Attendance is free, but prior registration is required. To register, or for the conference programme and further information, please visit the conference page at the departmental website.

On 27 November, Eszter Tarsoly and BA finalist Victoria Ford gave a joint presentation on grammatical possession. Hungarian has no genitive and instead uses ‘head marking,’ where the possessed thing (e.g. János háza) is marked, rather than the possessor (John’s house). 

Eszter and Victoria presented was a comparative analysis of possessive constructions in English and Hungarian, with reference to the first chapter of György Dragomán’s 2005 novel A fehér király, and its English translation by Paul Olchvary, The White King. The texts are available online on Dragomán’s website, in the original and in English translation. The method was (1) to identify in the English text occurrences and uses of have and of, (2) to translate them back to Hungarian (back translation), and then (3) to cross check with the original the words and phrases translated with have and of.

It goes without saying that categories of have and of usage are numerous. To name and illustrate a few, contrasting the English translation with (2) back translation and (3) the original:

Sequence of tenses:

(1) I took the clothes I had put on the back of my chair

(2) Elvettem a ruhákat, amit a szék hátára tettem

(3) Levettem a szék hátáról az este odakészített rukátat

Linking a quantifier to a quantified item (noun) or as part of prepositions:

(1) her usual sort of hug

(2) az ő szokásos ölelése

(3) megölelt, de nem úgy, ahogy máskor

Possession (habeo):

(1) Mother asked if they had a search warrant

(2) Anya megkérdezte, hogy volt-e házkutatási engedélyük

(3) Anya akkor azt kérdezte, hogy van erre parancsuk

This method of comparing back translation with the original highlighted the number and complexity of issues faced by students of Hungarian and translation when dealing with grammatical possession (habeo construction: van (+ possessor-dative) + possessed thing-possessive suffixes; or the possessive structure where there is no true ownership: van + possessor-adessive + possessed thing). 

Nyugat, IV, 1911, 3

A small exhibition will accompany the roundtable discussion, ‘Hungary’s ‘West’?: Literature and Culture at the Centenary of Nyugat‘, and will be on display on Thursday 11 December until 5 pm, on the second floor of the SSEES library, 16 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW.

Nyugat poster, Mihály Bíró, 1911

We are delighted to announce the roundtable discussion, ‘Hungary’s ‘West’?: Literature and Culture at the Centenary of Nyugat‘, to be held on Thursday 11 December, 3.00-6.00 pm, in the Old Refectory, Wilkins Building, University College London.

On the occasion of the centenary of the literary periodical Nyugat (‘West’, 1908-41), scholars, translators and journalists will discuss Hungarian literature, translation and culture, as well as broader notions of ‘the West’, to which students and friends of Hungarian and Central East European Studies are invited to take part.

Texts and visuals from Nyugat will be presented, and discussion will take place in an informal atmosphere. Keynote speakers and discussants include Dr Zsuzsa Varga, University of Glasgow, who will give a paper on the reception of western literature in Nyugat; Len Rix, noted for his popular translations of Antal Szerb and Magda Szabó; Tim Wilkinson, essayist and translator of, among others, Imre Kertész and Péter Zilahy; as well as scholars from UCL-SSEES. The event will be chaired by Dr Daniel Abondolo, Senior Lecturer in Hungarian Literature at SSEES, and is convened by Dr Gwen Jones and Eszter Tarsoly.

The poster comes from the National Széchenyi Library’s Nyugat centenary website.

Andrea Talabér recently presented the work of Hungarian historian and Open Society Archives director István Rév, together with articles from Népszabadság covering the official 15 March celebrations of 1967 and 1974. Andrea outlined Rév’s focus on the function of show trials, and the manipulation of personal histories (not to mention historical dates), within the context of a broader discussion of competing historical narratives, and national holidays and official ritual under socialism.

With reference to Rév’s work (in particular, the essays in Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Postcommunism, Stanford CA, 2005), Andrea noted the sheer number of ‘revolutionary’ public holidays in the early 1970s, (re-)burial practices, and archival ‘findings’ produced to rewrite history. Reading the Népszabadság articles (‘Gazdag program a forradalmi ifjúsági napokon’, 1967, and ‘Forradalmár elődeinkez méltóan dolgozunk, harcolunk’, 1974), we discussed the elevation of 1848 and erasure of 1919 from Hungarian Communist chronology, convergent interpretations of 1956 as an anti-Communist revolt, as well as the more general coincidence of rhetorical styles adopted by the Kádár regime and, the subject of a number of our earlier talks, the contemporary Right. 

