Category: VOLUME IX, No. 6

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,