Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

George Cushing: Eger - British connections

mournful silence reigned throughout. ... There is nothing in Erlau to detain a stranger, it is in general ill built; almost the only good houses I noticed were those of the canons. Here is a Turkish tower in very good condition. In the town wax is bleached, and not far from it Cordovan leather is prepared: red, yellow and black are made; the first two kinds are chiefly used for women's boots but their colours do not stand.

0 Townson is wrong, incidentally, about the Hungarian birth of either Kracker or Sigrist, the painters of the ceilings in the Lyceum. And here too is something of a mystery. Some years later, in 1810, a Russian naval officer, Vladimir Bronyevskij, also visited Eger on his way from Trieste to St. Petersburg. He published his diary there shortly after his return. If certain passages in it are compared with Townson's account, they appear identical - for example this mistake about the painters, the details of the Council of Trent and the remark about the leather for women's shoes. Could Bronyevskij have seen a copy of Townson, either in English or in French?'

6 In the nineteenth century, with the improvement of communications and the dissemination of guide-books, travel became easier and Central Europe less exotic. It is worth noting, however, that the early editions of Baedeker were totally wrong about Eger: the famous siege was dated 1535 and the building of the Lyceum was attributed to Archbishop Pyrker.'

7 But by that time there were other connections between Eger and Britain. I suspect that very few Hungarian writers (and citizens of Eger too) have had their death recorded so promptly in the English-speaking world as Vitkovics Mihály. In 1830 Sir John Bowring published the first anthology of Hungarian verse in English, entitled Poetry of the Magyars. This includes nine poems written by Vitkovics, but that is not all. Bowring's long introduction includes biographical sketches of each poet; that from Vitkovics begins 'While the paper is yet wet which bears these translations from Vitkovics, I receive the intelligence that this interesting poet has ceased to be. He died on the 9th of September 1829.'

8 The poems for translation were not selected by Bowring, but sent to him by Karl Georg Rumy together with a German version from which Bowring made his versions. He did not know Hungarian. The nine poems include Füredi pásztor dala, Cencihez and Megelégedés. But there is also his version of a Serbian folk poem, entitled Az elváló leány, which appears in the 55