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

princess," who gave her name to a pageant in which young Charles was to participate in Gloucester ("Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 11"). For Olson Captain John Smith meant several things: a traveler, mapmaker and journalist (journal-writer), he created modern versions of the periplus or portulans by valorizing the particular and showing scrupulous attention to detail; he was a man of action, who acted upon his attention, curiosity, and passion. What seems significant for Olson is that John Smith was a figure of cultural dislocation, in possession of the advantage, or capacity, of changing perspectives and thereby convey history as an instance of wonder, while also producing wonder. Olson took his "Hungarian roots" as emblematic of this dislocation and paradigm change, as well as some condition preceding logocentrism and the written word. As Robert Creeley notes in his preface to the Hungarian edition of Olson's poems: [...] it is the implicit echoes of "Hungarian" itself, as a language and movement of people, which must have pleased him. It reaches beyond the enclosure of the Indo-European to a world one has only as words spoken, which last would have been his delight. (13) 4. István Budai Parmenius' account. If, following the lead of these "implicit echoes" of Hungarianness, Olson had dug a little further into the writings of European explorers, he might have found another person of this same period of Transatlantic Renaissance, one more Hungarian capable of cultural dislocation: István Budai Parmenius, or Stephanus Budaeus. Born in Buda in the second part of the 16th century, Parmenius was a student in various cities in Europe, Heidelberg mostly, but traveling as far as Elizabethan England. In Oxford he studied in Christ Church College, and was the roommate and friend of Richard Hakluyt. Through Hakluyt he met Humphrey Gilbert, who was just getting ready to make his second voyage to North America. Parmenius wrote a poem of praise, in Latin, to Gilbert, which was published in 1582. Gilbert then took the Hungarian poet along for his third voyage starting in 1583, in order to secure a poet to chronicle their adventures. The expedition contained four ships, out of which three landed, 50 days later, in Newfoundland's Saint John's Harbor. Parmenius sent a long letter back home from here, with one of the ships, describing to his 19