Category: The Arts

The following 1977 essay by Gyula Illyés, Hungary’s major writer of the mid to late 20th century, on the disenfranchisement of national minorities is a remarkable document and an exposition of ideas. Speaking of these communities representing universal values everywhere in the world, and on the chances of remedying their

In the year currently drawing to a close, Gottfried Herder’s noteworthy prediction has once more shaken our intellectual life, if only on the surface. As Emil Kolozsvári Grandpierre wrote in Kortárs,1 the gloomy prediction has been mentioned by many for almost two hundred years, but it is never quoted accurately.

The earliest records show the southern part of Transylvania belonging to Dacia, a Roman colony at the very frontiers of the Empire. With the fall of Rome that area was overrun by successive waves of invaders, the Ostrogoths, the Huns, the Bulgarians, the Avars, etc., and finally in 896 AD by Hungarian tribes that occupied the whole Carpathian Basin. Then for a thousand years Transylvania was the home of Hungarians alongside Romanians and the descendants

It was good news indeed to have learned that the Cambridge-based English poet Clive Wilmer was awarded the 2018 Janus Pannonius Prize for Translation. Wilmer and myself have been friends for nearly five decades co-translating modern Hungarian poetry into English, our joint efforts resulting in two books by Miklós Radnóti,

The Museum of Music History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) is the first venue in Hungary to have curated and hosted a commemorative exhibition of Sándor Veress (1907 Kolozsvár–1992 Bern), one of the foremost Hungarian composers of our time. Veress’s work, comprising definitive contributions to folk music research

Dedicated to Zoltán Kodály, on the 50th anniversary of his death and his visit to Santa Barbara, and to Ernő Dániel, on the 40th anniversary of his death In 1972, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Zoltán Kodály’s death, Muzsika, a Hungarian magazine dedicated to classical music, invited

The Quincentennial of the Reformation supplies a particularly opportune moment to remember a stained glass window made by Hungarian masters known as Het Hongaarse Raam (“The Hungarian Window”), which made headlines in the press in 1923, when it was completed, but later somehow fell off the radar screen of researchers.1

One of the many memorable scenes in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wonderful Between the Woods and the Water involves a haystack, laughter and “those marvellous girls”. Then without exchanging another word we struck out for the shore [of the river where he and István had been swimming naked] as fast as