Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: "My son is a Magyar": Ideas of Firstness and Origin in Charles Olson 's Poems

onslaught [támadás] and resurrection [feltámadás] have the same root, what he suggests is no less than the overcoming of death via staying in process. "The renewal / is the restoration." What exactly are these Hungarian roots? In a letter to Robert Creeley dated May 27, 1950 he refers to the family name of his grandmother, Lybeck (Lübeck), as being Hungarian (Correspondence 1: 51). This supposedly exotic identification appears also in the Berkeley reading: "That's because I am a Hungarian" (Muthologos 1: 131). On the same page with this reference in volume one of the Olson-Creeley Correspondence he cites the Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyai and his famous metaphor of the violet-like coincidence of new thoughts: It is here again c. 1825 Bolyai Farkas, to Bolyai János: "Son, when men are needed they spring up, on all sides, like violets, come the season." (51) The original quote reads: "many things have an epoch, in which they are found at the same time in several places, just as the violets appear on every side in spring" (see the notes to Olson-Creeley Correspondence 1:164). He refers to this remark in other poems as well, among them "The Story of an Olson, and Bad Thing" and "Apollonius of Tyana." John Smith is another "Hungarian connection," and Olson was aware of this (see his essay "Captain John Smith"). John Smith had been in the service of the Hungarian Zsigmond [Sigismund] Báthori (1572-1613), prince of Transylvania, and fought the Turks in the tragic battle of Mezőkeresztes in 1596, where he nearly died. Captured, he escaped—with the help of the Turkish princess, Charatza Tragabigzanda

—from Constantinople in 1603, went on to Russia and returned to England in 1604. Here he joined the group of English colonists setting sail in December 1606, to arrive first at Chesapeake Bay (April 1607) and then to what was to become Jamestown Colony, May 14. The journals of John Smith give ample description of both his adventures in Transylvania and of the young Byzantine princess, Charatza Tragabigzanda, Smith's benefactor for whom he named Cape Ann. This Tragabigzanda then appears in Olson as the "Turkish 18