Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1975 (3. évfolyam, 6-8. szám)
1975 / 8. szám
ARTICLES AND PAPERS Bisztray, George, "With the People through a Thousand Dangers: East Central European Populism,” Mosaic VI (Summer 1973), 39-49. In the West revolutionary movements led to the isolation of the poet from the masses, but in the East populism (nepiesse'g) characterizes much of the literature, i.e. “a conception of leadership in which some distance between the leader and the masses is conceivable in terms of eminence, although the aims and interests of the leader and the masses are truly identical.” Sa'ndor Petőfi’s view of the function of poetry is a model for this populism. He turned sympathy for the people into socio-political activism. He recognized the class antagonism and reproached Hungary for this. In his poems he fights the inner enemy. His poetic populism is seen by Bisztray as the ideal of national, social and spiritual intellectual freedom; the poet himself as a “vatic seer of past and future,” and an active social force. The abyss of social resignation did not triumph in Hungary. Tompa's A madár fiaihoz(The Bird to His Sons) and Arany’s A walesi bárdok (The Bards of Wales) already express resurging hope in the 1850s. In the 20th century, too, poets kept in close contact with the people: Endre Ady and Attila József are cited as examples. The poet, even today, is a political force in Eastern Europe whereas his political impact in the West is negligible. □ (Continued next page) BOOKS (Continued) included a good number of respected personalities, the author discusses in four chapters Teleki's early career, his efforts to change the terms of the Trianon Treaty, his struggle for his country caught between the forces of East and West, and the dilemma he was unable to resolve but by suicide. One of his ancestors, Mihály Teleki was governor of Transylvania in 1685, and Paul Teleki’s policy was said to resemble that of his particularly esteemed ancestor who had been a leading figure in the struggle “between two pagans for one fatherland," i.e. between the Ottomans and the Germans who had equally menaced Transylvania. In his days Paul Teleki frequently made reference to the double danger that threatened Hungary, that of the Slavs and the Germans. He believed in the power of knowledge and in his various roles in academe and in government, strongly supported social science research. He was a reformer at heart with strong humanist and religious leanings strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon political ideas. He thought of social institutions such as the YMCA and the Boy Scout movement as suitable channels for the dissemination of western democratic ideas and supported them strongly. He was a nominal collaborator with the Germans under enormous military pressure and expressed his relationship once by saying that Hitler wanted 10,000 freight cars full of wheat and he sent him a bouquet of flowers instead. He had widespread contacts with the academic communities of the world, visited the U.S. as early as 1912, lectured here in the early 1920’s (see the review of his book above), and received a honorary doctoral degree from Columbia U. in 1935. When conditions reached a point where he no longer felt himself capable of fulfilling his difficult and unhappy task as prime minister, he committed suicide. The New York Times commented:“For a man of Teleki’s temperment and character, suicide was a deliberate act, an act of state, the only gesture he could make of protest and refusal.” Vegesv István. ANGOL-MAGYAR KÜLKERESKEDELMI SZÓTÁR. (English-Hungarian Foreign Trade Dictionary.) Budapest: Közgazdasági es Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1974. 632 pages. Forint 83.00 cloth. The second edition of this highly specialized dictionary is designed to assist translation of texts related to general economics, foreign trade, and business matters from English to Hungarian. It extends its coverage also to such related areas as banking, stock exchange, commercial law, transportation, communication, accounting, statistics, market research, advertisement, customs and shipping. It presents technical terms in their every day context, thus it includes a good number of non-technical popular terms. Because the approach to the substantive areas is from the English rather than from the Hungarian language, there seems to be a definite bias toward coverage of capitalist terminology to the expense of socialist terminology but sufficient coverage of the latter is given to assist translations into the socialist frame of reference. The second and revised edition contains about 4,000 more terms than did the first edition. Most of the new terms refer to economic development, environmental and computer technology. Wojatsek, Charles. HUNGARIAN TEXTBOOK AND GRAMMAR. (3rd rev. ed.) Toronto: Sovereign Press, 1974. 324 pages, illustr. $6.00 paper. Available from Pannónia Books, P.O. Box 1017, Postal Station “B", Toronto, M5T 2T8, Canada, or Hungarian Central Committee, 16403 Southland Ave., Cleveland, OH 44111. This is the third and revised edition of a text which first appeared in 1962. Reprints are some indicators of interest, and good Hungarian language texts are scarce. Perhaps the most thorough and most intensively tried set for learning the spoken language is that of the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, Calif., which is not readily available through commercial channels. Another set in two volumes based on the DLI method, that of the U.S. State Department (Foreign Service Institute), Hungarian Basic Course, Units 1-12 and 13-24, is available through the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. The early pioneer of Hungarian language texts A.H. Whitney’s Colloquial Hungarian (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950) has gone out of use, hence Wojatsek’s text fills an obvious void. Neither he, nor the only text published in Hungary, Z. Banhidi, Z. Jo'kay, and D. Szabó, Learn Hungarian, (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1965) apply dialogues, drills, and cartoons as stimuli. Wojatsek’s book includes reading exercises, questions to be answered in Hungarian, vocabulary, grammatical explanations and various exercises. It is illustrated with twenty photographs and two maps. Phonograph records to accompany the text are also available. Prof. Wojatsek is at the Dept, of History, Bishop’s U., Lennoxville, Quebec. (Continued on page 10) 4 NO. 8 1975 HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER
