Category: Arts and Literature

THE TREE THAT REACHED THE SKY – A HUNGARIAN FOLK TALE

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, far beyond the end of the world, I saddled a nag, leapt upon her back and rode into the forest. I ate well, I drank well, and I put the nag under my head for a pillow. All of a sudden

TWO POEMS

Translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri NOCTURNE Blue-black, the night sky. Bushes stand guard at the roadside. The trees’ chained shadows bay like far-off dogs. Life sparkles on the world’s big blooms like jewelled wine. Gaunt angels glide; with a sponge they dry it up. In

INTRODUCING THE POEMS OF SÁNDOR MÁRAI

“I am not a poet”, Márai insisted. That would seem to settle it, but it has to be remembered that Márai had exceptionally high standards and he was playing with prosody at a time of exceptional fecundity in Hungarian poetry. He was the contemporary of Attila József (considered by some

REQUIEM FOR A BYGONE COUNTRY – PERSONAL NOTES ON YUGOSLAVIA

Once upon a time there was a country. With a MOO COW and a BUNNY living in it. Happily and unhappily by turns. This way one day, that way the next. The sun would rise, run its course, then sink behind the horizon. This is how this country was. Neither

THE MEMORY OF THE FUTURE – ON THE WORK OF SIMON HANTAI

Nearly five years after the artist’s death and 35 years after his last major exhibition, a retrospective of Hantai’s work opened on 21 May 2013, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The exhibition is by far the most complete showing ever of the works of one of the preeminent figures

MAKING THE SILENT DEEP SPEAK

On the Danube-Concept of Thomas Kabdebo’s Novel Trilogy Danubius Danubia  As I sat on the bottom step of the wharf,A melon-rind flowed by with the current;Wrapped in my fate I hardly heard the chatterOf the surface, while the deep was silent.As if my own heart had opened its gate:The Danube was

NOTES AND POEMS ABOUT RADIO

THE AGE OF RADIO It was the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 that made the world fully aware of the vital necessity, the deadly seriousness of radio. The survivors owed their lives to radio; those who perished drowned only because of confusion in the ship’s radio room and

A GERMAN HISTORY REINTERPRETED

Lucian Boia: Tragedia Germaniei 1914–1945 [The Tragedy of Germany 1914–1945]. Humanitas, Bucharest, 2010. 142 p. For some years now, historians have been seeking new ways to interpret Germany’s 20th century history. In the 1960’s, the “Sonderweg” theory seemed unassailable. Its thesis: that Hitler and Auschwitz were the logical and necessary product of