Békássy Ferenc angol–magyar költő

Author(s): György Gömöri / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

This paper introduced Ferenc Békássy (1893–1915), an Anglo-Hungarian poet who was born in Western Hungary, educated in England (at Bedales and Cambridge) and died in the First World War, fighting the Russian army, similarly to Sándor Petőfi. As most of Békássy’s Hungarian work was published in a collection in 2010, we paid more attention to his poems and letters in English, recently published under the title The Alien in the Chapel by Skyscraper Books, edited by Mari and George Gömöri. The majority of Békássy’s letters were written to Noël Olivier but letters to his other English friends such as John Maynard Keynes and James Strachey also shed light on friendships of this extraordinary young man, the first foreign member of the „Apostles”, who made a lasting impression on many Cambridge scholars and the London artistic elite prior to World War I.

Kulturális önazonosság, történeti trauma és személyes élettörténet közép-európai emigránsok önéletrajzaiban

Author(s): Zoltán Z. Varga / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

The study researches the way twentieth century historical traumas are depicted in autobiographical works. The author’s interest is focused on a specific subfield of the topic which offers a wide range of material: he is interested in studying autobiographies of persons who were forced to leave their home country for historical or political reasons. The specificity of these works is not just in the poetics of the literary handling of historical traumas, but also in the study of multicultural identity from various perspectives. Zoltán Z. Varga’s paper looks into the problem by studying the work Budapest Diary by Susan Rubin Suleiman, who had left Hungary at the age of nine, and later achieved a successful academic career in the U.S. The work of the author, who returned to her homeland as an adult, seeks not only to find the reasons for burying the past burdened with collective historical traumas, but also tries to discover the regional components of identity, of the cultural otherness of East-Central Europe. The combined viewpoint of the foreign and one’s own affects the story of one’s life story and the understanding of relationship with parents and childhood experiences, and thus the rewriting of the past as a recounted identity is done on several levels.

Identitásnarratívák kortárs magyar származású írónők prózájában

Author(s): Magdalena Roguska / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

The study tackles two phenomena: translingualism and transculturalism. Both of them are closely connected to literature written by women writers of Hungarian origin living outside of Hungary. The first one refers to the situation when a (woman)writer “rejects” her mother tongue, and starts writing in the language of the place she is living in. The second phenomenon refers to instances where the works of the above mentioned writers create a space in which the two cultures meet together. This can be equally observed on the levels of the plot, narration and linguistic and stylistic solutions used by the authors. Studying identity narratives in works by Agota Kristof, Melinda Nadj Abonyi and Ilma Rakusa, the paper presents characteristic features of translingualism and transculturalism.

Szövegközi átjárások, köztességtapasztalatok Terézia Mora prózájában

Author(s): Éva Toldi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

The paper attempts to give a transcultural interpretation of the novel Das Ungeheuer (The Monster) by Terézia Mora. It seeks to find an answer to the question of how belonging to several cultures transforms and fills with new content topoi such as migration, belonging, foreignness and language interactions. Next to this, it also deals with the narrative structure of the novel, which provides characteristic features that overwrite earlier concepts of multi-cultural literature constituted along lines of simplification.

Intertextualitás Dubravka Ugrešić Štefica Cvek Az élet sűrűjében című regényében

Author(s): Gabriella Dobszai (Dobsai) / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

Romantic love stories are among the most popular and wide spread commerce forms of literature; this genre unmistakably always provides the reader with the same delightful schematic experience: a love story between an ordinary girl and her “prince”; their story has a happy ending despite the “cruelty of fate”. Dubravka Ugrešić’s patchwork novel Štefica Cvek u raljama života (In the Jaws of Life) was a completely new way of tackling the genre when it became published in 1981. Today it is considered to be a classic book. It confronts us with trivial, naïve and dilettante story telling. The writer applying the props of intertextuality characteristic of postmodern literature, using elements from fairy tales and common examples from everyday life, accentuates the difference between popular literature and the so called high, sophisticated literature. The study focuses on these intertextual elements or fairy-tale characteristics, and tries to explain them.

