Authors:László Munteán Pages: 1 - 19 Abstract: This article explores the technological and cultural history of the Roman aqueduct of Aquincum in Budapest. The only one in the Roman province of Pannonia that was elevated to a continuous line of arches, this aqueduct conveyed water from its source in what is now Budapest’s third district to its final destination over three miles to the south, where a Roman military town was located. Apart from the aqueduct’s technological and archaeological aspects, this article also examines several cultural practices that it engendered including the ritualistic significance of the springs that fed it, its appearance as a ruin in various medieval documents, the transformation of its last, above-ground pier into a Christian shrine in the nineteenth century, as well as the relocation of two of its piers to give way to the construction of a road junction. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.424 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Éva Márkus, Maya Lo Bello Pages: 20 - 40 Abstract: In the Carpathian Basin, German-speaking peoples have lived alongside Hungarians for hundreds of years, resulting in many, shared points of cultural intermingling. (Although commonly referred to as svábok [‘Swabians’], this is not the correct term for Hungary’s German minorities since their origins differ from those of Swabians living in Germany today). After World War II, thousands of Hungarian Germans were deported to Germany. Those who remained could not use their native language and dialect in public. Today, young generations reconnect with their German roots in state-funded, national minority schools where, through the medium of Hochdeutsch, students are familiarized with their Hungarian German dialect, history and traditions in a subject called népismeret [‘folk education’]. This paper provides a brief overview of the current legal documents and rulings that determine the curriculum in Hungary’s national minority schools before detailing the topics studied in a Hungarian German folk education class. We contend that the overwhelming losses in cultural heritage that resulted from assimilation must be reversed in a process that simultaneously respects their unique, dual identity. To this end, we recommend adapting the curriculum of folk education to include an alternative, more inclusive perspective of famous, “Hungarian” individuals. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.426 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Zsófia Kucserka Pages: 41 - 51 Abstract: Although Zsigmond Kemény (1814-1875) and Miklós Jósika (1794-1865) inevitably figure among the most significant writers of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature, the interpretation of their novels is embedded within international historical contexts that are often inaccessible to the present-day reader. This study examines the physiognomic meanings of parent-child similarity in nineteenth-century novels and thus situates the examined works within the context of European literary and intellectual history. Such an interpretation of the novels reveals the diverse and strong current in the history of European ideas with which the analyzed texts engage in a lively dialogue. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.416 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Mari Réthelyi Pages: 52 - 64 Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, the Khazar ancestry of European Jewry was a popular idea that particularly resonated throughout the discourse surrounding Hungary’s national origin and belonging. One of this discourse’s critical questions concerned whether Magyars and Jews were divided or united by ethnicity or religion: this paper demonstrates how Samuel Kohn (1841-1920), an important rabbi-scholar of the time, participated in this discussion by arguing for a common origin of the two groups. Kohn asserted that the Khazar ancestry of Hungarian Jews comprises both an ethnic and a religious connection. He considered two complementary questions: whether Hungarians and Jews possessed common ethnic origins and thereby belonged to the same race, and whether Magyars converted to Judaism during the Khazar era, i.e., the belief that Hungarians and Jews shared a common religion in the past. The contemporary political atmosphere magnified the significance of Kohn’s contribution. