Language and Literature papers

Cox, John K.

North dakota State University

The Hungarian Home of Danilo Kiš

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My project focuses on the role played by Hungary and Hungarian literature in the life and writings of Serbian writer Danilo Kiš (1935-1989). Kiš, born in Subotica/Szabadka when it was part of Royal (interwar) Yugoslavia, had a Hungarian-speaking Jewish father, Eduard, and a Serbian-speaking Orthodox Christian mother from Montenegro, Milica Dragi?evi?. Kiš spent the years of World War II in Hungary, and his father was deported to Auschwitz from there and killed by the Nazis. For the rest of his life Kiš maintained an active engagement with Hungarian literature by writing essays about it (he especially admired Endre Ady) and publishing a large number of his own Serbian translations of Hungarian poetry. Wartime Hungary also figures prominently in his autobiographical novels, in some of his short stories, and in his play Night and Fog (an English translation of which I have just published in the journal Absinthe: New European Writing).
Not only do I analyze the image of Hungary in Kiš's fiction and non-fiction, but I also examine his essays in particular in order to home in on the regional identities that are of such great concern to cultural and intellectual historians. For instance, it can be argued that Kiš takes the "sting" out of the term Balkan by shifting discourse away from the traditional arrangement "Balkans--Central Europe--Eastern Europe--Europe" that has informed so much nationalism, state-building, and scholarship in the region. Kiš stresses global or pan-European cultural identity, and his refurbished vocabulary of regional associations focuses on "Mediterranean" and "Pannonian" characteristics. Kiš's overturning of invidious distinctions between sub-mentalities in Europe is a refutation of many fixed, registered, ascribed identities---even, to some extent, the venerable material of Central Europeanness, his commonalities with Konrád, Kundera, and Mi?osz notwithstanding. This emphasis on integration and commonality also predisposes him to keep the "big picture" in mind with regard to totalitarianism, a term he uses with equal readiness for both Stalinism and fascism.



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Dombi, Judit

University of Pécs

The Construction of Intercultural Communication in Scholarly Writing

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Effective communication is vital, and the need for it has never been more emphasized than these days when people from different national, cultural and linguistic backgrounds interact in the course of their daily lives. After Hungary’s admission to the EU it is evident that the country needs to find its place in the integrated Europe and this can only be achieved by cooperation and successful communication with other cultures. The amplified interest in more flourishing communication across cultures has led to the mushrooming of programs across the country that offer theoretical and practical knowledge on Intercultural Communication. The field has rapidly entered academia as well and has become a center of attention. Due to the relatively novice nature of this concept it is rather difficult to define what actually is taking shape under this umbrella term.
This paper presents the findings of an empirical study that attempts to get an insight into how intercultural communication as a discipline is being established. By providing a qualitative analysis of the abstracts of examples of scholarly writing, the study attempts to get a holistic view on what subfields Intercultural Communication encompasses and how relevant theories of these subfields contribute to the development of this academic discipline. Findings imply that though the phenomenon under study is rather multi-faced and extended, Intercultural Communication is definitely of use for Hungarians trying to bridge the gap not only between them and the Others, but within their own culture as well.



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MacDonald, Vashegyi Ágnes

University of British Columbia

The Legacy of Nyugat in Hungarian and World Literature Today

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My paper examines how the Nyugat review played an essential role in the development of literary and cultural modernism in early twentieth-century Hungary, with special attention paid to three of its writers – Margit Kaffka, Dezs? Kosztolányi and Antal Szerb. Their influence is part of the most important cultural legacies of modernism within and outside Hungary. By telling the story of the Nyugat writers in English I consider my study a call for reworking models of literary and cultural history and for strengthening bridges of Hungarian studies overseas.


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Molnár, Erzsébet

University of Miskolc

Samuel Brassai’s Linguistic Work

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Brassai’s most permanent achievement falls in the field of linguistics, which is the area in which he received the most acknowledgement. Modern syntactic literature begins with Brassai’s idea of the central position of the verb. His main work on syntax, in which he gives his detailed views about his theory of the sentence is A magyar mondat (The Hungarian Sentence). He placed the Hungarian sentence at the centre of his investigation, which was something of a novelty at that time, when, in the context of historical comparison and description, the unit of linguistic studies was the word. Brassai was the first to describe the actual structure of the communicative sentence; the first who had the idea that a sentence can be broken into a topic and a comment. He created the first and up to now the only sentence model that was capable of generating and describing endless numbers of Hungarian sentences. Researching the universal features of the sentence he concludes that the Hungarian sentence is not based on the dualism of the subject-predicate.
Brassai made intense studies of the problems of sentence and word order, examined the principles of stress and accent and carefully safeguarded the purity and correctness of the Hungarian language with regard to translations.



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Niessen, James

Rutgers University

Károly Szabó's Union Catalog, "Old Hungarian Library", and the Bibliographic Construction of Greater Hungary

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As librarian of the Transylvanian Museum Society in Cluj/Kolozsvár for the first thirty years of its existence, Károly Szabó (1824-90) brought together in a pioneer union catalog not only descriptions but holdings for early Hungarian imprints located in multiple repositories. His innovation in library science was inspired by the project to create a Greater Hungary.
Szabó’s job description as librarian placed central emphasis on the cataloging and description of the manuscripts and books entrusted to his care. In assembling the book catalog he determined that an adequate description of the early publications required that he compare them to other copies and unique items in other repositories, and also that Hungarian imprints be defined by place of publication rather than language. Hence the catalog of one library grew into boxes of cards carefully annotated thru visits and correspondence with more than 40 repositories, then eventually into the multivolume work that was completed after his death but was always meant to stimulate additional entries by colleagues around the country.
This paper proposes to investigate the inspiration and significance of Szabó’s "Old Hungarian Library" for librarianship in Hungary and abroad. I am in correspondence with Cluj/Kolozsvár in Romania and hope to consult Szabó’s papers there for the completion of this project.



