Living at the speed of two languages

I finally got around to Hungarian literature in the form of Ferenc Molnar's The Paul Street Boys (A Pal Utcai Fiuk), a century-old novella about two rival gangs in Budapest. It had its merits, from the comical (I still laugh when I think about little Nemecsek falling into the Danube, and Csonakos asking, "Did you have a drink, laddie?") to the political (Molnar draws overt links between the gangs' pivotal battle and the real turf wars between states).

Not that I expected much from a book for young people, but still, to call this a "true world classic" (preface by Molnar's grandson) is a little silly. Some of it is the author's fault, e.g., martyring a schoolboy (sorry to ruin the ending if you were planning to read it). But to Molnar's credit, much of the problem is the translation. I once thought if you could speak two languages that was enough to translate, so it amazes me still how vital is a translator with a handle on the mechanics as well as literary form. This creates I think a divide that questions where credit is due: is the author great if the translator isn't? Conversely, can a talented translator fill in where an author is lacking?

The topic also resonates as I finish up Crime and Punishment. Not only do Raskolnikov and Razumikhin translate works between Russian and German, there's a circular scene in which Sonia reads in Russian the passage about Lazarus from a bible that has been translated (from I don't know what, German? Latin? English?) but of course I am reading this all in English. The translator, then, must have been very self-aware as he worked on Dostoevsky.

As in many introductions to Russian lit, this one clarifies the peculiarities of Russian names. But it goes a step further, explaining that the translator chose to keep some possible sources of confusion (such as referring to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov as Rodia) because he is in Russia, the reader must remember.

I thought of it again last week at a Hungarian rendition of Hello, Dolly! Because I wasn't familiar with the plot, my subconscious succumbed to the Hungarian dialogue and repeatedly believed that the characters were traveling from Budapest (rather than Yonkers) to Manhattan. Again I relied on some translation and again felt the guilt of missing out on works as they are in the original (not that the Hungarian Hello, Dolly! is original...). I've read an untranslated work once in my life, Marquez's Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada, and it was immensely more beautiful and there is so much that just can't be translated. Hence my insistence that we preserve as much as possible, sans translation.

The only argument I've heard against bilingualism, and I heard it recently, was that one language would detract from the other so you'd never really have a command of either. But I reject it, else how could Milan Kundera write in French and Czech? So, Hungarians, that is one thing you must work on. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised at the scarcity of English speakers here, as so many politicians around the world don't speak English, but even Hungarians themselves admit that not enough of them, especially compared to neighboring countries, know the language.

Of the merits of bilingualism, though, I again share this argument a la Eddie Izzard:


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Watching: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Listening to: Springsteen, Greatest Hits

Field trip: Debrecen refugee camp

Technically I'm not a refugee because my family left Vietnam voluntarily and for economic reasons, though I did live in a refugee camp in the Philippines for a few months. But I remember nothing, so the trip with my Refugee Law class to a camp in Debrecen was really my first. It would be foolish (but probably unavoidable) to predict what such a camp would be like. We drove three hours east by bus and entered what looked like an elementary school: dry, green and yellow grass; subdued, white and beige buildings with flat roofs; and in the middle, a wooden jungle gym and a blacktop for football and basketball. One classmate said it looked like a summer camp. Another took offense at the gray walls and barbed wire along the perimeter.

At first we expected to be observers, like apprentices come to examine this specimen called the refugee. I think I expected them to be used to visitors, but they're there for such a short time we might have been the first such group to drop in. So they stared at us as much as we did them. It occurred to me as they tried to answer in Hungarian that they might have thought we were locals and they were the outsiders (while we had thought something similar of them). But Central European University is made up of so many international students (and few Hungarians) that this Refugee Law class is often introspective and just about everyone is an outsider.

We had a panel discussion with the camp director and then the decider, an asylum official, both in a bright yellow room with childrens' drawings and posters from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the walls, origami cranes hanging from the ceiling, and crayon marks on the floor tiles. At any given time there are some 700 asylum seekers hosted at the camp, where they stay for two months on average and receive around $30 petty cash a month. Debrecen generally serves as a stopping point for asylum seekers from Eastern and Southeastern Europe on their way west.

"They don't like us," the director said of Debrecen's locals and authorities. It's probably safe to say that such a negative reception conflicts with the view of most people in that room, and yet I get the impression it's a common sentiment (racism? xenophobia? nationalism?) in any region with a sizable foreign population. I don't think I could ever empathize with such a sentiment, but how, I wondered, could there be such a wall between our openness to foreigners and their rejection of them, both of which seem 'normal'? It's true, we're a self-selected group, students who choose to study refugee law. Still I don't understand it.

