Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 1999 (11. évfolyam, 43. szám)
1999-11-12 / 43. szám
AMERICAN Hungarian Journal MEDITATIONS by Dr. Bela Bonis Pastor (562) 430-0876 First Hungarian Reformed Church, Hawthorne In one of the scornful passages in Either/Or, one of his philosophical writings, Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian thinker, complains that our era is not wicked but paltry. He discerns our smallness of soul in our lack of ultimate passion: the passion for God, for sin, for salvation. "Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lacemakers," he laments. The thoughts of their hearts are too flimsy to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Kierkegaard described his fellow Christians as shopkeeping souls. They did their religious duty in order to satisfy a God whom they conceived not as a purifying flame of love but as a cold balancer of debits and credits. "This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare", Kierkegaard concludes. "I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants... they sin." The writer of Psalm 28 is passionate about sin, not least of all his own. He calls on God not to stop his ears or remain silent. He implores God to answer his plea for help and to punish hypocrites. Psalms of imprecation make many Christians fidget, even though scripture and tradition both insist that divine judgment and divine mercy are inseparable. Our God, by contrast, is merely nice. And so are we. We would not dare ask God to bring his fury upon evildoers, lest we resemble those who are harsh and judgmental and unloving. Like latter-day Pharisees, we thank God that we are not as they are. The sociologist Peter Berger argues that our history and science have rendered us incapable of a perspective in which the universe is permeated by various divine interventions. We are left, insteadwith an infinite plurality of worldviews, religious, social structures. We dwell in a world without certainties, in "a vertigo of relativity." Every great religion must stand for the vindication of law. Christianity would be emasculated if the doctrine of Atonement were not at its heart. Still, Christianity is the religion of love as John 3:16 affirms. Jesus still is the one in whose presence you know who you really are - the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. In Jesus, you can see the wondrous transition of divine wrath to divine grace. John the Valiant Breaks the Language Barrier Book Review by Susan Jancso If ever a literary masterpiece needed a decent English translation, this was it. Had Sándor Petőfi’s Hungarian epic-folk-fable been written in one of the great world languages, it would have long taken its rightful place among the western world’s best known and best loved legends, along with Homer’s Ulysses, France’s Roland, Italy’s Orlando, Spain’s Don Quijote and England’s Camelot. And now it can, thanks to the inspired and dedicated seven-year effort of Professor John Ridland, an American poet born in London and teaching at U.C. Santa Barbara. The miraculous journey of John the Valiant is deeply embedded in the Hungarian psyche both in its epic form and its musical version, which combined the best talents of the age. The libretto was written by Jenő Heltai for lively wit and smooth pronouncibility, set to music by Pongrác Kacsóh in 1904, and transformed into grand opera by Ákos Buttykay. "János Vitéz" was first performed at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in 1931, and has been a popular favorite ever since. Its melodious arias such as "Blue lake, clear blue lake" have been sung by the finest artists as well as the man of the street, and they still touch a cord in the Hungarian heart. "Ostensibly for children, the tale can freeze a child’s marrow as it did mine, with its horrors of battles, giants, witches, ghosts and dragons; it can dazzle with wonderful ludicrous images such as the brave Hungarian hussars carrying their horses on their backs or crossing mountains, eating the air and squeezing water from a cloud as they go" writes Hungarian-British poet George Szirtes in his Foreword. "This complex dish is served up with a garnish of irony, nonsense and good humour that can laugh at itself and play havoc with geography, and enough bloodthirstiness and cruelty to launch a thousand corpses. The telling of the tale is accomplished with such brio you cannot help but be swept along by it..." Illustrator: Peter Meller The plot of John the Valiant is a mixture of folk tales, heroic epics and fairytales. The hero is an orphan boy, found in a cornfield and given the name Johnny Grain-o’-Corn. He falls in love with the other village orphan, the beautiful Iluska (Nell in the translation), who is tortured by a wicked stepmother. While dallying with Iluska, Johnny loses half the sheep he is supposed to be guarding, and has to run away. He runs into and escapes from bandits, then joins a troop of magnificent Hussars, pointing out that "God made the Magyars for the horse". They ride through a dozen countries of imaginary geography and arrive in France, where Johnny saves the king’s daughter from the Turks and is offered her hand in marriage. He is knighted and given the name "John the Valiant". However, his heart is still with Nell, and he returns to his native village, only to find that she had died at the hands of the wicked stepmother. From here on, the fairytale takes over. John plucks a rose from his sweetheart’s grave and starts wandering again, inviting adversity and death. He passes through the land of giants, scatters a witches’ convocation, and ultimately arrives on an island beyond the Seven Seas which is Fairyland. No sunrise, no sunset - no sunlight is shed, Dawn plays here unendingly, rosy and red. In that countryside, each fairy girl and her boy LTnacquainted with death live purely for joy. Despite of its timeless beauty, John is saddened by the fact that in Fairyland everyone has a mate except for him, and decides to drown himself in a lake. However, it turns out to be the water of life which revives