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Várdy, Huszár Ágnes

Duquesne University

Hungarian-American Literature in the Age of Dualism and the Interwar Years

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During the four decades before World War I nearly two million Hungarian citizens, among them about 650,000 Magyars, emigrated to the United States. They were part of the so-called “great economic immigration” whose members left their homeland in search of a more promising future. Although often mistreated and exploited at home, upon arrival they soon developed a keen longing for their homeland. This longing became one of the main features of their cultural activities and of their literature. The other dominant feature of that literature was the description of the harshness of life in the coal mines, steel plants, and smoke-belching factories of America, including the frequent industrial accidents that resulted in the death of hundreds of immigrants every year.
This Hungarian-American poetry was not a high quality literature, but it was close to the immigrants. It expressed in a simple way their pains and sufferings, as well as their hopes for a better future. Most of these poets -- whose life was equally harsh -- continued to write even in the period between the two world wars. But after the First World War their original themes were joined by the pain they felt at Hungary’s dismemberment and of the transfer of their immediate homelands and villages to the newly created “successor states” created by the Treaty of Trianon. This poetry of interwar years is filled with the bemoaning of this dismemberment, which they viewed as a national tragedy on par with the consequences of the Battle of Mohács in 1526.



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Varga, Adriana

Indiana University, Bloomington

Dezs? Kosztolányi And/In Translation

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Dezs? Kosztolányi was one of the most avid and versatile Hungarian translators of the twentieth century. At the same time, translation offers a unique way of gaining insight into Kosztolányi’s own works, particularly into his last cycles of short stories, Esti Kornél (1933) and Esti Kornél Kalandjai (1936). Looking at these stories through the prism of translation reveals that Kosztolányi’s prose is very much like poetry. In it, linguistic form is at least as important as semantic content, if not more. Here, the recognition of formal patterns leads to semantic discoveries. Language has become the protagonist that manipulates the other characters. Translation points most straightforwardly to this fact because it is in translation that the loss, and, therefore, the presence of the original’s linguistic form are most acutely felt.In my presentation I discuss Kosztolányi’s approaches to translation as well as what questions raised in the process of translation reveal about his own fiction.


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Varga, Zsuzsa

University of Glasgow

New Women for Old: Margit Kaffka and the Tradition of the New Woman

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
My proposed paper sets out to examine the representation of the New Woman in Margit Kaffka's fiction. M uch of earlier examination of Kaffka's novels focused on their embeddedness in history, and the decay of the Hungarian gentry, but Kaffka's heroines deserve an equal amount of attention from the perspective of women's emancipation. The heroines of Colours and Years and Maria évei explore the new questions of women's professionalism, access of the public sphere, and they also analyze the position of women in the domestic sphere.


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Venkovits, Balázs

University of Debrecen

Recollections and Photographs of a Journey in the Americas: Travels of Pál Rosti between 1856 and 1859

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Travelogues written by Hungarian travelers during the nineteenth century represented a major source of information for Hungarians interested in the culture, history or social traditions of countries in both North and South America. Pál Rosti was one of the most significant travelers of his time, who can be considered outstanding not only because of his writings, but also as a result of his achievements regarding the use of the new invention of the era, photography.
In this presentation I am planning to introduce Rosti’s journeys in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba through the discussion of his travel book and various articles published in Hungarian newspapers. The presentation, however, will focus on Rosti’s photographs that appeared in a special album after his return to Europe, as well as in his travel book, as the basis of the illustrations. The presentation will try to answer several questions regarding his photographs: What was Rosti’s purpose with using photography during his travels? Did he simply want to provide illustrations for his book? Or did he intend to present a more objective (scientific) view of the countries visited? How were the photos turned into actual illustrations? Did they all belong to Rosti or were some of them taken from other works? While answering these questions we will get a clearer picture of the unique achievements of an outstanding Hungarian and we can also identify the changes in travel writing brought about by the appearance of photography.



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Zerkowitz, Judit

ELTE, Budapest

Translating the spirit of the text: Nádas's Fire and Knowledge and Örkény's in Memoriam Dr KHG

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Péter Nádas in his short story entitled Fire and Knowledge relates that according to Hungarian media the four corners of the country have been ignited and the fire is spreading fast towards the capital. People „translate” the news as something is afoot, but certainly not as what they are told is the truth, and
as a result they do nothing. This phenomenon could be termed, modeled on Kundera's diagnosis of the Kafkan, as suspension of belief. If disbelief can cause communication breakdown between speakers of the same language it can cause even more problems in translations from one language to another. This talk
will present some translations that reflect the problem of staying too close or straying too far from the letter of the source text, due to a misunderstanding or due to the above willing suspension of belief in the spirit of the text. In everyday life such mistranslations are eventually clarified, as in Kertész’s recent interviews on his 80th birthday, but in literature consensual interpretation is hard to reach. Two English language translations of István Örkény’s In Memoriam Dr KHG will be analyzed and compared to illustrate how, once the spirit of the text is captured, stylistic differences can create delightful and in no way unacceptable versions.



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