Határesetek

Author(s): József Keserű / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

The study is an attempt at looking into the narrative of those writers who have broken with the tradition of presenting minority history in a pathetic way or giving a tragic depiction, but rather rethink their attitude to history and write from a demystifying aspect – among others, by introducing figures of irony and levelling. The novels In Our New Hont by Lajos Grendel and Border Case by Péter Hunčík do not only confront us with the prospect of rewriting history but also, – through the continuous reflection on border cases – with the interaction of various linguistic and cultural media. In the last section of the study the analysed novels by Grendel and Hunčík are interpreted as texts which evoke geocultural reading and are examples of Central-European magic realism.

Tomaž Šalamun és Tolnai Ottó

Author(s): Erzsébet Csányi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2017

The aim of this research is to conduct a comparative analysis of some poems by the Slovenian author Tomaž Šalamun and Ottó Tolnai’s poem entitled Tomaž Šalamun. The poetic dialogue or the response-effect is based on a parodical poetic language game, and makes obvious the kinship between the two ironic worldviews. Tolnai uses the poems of the Slovenian poet, primarily the poem entitled Who is who (1), in a playful manner, by adding to them, writing them further. There is not only an opportunity to research the poetic circuit between the opuses of the poets, but also between generations or literary magazines (the Új Symposion from Novi Sad and the Katalog from Slovenia). In the 1969, No. 47 issue of Új Symposion Tolnai’s poem Tomaž Šalamun and Šalamun’s Who is who (1) were published in the same section (Mici project) of the magazine. Tolnai replied to Šalamun’s poem, built on it, made a parody of it, of its lyric race, which started from a search for identity, self-defining, a parodic self-mythization: “you are a genious tomaž šalamun”. The demythization is a process of ironic self-mythization in Šalamun’s work, too: the selfportrait is an accessory for a grotesque parody – all this from a “cold”, “on the outside looking in” standpoint of conceptual self-perception.

A nem látott képek vizuális poetikája

Author(s): Attila Thimár / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2017

During the Romantic era in Hungarian literature works which were able to associate the verbal and visual became especially significant, and the task of verbal depiction of visual elements had become a real challenge. Dániel Berzsenyi was very efficient at it at the height of his poetic career as well as later when he wrote his theoretical papers, and also in his great dissertation Poétai harmonistika, which he wrote towards the end of his life. The poem A bonyhai grotta is a good example of a poetic accomplishment which connects the visible with the utterable world, what more, of the problem of verbal reproduction of an “unseen picture”. The poem was written when the poet learned that a countess from Transylvania vowed that she would have a poem of his engraved in a marble plaque and place it into a grotto built for this purpose. The poet created his poem without having seen the grotto to be built or having met the countess. The study analyses lessons learned from this unusual poetic situation by making a comparison between the visual structures of A bonyhai grotta and the poem which gave rise to its writing.

A humor stílusalakzatai Szabó Magda leveleskönyvében

Author(s): Julianna Lőrincz / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2017

In this study the author describes linguistic means of expressing humour, irony and sarcasm based on texts in Magda Szabó’s book of letters entitled Dear Kumacs! Letters to Éva Haldimann. Dealing with terminology issues in the beginning of the study, the author states that, since they appear together in humorous texts, in many cases notions of humour, irony and sarcasm are treated as synonyms in literature. The style of the letters by Magda Szabó is characterised by varied tone adequate to the given topics: elaborate, humorous, playful, ironic or sarcastic. The study primarily focuses on playful, humorous and ironic names in the address forms and closing formulas of the texts of the letters. The author chooses from the letters those repetitive figures expressing humour which have text-cohesive function.

Szociális defektus és partikularitás Đurđica Stuhlreiter gyerekkönyveiben

Author(s): Éva Hózsa / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2017

The twenty-first century reader can observe several changes in children’s literature, especially in the so called “young adult” literature, since the term children’s is too narrow and inexplicit. The genres and topics undergo some transformations, the trends and pictorial approaches change dynamically. In order to raise the dilemma of the contemporary Hungarian and Vojvodinan Hungarian “border crossings”, the need for more frequent comparative outlook arises. This study examines problem centric and taboo smashing texts of a contemporary Croatian writer of books for children and youth. The novel Gašpar i prijatelji comes into limelight from among Đurđica Stuhlreiter’s books, centered on the metamorphosis of a hearing-impaired boy wrapped in silence, who takes refuge in the world of animals. The paper dwells on discourses about bravery, identity searching and problems of childhood or adult life, and also points to relevant issues in Hungarian literature.

