The Friday Circle

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. 

November 23rd, 2008 | Category: Activities, Culture wars, Current affairs, Hungarian studies | Leave a comment

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.

November 23rd, 2008 | Category: Activities, Culture wars, Current affairs, Hungarian studies | Comments (1)

This term the focus of the discussions is reading and writing. Speakers at the seminars present a text and other participants, from various disciplines, offer their reading and interpretation of the text in question. A practical outcome of the discussions is to offer an insight into the process of writing in the broadest sense: from deciphering manuscripts through academic prose to iambic pentameter. We shall also address the question of how to write a doctoral or master’s thesis, a journal article, or a monograph.

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.

November 3rd, 2008 | Category: Activities, Hungarian studies | Leave a comment

The next text to be discussed in the ongoing translation series is an excerpt from Péter Esterházy’s 1995 novel Egy nő, translated into English by Judith Sollosy. The parallel text is here.

We meet at 6pm on Thursdays at the bar commonly referred to as the Roman Bar, on the first floor of the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square.

October 20th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment

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. 

October 5th, 2008 | Category: Culture wars, Current affairs, Hungarian studies | Leave a comment

Magda Szabó, 1917-2007

Madga Szabó’s 1960 novel Disznótor is a remarkable exercise in minimal reference tracking. Reference tracking – who is being referred to – can cause problems for many students (and translators) of Hungarian. Because Hungarian lacks gender-specific personal pronouns and grammatical gender, the student might, for years, encounter trouble deciphering whether the person being spoken about is male or female. Translators from Hungarian can also fall into a switch reference trap: a switch reference is a clarification of which third person is being referred to. In a conversation between a man and a woman, for instance, a sudden reference to ‘a férfi’ should be translated as ‘he’, not ‘the man’.

Disznótor brings Virginia Woolf to mind, in terms of the purposely difficult text in which everything is shown and nothing is told. The density of the text is partly due to the novel’s structure: events over the course of one day are narrated by means of seventeen characters’ separate interior monologues. The 1965 translation by Kathleen Szasz, Night of the Pig-killing, tackles the problem of whether and how to translate given names in a rather uneven way, by assigning ‘equivalents’ that range from the acceptable (Sándor becomes Alex, Geréné is Mrs Gere) to the frankly weird (János becomes Jonas, Anti becomes Tóni, and Imre becomes, inexplicably, Péter). Where reference tracking occurs at a much later stage in the original, however, the translator clarifies identity and gender as early as possible; moreover, the identities of the narrator and subject are frequently, and, one assumes, deliberately unknown. Szabó very occasionally assists the reader by highlighting emphasis one would pick up from speech:

Paula felhívta az iskolában, bejelentette, hogy valami gyűlés van, tovább bent kell maradnia. Ha éhes, kérje el Andreától a vacsoráját, és Szalayt okvetlenül meg kell hívni a disznótorra, ő szóljon neki.

The translator must use his/her knowledge of the entire text, not to mention his/her wits, to clarify who has to stay late, and who is hungry, whereas who should invite Szalay to the pig-killing is marked by the author.

Paula telephoned him at school, saying she had to attend some sort of meeting and would have to stay late. If he got hungry he could ask Andrea to give him his dinner. Yes, Szalay had still to be invited to the pig-killing, he had better speak to him.

From the opening lines of the chapter entitled ‘Sándor’, the translator pads out the sparse text and provides no less than three masculine personal pronouns for a sentence that contains none in the original:

Délutános volt, de felkelt jókor, nem szeretett heverni.

He worked the afternoon shift but he got up early, because he didn’t like to idle in bed.

An English-language translation will require reference tracking by means of personal pronouns, but also references to events alluded to elsewhere in the text. Szabó can switch the subject from sentence to sentence:

Hát sose lesz már nyugalom odabenn? Először hol sír, hol nevet a néni, aztán ajtócsapkodás, szaladgálás, beveszi magát a fürdőbe, hányik. Kiment a hátsó szobába, hogy ne hallja a hangot, nem mintha ő is felémelyednék tőle, csak hát jó az ilyet még hallani sem.

Will she never be quiet in there? First the old woman laughs and cries, then doors slam, running footsteps sound, and she shuts herself up in the bathroom and vomits. Mrs Gere drew back into the inner room so as not to hear her; not that it affected her in any way.

It is up to the translator how much s/he leaves the reader in the dark, to do the work themselves. Disznótor, a goldmine of stylised ambiguity, and a challenge to the most ambitious translator, is, at present, best enjoyed in the original. 

October 5th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment

- Megvan a kés!

