosche, one of the leading German publishers of Hungarian literature, to be published in German, I wrote to her immediately to tell her I had received a fantastic translation.

But you couldn't give her any information about the translator.

I only knew his name. So I wrote two letters. I wrote to the address that this Lenard had given me and told him it was absolute madness, a very rash thing to do, to translate a Hungarian book into German without a contract. I also told him that I thought his translation was excellent and that he should contact Hildegard Grosche, to whom I wrote the second letter. She replied. "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read your letter, it was we who commissioned Lenard to translate The Queen's Necklace." I only received the letter covering the manuscript from Lenard weeks later, in which he explained who he was, the friends we had in common, Károly Kerényi⁶ and so on and so forth. That was how our correspondence and friendship began. That was also when I learned that a book of his had been published in Germany entitled Die Kuh auf dem Bast. He sent me the book.

The German or the Hungarian version?

The German and the English, both of which he had written himself; Robert Graves wrote the foreword to the American edition, which had the title The Valley of the Latin Bear.

It's strange that he did not send you the Hungarian version.

As he had not yet written it in Hungarian, he couldn't have sent it to me in Hungarian. I asked him whether he'd be prepared to translate his own book into Hungarian. He said he would write it instead. And he did; so his book exists in three versions, all of them slightly different. The essence is the same, but each has elements specific to the language it was written in and to the nation that speaks the language. Let me tell you something else: the manuscript I received was written in a beautiful hand, on onion-skin paper, I had to type it out before I could give it to the Hungarian publisher.

All of this was by post?

Yes, this is all by correspondence, I have about a thousand to a thousand five hundred letters from him.

In the photograph you've shown me, he has a beard, a thick moustache, a high forehead, and is well dressed, wearing a tie, looking like a professor.

No, he was a bear. He was always badly dressed. When he was teaching at Charleston College in South Carolina this was a problem for him, not to come to classes in jungle gear. Because that was where he actually came from, the jungle. He taught four semesters in Charleston.

A peculiar place to choose to live, the Brazilian jungle, amongst poor German settlers.

There was a German settlement around him, and poor Indios, in the state of Santa Catarina.

As far as I know, Lenard was always in straitened circumstances. How was he able to find peace of mind and buy a farm in Brazil?

Straitened circumstances-that's putting it mildly. He was always extremely poor. There was a huge Bach competition held in Sao Paulo called "The Sky's the Limit". He was one of most knowledgeable people in the world on Bach and entered the competition. It lasted six months; in the end he won and bought his pharmacy and his farm in Blumenau with the winnings.

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The Hungarian version of The Valley of the Latin Bear, entitled Völgy a világ végén (Valley at the End of the World) was published in 1967 and had an extraordinary effect on readers for the spirit in which it was written and its emotional content.

Being published in Hungarian was perhaps the happiest event of his adult life. The great dream of his life had been realised, something he had thought he had had to renounce for ever: he became a writer in Hungary, in the country he had left when he was eight years old.

Who was he?

It is very hard to answer that. He was a poet, but he also drew well-he illustrated his own books. And he was an excellent pianist. I heard him play; if he had chosen that life for himself, he could have become a leading musician. He was also a gifted linguist; he wrote and spoke over ten languages, six or seven of them like a native.

Soon after the publication of the Hungarian version of The Valley, probably at your instigation, other works followed: Egy nap a láthatatlan házban (A Day in the Invisible House) and Római történetek (Roman Stories) in 1969.

Roman Stories first appeared in fragmented form in a Hungarian journal published in Brazil. The title may not have been the same-he never actually finished it-but at my request he sent me the pieces that had appeared. From these fragments I put together the book known as Roman Stories. I would also like to tell you how A Day in the Invisible House came into being. I asked him to describe a normal day, what he does from morning till night. He replied that it would be a little bit complicated to do that in a letter, he would try to do it in several letters. And that is how the book came about, from these letters.

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This is a shortened version of an interview broadcast by Hungarian Radio on July 8, 1984. The interviewer was László Rapcsányi, author and broadcaster.

¹ Sándor Weöres (1913-1989), poet, playwright.

² Amy Károlyi (1919-2003), poet.

³ János Pilinszky (1921-1981), poet.

⁴ Ágnes Nemes-Nagy (1922-1991), poet and essayist. She helped compile Szerb's last work, the anthology titled Száz vers (A Hundred Poems) which Szerb kept with him throughout the months spent in a labour camp. She translated some of Lenard's poems from the German.

⁵ Balázs Lengyel (1918-2007), writer and critic, husband of Ágnes Nemes Nagy.

⁶ Karl [Károly] Kerényi (1897-1973), classical scholar, historian of religion.

 

Klára Szerb (1913-1992)
was born into a family of high cultural and artistic attainment. The writer Frigyes Karinthy referred to her as "the daughter of Nyugat". Her father, Aladár Bálint (1881-1925) was a writer and the art critic of that legendary journal, Ernő Osvát, her uncle, was its editor. Her brother, Endre Bálint (1914-1986) was a painter, a cousin Pál Justus (1905-1965) a social democrat politician, editor, poet and translator, another cousin István Bálint (1943-2007) a poet, writer, actor and director, and her son János Szerb (1951-1988) a poet and Tibetologist.
"For many years I worked as a nurse: it is the only qualification I have, because I was born into the numerus clausus, and was not admitted to medical school. And my mother, who was a widow, could only afford to send one son abroad..." , she informed Alexander Lenard in one of her letters to him in 1965. Her erudition and memory were legendary. From 1945 she worked at the Institute of Adult Education, and from 1959 until her retirement in 1973 in the Bibliographical Department at the Institute of Literature of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She took part in the compilation of A magyar irodalomtörténet bibliográfiája, 1905-1945 (The Bibliography of Hungarian Literature, 1905-1945).
She married Antal Szerb (1901-1945) in 1938 and did everything within her power to bring recognition for the writer and literary historian labelled 'bourgeois' in post-war Hungary.