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.427 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Izabella Agárdi Pages: 65 - 79 Abstract: The article contextualizes the oral life stories of three Hungarian-speaking women and their connections to the national histories of East-Central Europe. Through these three life narratives, I argue that in reconstructing their own life stories, the women articulate historical change. The women – born in the 1920s in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and coming of age in a socialist Eastern bloc as citizens of different nation-states – make up a generation as well as a mnemonic community with divergent versions of their community’s past. They talk about childhood in the interwar era, their maturation during the Second World War, their married life and work during the early years of socialism and their retirement years after 1989. In so doing, they give shape to starkly different family histories and personal experiences which inform not only their political sensibilities, but also their sense of womanhood, ethnicity, social standing and assessments of the past. While placing themselves into a sequence of events, they maintain their sense of integrity and construct political subjectivities. Their stories are imprints of a deeply divided collective memory of a generation bearing all the complexities that make women’s history different from the mainstream historiographical canon. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.428 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Ildikó Szántó Pages: 80 - 99 Abstract: Based on the long-term, demographic forecast, Hungary faces a significant population loss. This paper examines the continuing low level of Hungarian fertility, as well as the marked decline of population due to out-migration beginning in the mid-2000s. First, I will discuss the role governmental family policies play in halting fertility decline before 1989, the demographic post-transitional period of 1960-1980 and the past thirty years since 1989. Second, this paper particularly aims to highlight the impact of the new family policy since 2010, a reverse redistribution of resources from poor to the better-off families which did not result in a marked growth of birth rates. The new family benefits possibly further contribute to the existing polarization of Hungarian society without altering Hungary’s demographic data. Finally, the paper also compares the recent changes of family policies in Poland, Hungary and Romania since 2004. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.429 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Beáta Bálizs Pages: 100 - 120 Abstract: Embedded in culture historical research on color, the present study contributes to the hypothesis that a given color only obtains its cultural or symbolical meanings in association with another color. By analyzing Hungarian examples of the color yellow, I will demonstrate that a color may have associations of a different character in relation to another color: this association may rely on symbolism alone, as seen in the relationship between yellow and black in connection with the concept of impurity tied to bile, excrement and dirty soil. Connections between colors may also be based on sensory-psychological/cognitive similarities, such as those drawn between yellow and green in earlier times across Europe, an association that can be traced in some archaic elements of Hungarian culture, such as in the ideas connected to jaundice. In addition to this argument, I also propose that, out of excreta, compared to feces light yellow urine is closer to the category of white associated with purity (through the analogy of white wine) than to yellow which (also) symbolizes impurity. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.430 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Peter Sherwood Pages: 121 - 122 Abstract: Introduction: The three papers in this cluster are very diverse as regards genre, focus and approach, but what their authors share is a passionate devotion to the promotion of Hungarian literature in the English-speaking world. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.431 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Peter Sherwood Pages: 123 - 144 Abstract: László Krasznahorkai is now the best-known Hungarian writer in the English-speaking world (perhaps in the world, period). But what is the precise nature of the relationship between his Hungarian works and their English translations that have been, on the whole, so well received in Britain and especially the USA' This article takes a very close linguistic look at one his shorter works, ÁllatVanBent, in a version by Ottilie Mulzet, co-recipient with George Szirtes of the translators’ share of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, which recognized Krasznahorkai for his “achievement in fiction on the world stage.” I argue that Ottilie Mulzet’s translation is in a hybrid English that in some places evidences a misunderstanding of the Hungarian, and in others claims to be a foreignized, “Krasznahorkai-English” that is, however, insufficiently justified by the original. More broadly, the article thus takes issue with the increasingly widely held view that the translator is not merely a co-author but enjoys a kind of authorial autonomy that implies that the translation can be judged without close reference to the original. As Krasznahorkai’s known views on translation suggest the acceptance of this notion, he is therefore, to a degree, complicit in the partial misrepresentation (and hence misconstrual) of his work.
