An Insecure Home Nestling in a Blood-Soaked Land
by Thomas Ország-Land (March 2015)
Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry
Translated and edited by á
Syracuse University Press (2014), 272 pages
978-0815633624
This volume offers English readers an enjoyable and faithful introduction to the enormous contribution made by Jewish writers to the treasury of Hungarian poetry, which is itself a little-known but essential part of Western literature.
Jewish poetry has been loved the world over since The Psalms of King David. It made its public appearance in vernacular Hungarian after the emancipation of Jews in 1867, and was received with a delighted if uneasy welcome. The book shows why.
Many contemporary Jewish-Hungarian masters like Ágnes Gergely (b. 1933), who is included in this anthology, responded to the Holocaust by doggedly holding on to their racial/religious identity as well as the Hungarian language, and rebuilding Budapest as a vibrant European Jewish cultural centre. Others like Dan Dalmát (b. 1934), excluded from the book because of a shortage of space, have sought to heal their broken lives by transplanting their literary careers to Israel as Hebrew authors and Hungarian translators.
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, a co-author of this volume, was a Jewish child survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust and the three-month Soviet siege of Nazi-occupied Budapest. She recently set out her experience in the heart rending autobiography When the Danube Ran Red (Syracuse, 2010). Today, she holds the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas in Dallas, where she is also director of the Ackerman Centre for Holocaust Studies.
They say here that they sought to present their readers with digestible representative samples of Hungarian poetry by translating the best works of the greatest writers of the eight centuries under review and placing them in their historical, biographical and cultural contexts.
This can be translated into English fairly easily, given a passion for words and a decent rhyming dictionary. But lesser writers have wisely avoided trying because such a poem would become doggerel in their hands.
My Songs
The part that one might call prevailing
Among my songs, madam, of late
Were writ for you, my little Kate.
That moiety, deemed so prevailing,
Among those little songs of late,
Indeed you loathed them, little Kate.
Motives deemed inappropriate,
When one addresses little Kate.
But that part one might deem prevailing
Among those songs you execrate
Straight to your heart, my little Kate.
So if, from all your cold reviling,
Which one might malheureusely call your hate,
I die in grief of such misdealing,
You are to blame, my little Kate.
Then blame yourself, my little Kate,
If nought remains of me but ailing
Songs you did not appreciate
(The ones that one might call prevailing).
The translators conclude the anthology with an essay each, Ozsváth tracing the evolution of Hungarian poetry since the arrival in the Carpathian basin of the migratory Magyar tribes about 1,100 years ago, and Turner placing the poems in the context of West European literature.
Turner views Hungarian poetry as a fresh and wild Asiatic response to West European sensitivity. He thinks it may serve as a model for the regeneration of what he describes as the vital human community of poetry.
Such work, he believes, demands great humility exercised by the translators as well as their preparedness for close identification with the authors of the original material. His essay includes a useful description of technical aspects of the translation process that he has developed jointly with Ozsváth over the years.
Hungarian poetry is rooted in the classical and Medieval Latin traditions of the region. But it has been also set apart by its heightened intensity and verbal energy inspired by the struggle for the cultural and even physical survival of people perpetually isolated by their language and history among suspicious neighbours.
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Thomas Ország-Land (b. 1938) is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent who writes from London and his native Budapest. His poetry appears in current, forthcoming or very recent issues of Acumen, Ambit, The Hungarian Quarterly, The Jewish Quarterly, The London Magazine and Stand. His last book was Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust (Smokestack/England, 2014).
(Author Photo by Hajnalka Friebert)
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