Category: VOLUME XII, No. 2

OUR AUTHORS

SZILÁRD  BIERNACZKY, CSc,  retired associate professor, music and ethnographic researcher, Africanist, book publisher, poet, and translator. His awards include the Károly Kós Prize and the Iroko Lifetime Achievement Award. His main research areas are Hungarian, Italian, and African literature, musical and oral traditions. Dr Biernaczky is the author and editor

ATOP FLANDERS POPPIES AND OTHER BLOOPERS

The year 2021 marks a century since the parents and siblings of my maternal grandfather, the future engineer and doctor of technical sciences Ervin Becker, had to leave their hometown, Selmecbánya, and to move to ‘Rump Hungary’, as it was called at that time. My grandfather had had to leave

THE UNITED STATES AND HUNGARY

Long Time Friends Right from the Start As the unprecedented presidential campaign came to end in 2020, it revealed the voting behaviour of a cross-section of American voters that is now worth studying insofar as it will, without a doubt, carry over into the next off-year election. To the extent

STOCKS OF LOVE—A PORTRAIT OF ISTVÁN SZEPSY

Film Snapshots of the Man Who Redefined the Tokaj Wine Region István Szepsy is a member of the sixteenth generation of a winegrowing dynasty in Tokaj, which first left an indelible mark on Hungary’s cultural and  economic  history  in  the  early  seventeenth  century.  Although  I        have been following Szepsy’s work

THE INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES KŐSZEG

Ferenc Miszlivetz and Jody Jensen in interview with Mátyás Kohán MK: The Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK) is now five years old. Could you sketch a guide to how to found a research facility of that rank in a modest little city in the Hungarian countryside? JJ: Our group

LÁSZLÓ MAGYAR—UNTOLD STORIES OF A HUNGARIAN EXPLORER
BORN TWO HUND

Part II MAGYAR’S RECEPTION IN HUNGARY AND ABROAD Owing to his Hungarian patriotism, and—having been an illegitimate child— his family circumstances and upbringing (he wanted to prove himself to his father), he insisted on publishing his books and other writings in Hungarian, despite offers from Portugal and Britain. Consequently, although

TWO POEMS

Pilgrimage Chaucer caught me up a month before my birth, sent a signal through the amniotic soup to cue my DNA: remember, pilgrimage is part of your green heritage. I dropped to earth with boots and stick a faint prophetic sign, advancing Zechariah’s promise to those aged Jews. Then Bunyan

BOOK REVIEW

A Nation Dismembered A poet is compelled to write, even if only a grey sparrow. And my feathers will be whirling down, with ink dripping from the ste Árpád Farkas, ‘Open Skies’, 1991 This selection of work* by thirty-seven Hungarian poets, stretching from 1918 to the year 2000, was based on

REDEFINING THE CONCEPT OF THE HUNGARIAN NATION

Part II In 2010, the parties of the conservative coalition, the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz)–Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) led by Viktor Orbán won a two-thirds parliamentary majority and were able to launch a new kin-state policy that involved the redefinition of the nation on an ethno-cultural basis to

UNIVERSITY TEACHING IN HUNGARIAN AT THE NOVI SAD FACULTY OF LAW

A Retrospective after Fifty Years This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the success that launching concurrent instruction in Hungarian at the Novi Sad1 Faculty of Law meant to many of us. Alas, none of this survives today, except in memory. Yet my friends tell me that I should at