Authors:Anna Bentley Pages: 145 - 163 Abstract: This paper asks why so few works of Hungarian children’s literature have made it to publication in English-speaking countries. It finds that few translated children’s books make it onto the English-language market and those translations that are successful mainly appear in major European languages. Representation at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair has been dogged by a lack of financial resources and polish while Hungarian State funding has lacked continuity. Nearly all the English translations of Hungarian children’s books available today have been published in Hungary, although a book will occasionally find its way to foreign publishers by informal means. This paper also follows the development of Hungarian children’s literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day, noting changes in terms of character, subject matter and attitudes to diversity and use of the fairy-tale tradition. It outlines one recent controversy surrounding the publication of Meseország mindenkié [’Storyland for Everybody’], a book which aims, in contrast to the current regime’s ideology, to represent the marginalized in Hungarian society. It also details recent clashes sparked by the new Hungarian National School Curriculum and one writer’s feminist critique of a classic text. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.433 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Jozefina Komporaly Pages: 164 - 175 Abstract: Reflecting on my experience of translating contemporary Hungarian theater into English, this paper examines the fluidity of dramatic texts in their original and in translation, and charts collaborations between playwrights, translators and theater-makers. Mindful of the responsibility when working from a “minor” to a “major” language, the paper signals the discrepancy between the indigenous and foreign ‘recognition circuit’ and observes that translations from lesser-known languages are predominantly marked by a supply-driven agenda. Through case studies from the work of Transylvanian-Hungarian playwright András Visky, the paper argues that considerations regarding such key tenets of live theater as “speakability” and “performability” have to be addressed in parallel with correspondences in meaning, rhythm and spirit. The paper also points out that register and the status of certain lexical choices differ in various languages. Nuancing the trajectory of Visky’s plays in English translation, this paper makes a case for translations created with and for their originals, in full knowledge of the source and receiving cultures, and with a view to their potential in performance. The paper posits the need for multiple options encoded in the translation journey, including hypothetical concepts for future mise-en-scène, and situates the translator as a key participant in the performance making process. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.434 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Maya J. Lo Bello Pages: 176 - 185 Abstract: This review article examines the 2018 publication by Helena History Press of A Nation Adrift [‘Az elsodort ország’]: The 1944-1945 Wartime Diaries of Miksa Fenyő. Translated by Miksa Fenyő’s son, Mario D. Fenyő, this work gains new layers of meaning when alternately read as a Holocaust narrative, a family history, an example of life writing and the continuation of intellectual activity in the face of great adversity. Only recently available to an English-speaking audience, Az elsodort ország provides a remarkably comprehensive, well-composed description of the Hungarian Holocaust, World War II and the Siege of Budapest, as related by Miksa Fenyő (1877-1972), the former editor and critic of the modern literary journal, Nyugat [‘West’] and deputy director of GyOSz [Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetsége; ‘Association of Hungarian Industrialists’]. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.436 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Louise O. Vasvári Pages: 186 - 204 Abstract: Kinga Király conducted interviews with ten North Transylvanian survivors who represent the last witnesses of a generation that is about to disappear and leave us with the question of what to remember and how. On reading the testimonies catalogued in the volume Király produced from those interviews, I realized that I felt compelled to make further connections with my own research on foodways and war trauma and on the ecologies of survival witnessing. In a section on the mass genocide of Transylvanian Jewry I provide a brief historical sketch to help the understanding of the historical complexity and tragedy of the lives of pre- and postwar Transylvanian Jewry. I then contrast the stories of some of Király's subjects with the postwar memoirs of other Transylvanian survivors who emigrated either right after the war or under the Ceausescu dictatorship. I discuss prewar Transylvanian Jewish food culture, and subsequently locate Király's collection as a continuation of the tradition of the memorial or yizkor [‘remembrance’] books. Finally, I discuss Jewish cemeteries and the virtual social death of Jewish tradition in Transylvania, to ask: what is it that remains today from the shattered culture of Transylvanian Jewry' PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.437 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Zsuzsanna Varga Pages: 205 - 213 Abstract: As the above title indicates, because of the publication schedule of Hungarian Cultural Studies this bibliography straddles 2020-2021, covering the period since the publication in Fall of 2020 of last year’s bibliography in this journal. Each year’s bibliography may also be supplemented by earlier items, which were retrieved only recently. Although this bibliography series can only concentrate on English-language items, occasional items of particular interest in other languages may be included. For a more extensive bibliography of Hungarian Studies from about 2000 to 2010, for which this is a continuing update, see Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and Carlo Salzani. “Bibliography for Work in Hungarian Studies as Comparative Central European Studies.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Library) (2011): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/hungarianstudiesbibliography PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.435 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
Authors:Izabella Agárdi Pages: 214 - 217 Abstract: Fodor, Mónika. 2020. Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives: Politics of the Untold. New York and London: Routledge. 285 pp. PubDate: 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2021.440 Issue No:Vol. 14 (2021)
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