- Hol?

- A hátamban.

Jenő Rejtő, Piszkos Fred, a kapitány

We discussed ways in which a literary language might grow through translation, with reference to translations of works of hard-boiled fiction by Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Chuck Palahniuk and others, together with one work of ‘high’ literature. Unsentimental narratives of violence and sleuthing can pose many an enjoyable problem for the translator. This excerpt is from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929):

While we were talking about it, plain-clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with.

Translated into Hungarian almost fifty years later by László Szíjgyártó as Véres aratás (diluting ‘red’ into ‘bloody’ harvest), the relevant passage reads as follows:

Még erről beszélgettünk, amikor két civil ruhás zsaru behozta a vörös képű fickót, akiben megakadt a Suttogónak szánt golyóm.

The translator’s way of dealing with a subject who had stopped a bullet intended for someone else was rather neat. Elements of the poetic came into play elsewhere:

If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn’t armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.

The translator makes best of use of the tools available, and will stretch the language where s/he can:

Fogadni mertem volna, hogy ha csak ugyan az én emberem, akkor nincs nála fegyver. Ezért aztán habozás nélkül a csúszós mellékutca közepén rohantam előre, belelesve, belefülelve, beleszimatolva a sötétségbe.

Similarly, Ross Macdonald’s 1956 novel The Barbarous Coast, translated in 1990 as A barbár part by Károly Ross, throws up a number of cultural references which may require explanation, or be ignored:

We climbed the steps to Mrs Lamb’s back porch, and I knocked on the rusty screen door. A heavy-bodied old woman in a wrapper opened the inside door. She had a pleasantly ugly bulldog face and a hennaed head, brash orange in the sun. An anti-wrinkle patch between her eyebrows gave her an air of calm eccentricity.

Ross translates:

Fölmentünk Mrs Lamb hátsó verandájára, s bekopogtam a rozsdásodó zsaluajtón. Egy pongyolát viselő, termetes, idős asszony nyitotta ki a belső ajtót. Kellemesen csúnya a buldogarca s vörösre festett haja volt, amely inkább narancsszínűnek látszott a napsütésben. A szemöldöke között lévő ráncosdás elleni tapasz egyfajta szolid különcséget kölcsönzött az arcának.

In translation, metaphor may become simile. The Barbarous Coast again:

He lay exhausted by his incredible leap from nowhere into the sun.

Úgy hevert, mint aki kimerített a hatalmas ugrás a semmiből a fénybe.

Excerpts from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) revealed a combination of experimentation with straightforward error:

The moment Marla is out the door, Tyler appears back in the room. Fast as a magic trick. My parents did this magic act for five years.

From Attila Varró’s 2000 translation Harcosok klubja:

Amint Maria kiteszi a lábát, Tyler felbukkan a konyhaajtóban. A Nagy Illuzionista. Akár az apám, életem első hat évében.

Aside from the choices all translators must make, and which are open to discussion, error usually comes about, we concluded, when the translator is tired. 

We ended the discussion looking at György Dragomán’s masterful 2005 translation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953). To wit:

Nor was the key the kind of key of which an impression could be taken, in wax, or plaster, or putty, or butter, and the reason for that was this, that possession of the key could not be obtained, not even for a moment.

A kulcs nem olyan fajta volt, amiről lenyomatot lehetett volna venni, viasszal, gipsszel, gittel, vagy vajjal, és ez azért volt így, mert a kulcsot még egy pillanatra sem lehetett megszerezni.

Dragomán is writing his doctoral thesis on Watt, so I leave it to him to discuss its narrative paradox, the virus of nothingness:

Form and content are not easily separated, each can and must be explained away in terms of the other, but the circularity of the argument will be closer to the insane attitude of endless investigation celebrated in the novel than to the ordinary world of logic and reason.

The full article is available in English; the Hungarian afterword to his translation is here. 

October 5th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment

Police vans on Andrássy

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 by twice as many police, and surrounded by several hundred ‘counter-demonstrators’, and a similar number of journalists and photographers. The march was attacked by various radical right-wing groups and individuals, and protected by the police.

Last year’s Pride events represented something of a turning point in Hungarian LGBT history. The festival was opened by Gábor Szetey, then Secretary of State for Personnel, who came out. Two days later, however, participants in the parade were subjected to acts of organised violence, and received inadequate (if any) protection from the police. Szetey was the first, and to date, the only openly gay member of government. In an interview published in Magyar Narancs, he said:

If the question is whether all of this would still have happened had I not come out, then my answer would be yes. The counter-demonstration was organized, we knew weeks beforehand that something was being planned. It is possible that my speech intensified the extremists’ passions, which makes me feel bad, but sadly we must be clear that since 19 September [2006], we have been living in a different country than [the one] before. If we pay close attention, the Árpád flags, the faces and the symbols were the same on Saturday as they were [during the riots]. This is an extreme-right group which is not large, but is vocal and provocative.