2006

In her recent talk on the subject of her research in progress (nationalism in Hungarian popular culture), Jenny Rasell addressed a number of matters. Remarking on the sudden proliferation of nationalist symbols, and with reference to recent opinion polls and academic research on xenophobia, antisemitism, racism and homophobia in Hungary, Jenny presented a number of texts taken from various radical-right websites, weblogs and chat forums, as well as the Magyar Gárda oath.

Discussion focussed on symbols in popular culture (crosses, religious and medieval articles, maps, flags and so on), concepts of kinship, the promise to create order out of chaos, and the relationship between the parliamentary and (extra-parliamentary) radical right. We also considered the profile of the radical right, in terms of age, class, educational qualifications, and so on, and examined instances of ‘tough guy’ talk in colloquial Hungarian.

A pdf file of Pál Tamás’s recent research findings on radical right attitudes is available in Hungarian here, or in English.

The programme for the remaining five sessions is as follows:

13 November: Jenny Rasell will discuss a few texts taken from websites and blog entries edited by radical right-wing groups as part of her work in progress for her MRes dissertation.

20 November: Andrea Talabér will introduce work by Hungarian historian István Rév and provide an overview of his work.

27 November: Possessed by POSSESSION – Victoria Ford and Eszter Tarsoly will discuss approaches to possession by looking at translation strategies for the preposition of and the verb have.

4 December: Dr Gwen Jones will contrast a selection of Hungarian-language reports on the current financial crisis.

11 December: Mikulás puttony or zsákba macska: the details of the usual Christmas extravaganza, as well as the programme for this last occasion, remain fluid. The Christmas party is likely to take place this evening in the Russell Square/King’s Cross area of central London.

Friday Circle – now on Thursdays!

We meet on Thursdays at 6pm in the ‘Roman Bar’ of the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square.

We discussed the interwar népi-urbánus vita, with a view to understanding its context, semantics and contemporary articulation. Commonly referred to in English as the dispute between (agrarian) populists and urbanists (or ‘metropolitans’), and undoubtedly a major component of public political discourse since 1989, we began by reaching consensus on what it was not: a clash of two opposing worldviews, one rural and one urban. Rather, it was one cultural response to the economic and political crisis that gripped Europe and North America after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the articulation of two historically-constituted structures of understanding, from which alternative versions of modernisation emerge.

Where népi intellectuals distinguished themselves from ‘epigone’ romantics of the peasant myth, and urbánus ideas of the 1930s evolved from a critique of népi thought, the vita did nothing to clarify or even produce consensus on the terms of debate: nép, polgár, humanizmus, faj, szocializmus, harmadik út (the ‘third way’). All participants were reformist intellectuals hostile to the status quo, to the inequitable distribution of land, and to capitalism, and socialism, as it had been tried and tested in Hungary. We agreed that, as the 1930s wore on, the vita was frequently an exercise in antisemitism by other means, but that the critique of the city held primacy over resentment of Jews.

The interwar népi generation’s failed attempts to collaborate with the Gömbös government, and the various retractions made once the Anti-Jewish Laws came into being, provided a stark contrast with the utilisation of népi and urbánus narratives by contemporary urban élites vying for power. Indeed, the great bedrock of modern Hungarian discord had been appropriated and utilised by the Socialist state from 1948 onwards, and enjoyed a revival from the mid-1980s onwards, in oppositionist circles initially. The ideas of Pierre-André Taguieff and others helped clarify populism as a syncretic form of political speech, a distinctive style of political mobilisation, the very hybrid nature of which allowed the incorporation of Leftist and Rightist ideologies; its conceptual flexibility makes it attractive to both democratic and authoritarian/totalitarian structures. The polarisation of Hungarian politics today is not a straightforward continuation of interwar polemics, revived after ‘hiatus’ of Communism, but perhaps rather the reproduction of a symbolic politics, frequently dislocated from actual social cleavages, which mediates and revises history to suit. If one things has remained constant throughout, though, it is the utter instability of the term polgár. 

