21 September conference report
On Friday, 21 September 2007, an interdisciplinary conference took place at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, marking the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of Hungarian studies at the host institution.
This was the third international conference on Hungarian matters in as many years at SSEES: a conference commemorating the centenary of Attila József’s birth was held in 2005, and another took place last year on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Uprising. As before, academics from across the UK were invited; this conference was supported and attended by the Hungarian Ambassador, Her Excellency Borbála Czakó, who hosted the evening reception at the Hungarian Embassy, and the director of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London, Dr Ildikó Takács, who, with Professor Martyn Rady, opened the conference. The event was very well-attended, attracting former, present and future students of Hungarian at SSEES, friends, supporters and practitioners of Hungarian studies, as well as academics from a wide variety of other fields.
It is anticipated that the Balassi Institute in Budapest will publish papers presented at the conference in their spring 2008 issue of TH2L, the Institute’s journal.
It is seventy years since Miklós Szenczi (1904-77) was appointed as the first Lecturer in Hungarian at SSEES. Peter Sherwood’s opening keynote speech traced the evolution of British scholarship on Hungary, beginning with the publication of John Bowring’s Poetry of the Magyars in 1830, and Sigismund Wékey’s A Grammar of the Hungarian Language in 1852, to the appointment of lecturers in Hungarian at SSEES: Szenczi taught from 1937 to 1947; Béla Iványi-Grünwald, lecturer from 1947 to 1949; and later G. F. Cushing (1923-96), whose appointment dated de facto from 1949 and who ended his career at SSEES as the UK’s first Professor of Hungarian Studies 1978-86. Best remembered for his translations from Hungarian literature, he also wrote widely on Hungarian literature and its historiography, as well promoting the Uralic languages. Peter noted that early English-language scholarship on Hungarian gradually dispensed with translation from Latin and German, and came to focus on language and literature together, as a ‘package’, an approach that is still favoured today at SSEES.
Speakers on the historians’ panel continued to expand on the theme of the antecedents to today’s work: Professor Robert Evans discussed the legacy of C. A. Macartney, in particular his Hungary and her Successors (1937); Professor Martyn Rady considered the challenges and opportunities posed to researchers by the recent digitisation of archival sources; while Robert Gray gave an account of his doctoral research on nineteenth-century land law. Discussant Dr Tom Lorman gave a robust account of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon historical scholarship continues to offer a distinctive and widely-accessible window on Hungarian history. The panel was chaired by Emeritus Professor László Péter.
The language, literature and culture panel addressed questions pertaining to the teaching of Hungarian at university level. Dr Daniel Abondolo highlighted one of the actual difficulties for students of Hungarian, the lack of a genitive case; Dr Gwen Jones’s paper addressed the ways in which texts might be read, and the need to steer clear of repeating clichés and unhelpful assumptions about Hungarian literature and culture; while Eszter Tarsoly discussed metaphors of language purism, the subject of her doctoral research. In the roundtable discussion that followed, discussants Dr Ádám Nádasdy and Dr Anna Gács, both of ELTE Budapest, suggested ways in which Hungarian and overseas writing on Hungary differ.
In his closing keynote speech, Dr Robin Baker made a case for the funding of Hungarian at university level, to ensure the future of Hungarian studies in the UK.
The conference organisers wish to express their gratitude to UCL-SSEES, UCL Graduate School, the Hungarian Cultural Centre, London, and the Hungarian Embassy in London, for all their generous support. Special thanks also go to Sasha Aleksić, without whose professionalism, grace and good humour the day would have been infinitely less successful.