TO GYULA KODOLÁNYI AT 80

Words quarrel, ideas clash, truths hide, theories mislead, deadlines have seized strategic chokepoints threatening paralysis, supplies of semicolons have failed to arrive on time, metaphors and similes are suspected of being enemy agents, irony and litotes have changed the road signs sending the unwary in the wrong directions, and all is confusion in the fog of editing.

Rumours abound that help is on the way. Optimism rises in the dugout: ‘We say it happens about six times a year’. And then it arrives and somehow, magically, everything is sorted out with only the occasional deadline breached or ignored.

London had in the BBC an office wonderfully named: the Director of the Spoken Word. Budapest has its own Director of the Word Spoken and Written, prose and poetry, creative and critical, grave and gay. 

We congratulate him on passing another milestone with grace and elegance, especially elegance of words.

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