Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
he also tried his hand at using classical metre. His work translated into English as Wheel o/) Fortune by George Szirtes, is possibly a poetic record of his own bitter experience with the mutability of good and ill luck: "Your merit means nothing to one who is blind, / Whom one day she frees, the next she will bind." A more appealing picture is painted in his Fairy Garden, where flowers and plants begin to dance in the poet’s dream. The bluebell and the daisy "bend a knee / in due respect / Smile and bow 1 as bound by courtly etiquette.” He also wrote a chain of tales set in the frame of a company of guests at a noble house spending eight nights at exchanging adventure-stories. Reminiscent of the Decameron, the narrative sequence called Winter Nightd was published, bound together with "poetic miscellanea", posthumously by Miklós Révai in 1787. Many, even in Hungary, are unaware of the fact that the words of the Lenten hymn beginning with the words "Mourn you, oh Christians" was actually written by Faludi. Faludi was a great collector of proverbs, "words which go together well”, "fine explanations”, and "ornamental expressions." The words ellenfél and nyetvbotldi, which are Hungarian for "opponent" and "slip of the tongue" were coined by him. His translation of "satire" — izatira in present-day Hungarian — was mardozó bazéd, or "words that bite.” In spite of his influence on such outstanding figures of Hungarian literature as Miklós Révai, Ferenc Verseghy, and Mihály Csokonai, Faludi is described by literary historian Balázs Vargha as merely "antiquarian." Although he is scarcely known today, Révai gave this account of Faludi's contemporary fame: "thanks to his beautiful voice as a writer, he was known by all and sundry as the Hungarian Cicero." The Nun Who Can Flit Through a Wall It is not - as one might expect — to the officially protected name of the street in District I today called Országház (Parliament Street, formerly Sütő utca and, from 1790, Landhaus Gasse) that the memorial sculpture made to plans by Miklós Melocco and installed in 1977 refers. What the beautiful little colour figure, romantically built into, or sprouting out of, the wall overlooking Kapisztrán tér at the end of the street is meant to conjure up, with its angelic 18
