All Things Hungarian

Hey, it’s here—my copy of Istvan Bart, Hungary and the Hungarians: The Keywords, fresh from the Primrose Hill Bookshop in London: they promised me 20-45 days and it got here in three (there must be a Microtrend here somewhere) (oh, and thanks again for the tip, Larry). With great elegance, Bart explains:

And bilingual dictionaries, constructed on the principle of equivalence, do not help … because they do not try to invoke the thoughts, concepts and images that are invoked for the native speaker upon hearing the name of a town or a region, a festival, a form of address, a dish peculiar to his country, or the lines of a song. For languages are made up of popular memories, myths and beliefs, customs and ever changing usage, words ring bells—and if our ears don’t hear their roll, life is merely a silent movie.

So, an attempt to understand a culture through words. Not a dictionary, strictly (I still can’t say I know any Hungarian). Only incidentally a guide to the people and institutions (a short entry for Janos Kadar but none for Imre Nagy; an entry for Lajos Kussoth but none for Ferenc Molnar (though Nagy and Molnar does get mentioned elsewhere). There is, by contrast, a remarkable entry on the Szomorú Vasárnap—“Gloomy Sunday,” aka the “Hungarian suicide song,” and its composer Rezső Seress, who himself, it is said, committed suicide.

Consider also, for example:

Kovács űr Mr. Smith (lit.); the journalistic name for the average Hungarian, which in real life is also spelled “Kováts” and even “Kovách”, the latter being considered more aristocratic because it is older; it’s [sic] American variant is “Coufax”; the name for the average Hungarian could just as easily be “Nagy” (big), or “Kis” (small), after all, these are equally common surnames.

Szerelem love; the Hungarian language has a separate word for loving a friend or fellow man (which is also used when someone loves a certain type of food), and another for the passion of a man and a woman feel for each other; this latter is denoted by the word ‘szerelem’, and which →Petöfi calls “a dark pit”, or “sötét verem” (possibly because it rhymes).

"Petöfi" would be the 19th-Century poet Sándor Petöfi, "in whose oeuvre," per Bart, "romanticism, patriotism and revolutionary fervor are admirably and perfctly mixed." Bart says he was "a driving force" behind the Revolution of 1848; he died a year and a half later at the age of 26.

And, at a more ambitious level:

Andrássy űt 60. 60 Andrássy Avenue; the infamous building situated on Budapest’s loveliest tree-lined boulevard which during WW II served as the fascist Arrow Cross ( →nulas [keresztes] mozgalom) headquarters, then as the headquarters of the dreaded communist secret police ( →ÁVO). Those who survived the tortures and interrogations in its subterranean the prison cells were usually taken to prison camp at →Recsk. In the sixties ( →hatvanas evek), the street, formerly named after Count Andrássy, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Monarchy ( →Monarchia), then rechristened first in honor of Stalin, then in honor of the Hungarian Peoples’ Republic (Népköztársaság utja), was given new house numbers in a futile attempt to obliterate the past. It is now once again Andrássy űt.