A nyelv rejtett tartományai

Author(s): István Vörös / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2017

By studying parallels between the poetry of János Arany and Karel Jaromír Erben, the paper adds to the history of 19th century Czech and Hungarian literary relations. Next to similarities between their biographies and roles as poets, it also tackles the parallel features in the thick atmosphere of their ballads, which compared to European tendencies were written a little behind time. The structural analysis brings forth the complexity and similarities of their worldviews, too.

“Who is who—the face as a mask” Péter Esterházy’S autobiographical pact with his readers (Celestial Harmonies, Revised Edition)

Author(s): Judit Görözdi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The much-cited theorist of autobiography, Philippe Lejeune, uses the term autobiographical pact to describe the silent contract between the author and reader, in which textual (and extra-textual) signals about referential and autobiographical nature of a narrative are understood as coming from the author and are accepted by the reader (Lejeune, 1989, 3–30). Autobiographical themes, connections and concrete allusions have always been present in Péter Esterházy’s fi ction (e.g., Termelési regény, 1979; Helping Verbs of the Heart—A szív segédigéi, 1985; The Book of Hrabal—Hrabal könyve, 1990; Celestial Harmonies—Harmonia cælestis, 2000; Not Art—Semmi művészet, 2008). In this context, the text Revised Edition (Javított kiadás, 2002), written in the form of a diary, which describes a real event in the form of one of the most authentic autobiographical genres, signifi es not only a change in the author’s understanding of the relationship between autobiography and literature, but also changes the reader’s expectations, i.e. the aforementioned silent covenant between him and the author. I will attempt to explicate the character of Esterházy’s autobiographical writing (understood on the one hand as autobiographical referentiality and on the other as an autobiographical way of writing1) on the basis of the texts Celestial Harmonies and Revised Edition.

Áprily Parajdon

Author(s): Márton Mészáros / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 03/2018

Vita

Author(s): Máté Ittzés / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2013

Adamik Béla: A latin nyelv története. Az indoeurópai alapnyelvtől a klasszikuslatinig. (Apollo könyvtár 30.) Argumentum Kiadó, Budapest 2009. 281 o. ISBN978-963-446-537-9

DISCOURSE FORMATIONS IN READINGS OF THE SZINDBÁD NARRATIVES

Author(s): István Dobos / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

This paper delineates critical approaches to the reading of the Szindbád narratives by Hungarian author Gyula Krúdy, which basically have tended to assume a balance of the sensual and the spiritual, as well as literal and figurative meanings. I propose an interpretative model focusing on the question as to how an imaginary event exists in the consciousness of a literary character, and how that character’s perception can be related in the narrative. There is not much on this short-fiction poetical issue in the secondary literature, much as there is very little on notions of overlaps between reality and fiction or the transformative text-events of becoming a creation.

NÉRON, OU LA TOLÉRANCE DE L’HISTOIRE - À PROPOS DU ROMAN DE DEZSÕ KOSZTOLÁNYI

Author(s): Thierry Loisel / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2013

Dezsõ Kosztolányi’s novel Nero, a véres költõ (translated into English from German by Clifton Fadiman as The Bloody Poet: A Novel about Nero and from Hungarian by George Szirtes as Dark Muses, The Poet Nero) was a consequence of a personal experience of the author in Italy. The novel enabled him to reconcile the idea of correspondences between the past and the present with other themes that preoccupied him, such as everyday life, the spirit of language, and the aesthetic. Fundamentally, the influence of Nietzsche, Freud and Thomas Mann prompted him to muse on Nero as poet and emperor, as well as on the condition of a writer who was the perpetrator of bloodthirsty acts. Was he a talentless poet or a talentless emperor? This is the question that was raised by Seneca, whose failure in his role as mentor is presented by Kosztolányi, along with the descent into hell of his distraught pupil.

