Hungarian Studies in London
On 5 July, the thirteenth annual Gay Dignity march (Meleg Méltóság Menet, or melegfelvonulás) took place in Budapest. On the same day in London, around half a million people celebrated Gay Pride; even Boris Johnson wore a pink cowboy hat on the procession. In Budapest, around one thousand people marched in between metal barriers, accompanied [...]
Rachel Beckles Willson, Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, gave a talk earlier this year on composer Sándor Veress (1907-92), and in particular the ways in which one’s biography can be altered to suit changing circumstances.
Veress left his home town of Cluj for Budapest in 1916, where he studied piano under Bartók and composition under [...]
The final class was spent looking at a text in a Southern dialect of Khanty, Tsingala, on the heavenly origins of the bear. Western dialects of Khanty divide into North and South; accordingly, Tsingala is related to Demjanka, Konda, and Krasnojarsk. These forms are probably extinct.
The text was noted down in 1899 by Vasilii Yakovlevich [...]
The site has been moved and upgraded, so that I can develop it over the next 25 years or so. To begin with, more photographs and links have been added; posts follow shortly.
As part of our translation series, we discussed an entertaining excerpt from the novel Tömegsír (Mass Grave, Kalligram, 1999) by one of our favourite authors, Lajos Grendel (b. 1948), with a view to thinking about untranslatability. The premise of Tömegsír is simple: following post-1989 property restitution, an academic moves back to his family’s house in a small town [...]
Malcolm Lesley has kindly agreed to make his English translation of János Háy’s short story ‘Petőfi híd’ available to readers of this site. You can read the original here (’Petőfi híd’, in Háy, Házasságon innen és túl, Budapest, Palatinus, 2007, pp. 154-61), and Malcom’s translation is here. Both are pdf files.
László Péter’s obituary has been published in The Times, Monday 4 August.