The Friday Circle

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

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 from ‘two old folks’ in a village on the Irtysh, reproduced from E. Vértes (ed.), K. F. Karjalainens Südostjakische Textsammlungen I, Helsinki, Suomalais-Ugralainen Seura, MSFOu 157, pp. 113-5, and translated as ‘A medve égi származásárol’ in E. Vértes (ed.), Hadmenet, nászmenet. Irtisi osztják mesék és mondák, Budapest, Európa, 1975, pp. 5-6. The frequency of repetition and parallels would suggest that the text is particularly archaic. As in other dialects of Ostyak, the past tense is unmarked. The present is marked with -l or -t.

FlailingpawMan (jāwətta ketpe xuj) and TjaperwomanMother (ťăpərneŋ aŋkə) are the bear’s ancestors, he is lowered to the earth by his seven-times-indented father (Numi Torem, as seven is sacred) on a metal chain:

karsəɣər təjnə wǎx sēɣər təjnə

vaslánc végen fém lánc végen

which would also suggest that metal was available in prehistory, prior to the re-primitivisation process mentioned elsewhere in these posts. A hunter and his dog disturb the bear from hibernation, but with customary circumlocution, the hunter is referred to only as xǎr jǎxtə xuj (erdőjáró ember), and the bear is never named. Killing a bear is the most taboo expression of them all, and as such idioms will pose a translation problem:

nuŋət ītə pājəŋ xǎttəŋ tūrəm pāɣəttam

Vértes translates this into Hungarian as ‘leszállítalak a véres alsó világba’, into German as ’so töte ich Dich’.

The text was a relatively easy read. Not only because Tsingala uses a similar word order to Hungarian, or because a number of words are by now familiar from looking at other Ob-Ugric languages: jāŋx (to go, also found in Ómagyar Mária Siralom), jast (to say), amp (dog), kət kittət (two hands/két kezet), wərta (to make), tēwət (to eat), səmem (my heart).

When asked whether Hungarian and its distant relatives are similar, the answer has to be a boring ‘yes and no’. Although the split occurred thousands of years ago, studying these languages without a knowledge of Hungarian would probably be too demanding. It’s also a peculiar feeling to come across something and think, that’s a little bit just like Hungarian!

The classes were greatly rewarding, a rare insight into cultures so unfamiliar and fascinating, and, having also served as an introduction to historical and comparative linguistics for those of us relatively new to the field, allow one to refute any crackpot linguistic theory with confidence. On a broader cultural note, the origins of the Hungarian language will always be tied in with ideas of the origins (and therefore belonging) of the Hungarian people, to the extent that fantastic visions of the latter will inform the former. While the premises of the nineteenth-cenutry ugor-török háború may not have survived intact, the desire and search for anchorage most certainly have. It wouldn’t do university departments of Russian any harm, either, to acknowledge languages and cultures native to Russia.

August 25th, 2008 | Category: Ob-Ugric | Leave a comment

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.

August 24th, 2008 | Category: Site updates | Leave a comment

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 referred to only as ‘T’. In the course of digging a well, a mass grave is discovered on the narrator’s property.

‘T’ is the prototype Central European small town, and the site of an ensuing farce. It never becomes clear who the bones belonged to, or how they ended up under the house. In this excerpt the town’s mayor explains the intricacies of post-communist identity to the narrator, who has been offered (threatened with?) honorary citizenship of T.:

 — Mi nem vagyunk azok – mondta. – Akik azok voltak, ma már nem azok. Nagyot fordult a világ – mondta – kereke. Én azelőtt is az voltam. Most is az vagyok, de a mostani azom nem ugyanaz az az, ami a régi azom volt. Azelőtt mi ellenségként állhattunk volna szemben egymással, de most ez megfordult. Most barátok vagyunk, segítünk egymásnak és egymáson. Közös a vektorunk – mondta még. – Az azunk többé nem ugyanaz az az. Tudja, én  másvalaki voltam tegnap, noha ugyanaz vagyok, az orrom például nem lesz se nagyobb, se kisebb, de ez mind nem számít.

Grendel, Tömegsír, second edition, 2006, p. 21

Both the mayor’s confusion, and translation difficulty, hinge on ‘az’; no one English word would work for each and every instance of ‘az’ (the, that, them, those). Rather, the translator would have to render the mayor’s difficulty in expressing his muddled thoughts into nonsense, and somehow replicate linguistic clumsiness for the play on ‘az’. For instance, ‘az azunk nem ugyanaz az az’ could be ‘we are not the we that we were’. However, it is the meaning of ‘az’ to which the speaker refers that has changed (the signified), not him or his surroundings, but it is the word ‘az’, the signifier, that remains constant in the text. In other words, it is not ugyanaz az az!

Other translation difficulties include: splitting ‘világ’ and ‘kereke’ with ‘mondta’; ’segíteni egymást’ and ‘egymáson’; and ‘közös a vektorunk’, which only means something to the speaker. I am particularly fond the throwaway ‘de ez mind nem számít’ at the end, the one and only instance of ‘ez’, but beautifully characteristic of someone who doesn’t really know what they are talking about.  Ultimately, the text is so deeply embedded in Hungarian that any attempt to lift it out would ‘kill the patient’ in the process.

I would be interested to check against the Slovak translation, Masový hrob.

A good Hungarian-language article on Grendel’s prose works is Sándor Olasz, ‘A megtörténtek paródiája. Grendel Lajos regényei’, in Új Forrás.

August 9th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment

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.

August 9th, 2008 | Category: Literature, Translation | Leave a comment

László Péter’s obituary has been published in The Times, Monday 4 August.

August 8th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

On Friday 13 June we began discussing problems encountered translating Hungarian literary criticism. The immediate problem we run into is that, as a rule, translation requires reading and understanding. Establishment literary criticism (Spenót, Szerb, etc.) is particularly difficult to translate, but not for lexical or syntactic reasons.

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.

July 26th, 2008 | Category: Hungarian studies, Literature, Nyugat, Translation | Leave a comment

Two new links have been added to the Links page, which are worth mentioning here:

• 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.

July 1st, 2008 | Category: Current affairs, Hungarian studies, Websites | Leave a comment