One year on, Szetey is no longer an MP, the radical right is still in carnival mood, and it is still unclear whether throwing eggs at people is a protected form of free speech under Hungarian law. As soon as permission for the 2008 march was finally granted (the Budapest Chief of Police had originally banned it on 11 June on the grounds that disruption to traffic would be too great), the drums started beating in the virtual realm of the radical right. Bearing in mind the events of the previous year, press coverage of various ‘calls to arms’ to defend the Hungarian capital, and the firebombing of a gay club on 2 July, participants in the 2008 melegfelvonulás, whether gay or counter-counter demonstrators, took part in the knowledge that the threat of physical danger was very real. The march was marshalled between sets of temporary metal fencing, separated from would-be lynchers by further fencing, and escorted by numerous riot police and vans from start to finish. The march lasted roughly two hours, one hour to get down Andrássy, and one penned in at 56-osok tere (formerly Felvonulási tér), waiting and wondering how we would get out.

Although the felvonulás was not much of a celebration or carnival, it was a galvanising experience for all those who marched. Everyone remained calm, despite the enormously tense atmosphere. There were surreal moments: both sides documenting each other through the fences, so that people were filming themselves being filmed, and the Budapest police have since posted photographs of counter-demonstrators they want to identify on their website. Afterwards, the uneventfulness of an early Saturday evening in the rest of town away from Andrássy seemed unreal; it was as if none of that had happened. With a few notable exceptions, coverage of the march focussed on the violence and its perpetrators, rather than its intended victims.

Our discussion returned to a number of issues. On whether homophobia was motive or excuse for the violence, the overall consensus was that it was one element in the mix. Together with the verbal and physical abuse (graphic descriptions of sexual acts, and a fixation with bodily issue, namely spitting, throwing eggs, spraying water mixed with excrement from huge water pistols), there was distinct pro-natalist outrage (‘nem csináltok gyerekeket!’; ‘kihalunk!’) and a post-socialist moral majority pose which does not, one assumes, extend to hardcore porn. At times it could seem that ‘buzi’ is the new ‘zsidó’: ‘lopnak, csalnak, hazudnak’; ‘azért vagyok itt, mert a buziknak van pénzük, s nekünk nincs’, etc.

The ‘majority’ stance is, essentially, anti-minority though, again, this does not apply to Hungarian minorities outside Hungary, as Szetey also argues in the interview cited above. The Right’s victim complex, and the thugs’ conviction that men shouting obscenities define and embody who and what is Hungarian (‘Ez nem Hollandia, nem Amerika, ez Magyarország!’), were the product of a longer-term appropriation of leftist discourses by the Right, borne out on the ‘korlátlanul magyar’ website kicked off its US server, as well as in opinion columns of right-wing dailies. Finally, two questions were familiar to students and researchers of the inter-war era: the relationship between hyper- and anti-liberalism; and the desire to ‘cleanse’ the city. Whether or not one buys into the notion of a state of cold civil war existing in Hungary, the antecedents to and rhetoric of this current crisis are depressingly familiar.

August 30th, 2008 | Category: Culture wars, Current affairs | Leave a comment

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 Kodály at the Liszt Academy. It appears that in the 1930s, his work gaining increasing popularity, Veress was on course to become the Next Big Thing in Hungarian music. He took over the composition chair from Kodály in 1942 and, following brief stints in England and Rome, where he immersed himself in the musical avant-garde, he returned to Hungary, and joined the Party in 1945. However, he didn’t return to Hungary after travelling with permission to Italy in 1949, and settled in Switzerland.

When applying for a job in Pittsburgh at the height of the McCarthy era, he was required to write a letter explaining his brief membership of the Communist Party, and it was this letter that provided the context for discussion of writing one’s past. On the advice of historian István (Stephen) Borsody, Veress claimed that he had joined for artistic and personal gain, and that he had always been pro-Western. Successive edits gradually removed his autonomy, until his statement resembled a seamless narrative to fit the new political context in which he sought a home. Veress was not finally able to move to the States, but remained in Bern teaching and composing music, and he never attained the recognition of either his predecessors, Bartók and Kodály, or his one-time students, Ligeti and Kurtág.

August 26th, 2008 | Category: Activities, Music | Leave a comment