Nell from the rose grown out of her remains, and they live happily ever after... "János Vitéz" was written in a few weeks of November and December 1844 by a young man who would turn twenty-two on New Year’s Day. It was published the following year, and a mere four years later Petőfi was dead. Although his lifetime was extremely brief, he used it well, leaving behind a body of work that makes him one of the greatest, if not the greatest Hungarian poet ever. Though slight of body, Sándor Petőfi was tough and resilient, having survived several years of dire poverty after a relatively sheltered childhood. He was already the most popular poet in Hungary when he wrote "János Vitéz". At an age where today’s young men are just beginning to show some promise, he was already an accomplished poet and a full-fledged human being, with a wide range of emotions and a love for his homeland that to this day moves his countrymen to heroic deeds. He died as he hoped to die, shedding his blood on the battlefield, proving that he meant what he said in the 1846 poem, "I’m often haunted by this thought": There would I like to lay down my life There would I shed the lifeblood of my youthful heart While from my lips a joyful song would rise, Over the sounds of battle, steel clanking, men dying Over the blare of trumpets and the cannons blasting, And through my dead body, on to the victory Fiery horses would gallop and rush Leaving my mangled body in the dust... (My own translation) Petőfi was able to vividly describe many events and places he did not - could not - have an experience of, including the ocean and the battlefield he had never seen. He worked as an actor in a traveling company which was "no less nor more disreputable than the one Shakespeare may have joined at a similar age" - writes John Ridland in his foreword, which is permeated by admiration, love and understanding of the Hungarian cultural heritage. He observes that the modern reader may be put off by Petőfi’s status as a "literary giant". But he makes an interesting observation, which is encouraging for readers of this new bilingual edition of Petőfi’s John the Valiant. "Foreigners, however, may have some advantages. Newcomers to a language or a culture may never learn all its nuances as seamlessly as natives, but we can approach its so-called ’Immortal Poems’ not as marble monuments but as living speech. They may become fresher poems for us than for native speakers, to be read more directly than before they’d been certified as Classics." About the translation, Ridland has this to say: "... if ’poetry is what gets lost in the translation,’ as Robert Frost (another candidate for popular immortality) said, then the shorter the poem, the more can be lost in an eyeblink. A longer narrative poem like this one, whatever stylistic pleasure it provides along the way, must carry the reader with its story." For those Hungarians who grew up under the Communist regime, and had to interpret the poem accordingly, he suggests: "Read János vitéz again (read as opposed to study or be dragged through). It’s such good fun." How did an American become so enchanted with this Hungarian national epic that he went to immeasurable lengths to transplant it into English? He was not hired to do the job, and certainly not offered great sums of money as an incentive. Not being related to any other language, Hungarian is not an easy language to approach, and the scarcity of good translators makes it even more difficult for speakers of other languages to discover the treasures of Hungarian literature. Are we Hungarians overestimating the greatness of Petőfi? It would not be a deadly sin if we were, but even the Encyclopaedia Britannica states: if there were no language barriers, Petőfi’s name would be mentioned today together with that of Robert Burns and Heinrich Heine. And experts such as French literary translator Guy Turbet-Delof had reinforced John Ridland’s faith that it was a worthy effort to translate János vitéz into English. Ridland describes his very first encounter with Petőfi’s epic like this. While visiting Budapest in 1987, he was taken to Hotel Erzsébet’s famous restaurant, János Cellar, where the walls above each booth had murals and stanzas of a poem in a language he did not understand. The one above their table showed a young man mounted on the back of a griffin, flying toward a village whose church steeple stood up against the horizon. The murals looked like pages from an illustrated children’s book, and yet he could not put them out of his mind. Upon his return to California, he looked up a prose translation of János vitéz by A.N. Nyerges, and later he enlisted the help of Márta Egri, who agreed to work with him. He started the actual translation process in 1991. He used every bit of help he could get, comparing the prose translations to previous literary ones, including Turbet-Delofs French, searching for the true spirit and the perfect "true rhymes". It took him seven years but it finally came together, and now anybody can read and enjoy the recently published bilingual edition of "John the Valiant" in John Ridland’s expert translation. Stanzas like this one, describing the mural he saw all those years ago at the János Cellar in Budapest: Over how many countries she’d crossed, Heaven knows, When suddenly, just as the bright sun arose: Well, the very first ray of the glittering dawn Straight onto John’s village’s steeple shone. Bringing about the bilingual edition was in large part the work of Dr. Antal Bejczy, a well-known researcher of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Lab. When he discovered the wonderful qualities of John Ridland’s translation, he left no stone unturned to achieve this goal. The volume was introduced in the Hungarian capital in September, including radio and television coverage and receptions by the Corvina Publishing House, the Széchenyi Library, and Professor Bejczy at - where else? - János Cellar, where the translator’s first encounter with the epic hero took place. **★★★*★★*****★*****★**★* 1999. november 12. murWlWfm 11 iJ nJii