Such criticism ‘presses buttons’ in the original, classifies into generations and ‘isms’, overlooks genre, and tends to confuse the elevated status of the poet with substance. Primarily, it is an exercise in the metalanguage of criticism, in which terms of debate, and the broader semantics, are presumed to be self-evident. In practice, this reinforces the privileged position of art and writing in Hungarian, and produces and reproduces a reliance upon a code that native speakers ‘get’, whether they like it or not. Attempts to translate this code yield opaque, impenetrable nonsense (and this also applies to similar literary histories written in English). The following excerpt from Antal Szerb’s Magyar irodalom történet (1935) on ‘Polgári irodalom’ illustrates this tendency:

A nyugatos orientáció igazi jelentősége az volt, hogy nem volt zsarnokian magyaros orientáció, nem volt teljesen a magyar múlthoz hozzáláncolva, európai szempontú szemléletével megoldotta a hagyományokat, levegőt, teret csinált, hogy egy újfajta magyarság, Ady és Móricz magyarsága mozogni tudjon. Az eredmény, melyet a Nyugat szellemi szabadsága legnagyobb képviselőiben létrehozott, nem abból állt, hogy a magyar irodalom nyugatibb lett, hanem hogy mélyebben és szabadabban magyar lett.

It is assumed here that ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Western’ (largely coterminous with ‘European’) are two discrete entities, between which ‘Hungarian literature’ is able to move. Literature is produced by ‘representatives’ of ‘orientations’. Such representatives can choose to detach themselves from a linear past of production and its attendant conventions (or ‘traditions’), having first created a ’space’ for themselves in which to do so. The quality of being ‘Hungarian’ can be quantified (to paraphrase: Nyugat created a space within which Hungarian literature could be more deeply and freely Hungarian). It remains unclear, however, whether Western or European literature can also be measured in terms of its essential western-ness or European-ness.

It is worth noting here that spatial metaphors of occupation and subjugation have not only survived the twentieth century, but have prospered because of it, to the extent that a great deal of contemporary cultural and public discourse deals in a hegemony of displacement, where things are simply in not in the place they should be. This displacement is, of course, politicised.

Rather than translating ‘polgári irodalom’ as ‘bourgeois literature’, it would be more constructive to explore the multiple referents of all things ‘polgár’. To take an admittedly random and necessarily superficial selection: the fourth volume of Spenót deals with ‘a nemzeti-polgárosult irodalom kibontakozása’ and its inevitable ‘phases’ between 1849 and 1905; the purported antonymy between ‘polgárság’ and ‘parasztság’ was cemented in the murky world of the inter-war népi-urbánus vita; the ‘polgári író’ survived for a while as a suspect creature under state Socialism; and now the term has undergone a serious attempt at appropriation by Fidesz. I won’t even go near ‘magyarság’, but would note that in this text, it appears to mean very little, if the ‘magyarság’ of Ady and Móricz consists of not much more than the fact that they were male native speakers of Hungarian who wrote in Hungarian in the early twentieth century. It was our opinion that, beyond this, they have nothing in common.

None of this means one cannot write about Hungarian literature well in Hungarian or, indeed, in any other language. Far from it. Rather, one should be wary of regurgitating the unhelpful, and boring clichés of the ‘classics’. An exegesis of this code remains unwritten!

With reference to translations of contemporary Hungarian literature, we noted that the big guns (Esterházy, Kertész and Nádas) are, naturally (!), Hungarian writers schooled in German culture. Translations of their works appear in German first, and all three pay close attention to translations of their works into German; translations into English do not appear to be a priority. Translations of Hungarian literature into English via the German are ten a penny. While the number of quality translations directly into English is gradually increasing, it is imperative that the broader circulation of sensible literary criticism, independent of both the Hungarian canon and hastily-applied cultural-studies-speak, accompanies this growth.

• Hogymondom.hu, a dictionary of contemporary slang to which readers can contribute. Lots of fun, expect profanity.
• Hungarian Spectrum, an excellent English-language blog on current affairs, written by Éva Balogh, which features intelligent and insightful posts on politics, media and history.