Category: Arts and Literature

When Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009 the Nobel Foundation praised her for her power to depict “the landscape of the dispossessed.” Considering the role the Nobel Prize plays in the formation of a canon of world literature, it is perhaps not surprising that the

If someone asks I have at hand a view and at home another two in me sleep the flies I can get homesick too sometimes the heartshit this white beating like Jasmine this time I won’t go there for On the tour boat last time I sat by an old

I first came to Budapest in February 1991. As an ardent student of architecture and design in the period 1880–1914, I used the little free time I had to study those secession buildings I already knew something about. The information I came with was minimal in those pre-internet days, when

78,000 characters equals sixty-two typewritten pages according to the old standard. An obsolete standard. No counting by standardized pages anymore, neither little nor big. But the detailed data of a sculptor’s career, sixty-two typewritten pages worth, have finally been recorded on the last pages of Ildikó Várnagy’s album, a veritable

On the Occasion of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Ferenc Liszt … With courageous faith you spread the fame of Hungarian music, and in distant lands do not forget where they once rocked Ferenc Liszt’s cradle. (lines from the poem To Ferenc Liszt, by Mihály Vörösmarty) Ferenc Liszt was

The film was followed by a few moments of silence that felt like an eternity in the crowded Uránia theatre. Only afterwards was there applause, but subdued and careful, as if for lack of a better response the viewers who had assembled for the premier had felt compelled, out of

The Furniture Designers of Hungarian Art Nouveau As Anna Lesznai writes in her book The Garden of Eden (1918), “Where we stood, time was not passing,Thus our encounter became everlasting.” At that time György Lukács considered the artist, decorator and writer Anna Lesznai someone who lived as one with the universe, in

An Essay on Language In his book Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Friedrich Nietzsche claims that “the people native to the Ural-Altaic language region (where the concept of the subject is the most rudimentary) are very likely to look at the world differently and discover different modes and manners for themselves

In September 1948 the famous poet Paul Éluard, perhaps the brightest star among the French Communist Party intellectuals, toured Central Europe. He visited Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where I met him when he visited the class in which we were familiarising ourselves with the secrets of the French language. Éluard was

But listen to the end… Then nothing more… It changes its meaning. (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus) Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon… (Wallace Stevens) For me Charon’s Ferry, Bruce Berlind’s beautiful translations of Gyula Illyés’ poetry, is also a remarkable selection of last poems. Why call them “last poems”