Der Brief als die Appellstruktur der Gestaltung in Kemény Zsigmonds Roman Gyulai Pál

Author(s): Borbála Pintér / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2012

Die neue Tendenzen suchende Kemény-Rezeption ist bis zu einer bedeutenden rezeptionsgeschichtlichen Tradition geworden. Vorliegende Arbeit schließt sich der Tradition des Wiederlesens von Keménys Werk an und beschäftigt sich mit Zsigmond Keménys Roman Gyulai Pál. Gyulai Pál als Experiment schöpft aus einem großen Formenrepertoir, strebt auf den Normen der Romantik beruhend nach der Veränderung der Funktionen der Gattungselemente. Während der Roman einerseits erst die sprachlich-poetischen Normen der einzelnen Gattungskonventionen erschafft, stellt er das Artistische des Verfahrens in den Vordergrund. Von den verschiedenen Gattungskonstruktionen konzentriert sich dieVerfasserin dieser Studie auf die in dem Roman integrierten Briefe, die als strukturelle Einlagen interpretiert werden, sich in der Fiktion in den Haupttext einbauen, die ineinanderknüpfende Dynamik der diskursiven und narrativen Schichten unterbrechen. In dem Fall der Briefeinlagen wird ein eingebetteter Textkörper angenommen. Die Ordnung der herkömmlichen Diegese wird aufgehoben, um den Leser über Ereignisse und Charakterzüge zu informieren, für deren Bekanntgabe die bisherige Erzählweise sich nicht als geeignet erwies. Der Wechsel der Sprechsituationen und der Gattungskonventionen, das Drama, den Epos, den Brief und das Tagebuch in Einheit verschmelzende Form schafft eine Metanarrativik, die die Konstruiertheit des Textes betont, und von dem jeweiligen Leser erwartet, sich in dieser konzeptionell geschaffenen Welt auszukennen. In dem romantischen Plotentwurf und der Realitätsnähe entdecken wir außertextuelle Elemente der Wirklichkeit, während im Erzählen und in der Konstruiertheit die modernen Merkmale der Textualität zur Geltung kommen.

L’Intertextualité Dans Harmonia Caelestis: Traduire Ou Copier ?

Author(s): András Kányádi / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Avec son roman Harmonia Caelestis, Péter Esterházy est à l’origine d’une réflexion sur la place de l’intertextualité dans la création Romanesque postmoderne. D’autre part, sa méthode d’écriture pose des problems spécifiques au traducteur. Plusieurs cas de figures se présentent, selon qu’il s’agit de citations dþment identifiées ou de passages entiers dissimulés dans le texte, dont l’origine est seulement – et éventuellement – indiquée par quelques indices. Certaines traductions étrangères se sont vues imposées d’indiquer, en fin de volume, une liste des oeuvres « mises à contribution ». D’autres difficultés propres à l’écriture d’Esterházy sont liées à son usage courant de l’argot et à la citation de textes hongrois très richement connotés ; notons que le recours non moins fréquent à des textes repris dans l’original en langue étrangère pose lui-même au traducteur des problèmes spécifiques.

Egy betegség geográfiája

Author(s): Orsolya Kész / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 04/2018

Kinga Tóth: Holdvilágképűek. Magvető, Budapest, 2017.120 oldal, ISBN: 9789631435252

GYULA KRÚDY AND SZINDBÁD

Author(s): Ferenc Takács / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2004

Gyula Krúdy (1878–1933) produced the main bulk of his fictional work in the period 1897–1920, when Modernist writing in Hungary was initially dominated by the short story as the medium of experiment and innovation. The basic form of his prodigious output was, similarly to a number of other important prose authors of the period, the short story. His highly influential work has an elusive quality: it is unclassifiable, and general critical labels such as Symbolism, Impressionism and Surrealism have been of partial and dubious help in discussions of his writing. Approached from a technical point of view, the underlying narrative strategy of Krúdy’s work can be identified as serial accumulation, with its attendant openness of form: the short-story sequence, the story-tagged-on-the-previous-story organisation of his novels, the historically pre-novelistic frame-tale-like coordination of various narrative forms. This is particularly evident in the case of Szindbád, Krúdy’s crowning achievement in fiction, which came into being as an ever expanding series of short stories, novels and “dreams”, held together by their protagonist, the symbolically reimagined figure of Sindbad the Sailor, the mythic wanderer of The Arabian Nights. Infused with the lyricism of conjugal Eros and Thanatos, the stories develop, and give variations on, the central character as a composite symbol, the manifold meanings of which range from authorial self-dramatisation to a philosophical vision of Man as metaphysical superfluity.