Part of it, the director suggested, was the perception of criminal activity among arrivals (though I stress perception because I reject the claim that it is any more prevalent among this group than another). Some shoplift, he said, admitting that just that morning police took a camp resident into custody on human trafficking charges.

I don't know which bothered me more - the crimes, or a potential cause of the crimes, namely the inactivity among the refugees. Most don't stick around long enough to find employment as they wait for their cases to be decided, and of the children, only one-sixth of them can be accommodated at the local schools. As someone asked the director how people spend their time, a handful of children banged on the door, divided between remaining obediently outside and spilling into the room like paparazzi anytime someone went in or out.

"This is what the kids do," the director joked. "I don't want to say what they do when they're more active! Same for adults."

The children turned out to be the unexpected highlight of the trip. It began slowly, with two or three boys peering curiously in through a six-inch gap in the window. As we walked by the jungle gym and the football matches, one or two would greet us with the only Hungarian they knew, "Szia!" But once the camera came out, all hell broke loose. I took a couple shots and showed them to the children, who quickly caught on and clamored around the camera. We had no common language, so they pointed and posed, competing for the attention of the lens. (Note: At the camp's request, I am not posting any photos of them.) It was a shallow friendship but I'm not complaining, because the icebreaker encouraged the children to follow us around for the day, and when we left, they waved goodbye and cartwheeled and ran along the side of the bus.

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Listening to: More Dirty Dancing [soundtrack]

Red, white, and green

In emails and local publications, I'd been reading warnings about the violence that has become typical on March 15, equivalent to Hungary's Fourth of July. I even read lists of hot spots to avoid, but yesterday was mild compared to the egg-pelting of years past, especially the destruction of 2006, following a leaked tape of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany admitting he'd lied about the dismal economy. I say mild, partly because I didn't get out much, but mainly because, aside from a few arrests (including one person with a case of eggs), there were few reports of conflicts.

But expectations of unrest were understandable. As seen in 2006, Hungary has been suffering economically since long before the current crisis; little has been said since an International Monetary Fund bailout was announced in October, and the European Union's rejection this month of a proposed $240 billion bailout isn't making things easier for Gyurcsany, whose Magyar Szocialista Part (MSZP) surely won't survive the next election.

I passed by a rally organized by Jobbik Szervezete, an extreme right wing party, but by the looks of the thousands-strong crowd at Deak Ferenc Square, you wouldn't know it's a minor party. I understood little, except for the choruses demanding Gyurcsany's resignation, that much scarier when you saw the hardliners dressed in something resembling black military fatigues. They held (and wore) flags of all kinds: the official flag, the party's flag, the old Arpad flag (associated with the Nazis, among others).

Everywhere, riot police lined the streets, many of which were closed for much of the day, as were the square in front of St. Stephen's Basilica (so I had to walk another way home) and the Chain Bridge. On the other side of the Danube River and away from Jobbik Szervezete, the main opposition party Fidesz held its own rally. I arrived at the tail end, so there was only time to get forralt bor (hot wine) and overcooked chicken, but two days earlier I'd caught a taste of what the conservatives were all about. As it does every year, Fidesz hosted a small memorial to General Jozsef Schweidel on the street that bears his name. He was one of the 13 Martyrs of Arad executed by the Austrians on 6 Oct. 1849 (hence the street named after this date) after Hungary's failed War for Independence from the Habsburgs.

Five paragraphs deep, and I am just now mentioning this event, but that's appropriate because much of the historical significance is lost on March 15 (when the abortive revolution began with a reading of a 12-point list of demands). Instead of commemorating the events of 1848-49, Hungarians are more likely to hold political platforms to criticize the incumbents, which indeed is what Fidesz did at the memorial. In all fairness, they also sang the national anthem and recited "Nemzeti dal," the national song Sandor Petofi penned for the occasion. There's now a bridge and radio station dedicated in his honor, but details of his death are still unclear.

Much less political are the activities on the Chain Bridge, decorated end to end with the country's flag and stages meant to give a snapshot of life in the mid-19th century. Specifically: horse-drawn carriages, a game of jumping over a stick, and some kind of ash-covered metalsmith. I liked the blown up black-and-white photos that stood alone, but stopped taking pictures after no one could tell me who they were. Some wear paper hats that look as though they're off to war, and everyone (and I do mean everyone) wears the red-white-and-green pendant called kokarda. Anyway it probably beats our Independence Day fireworks.

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Reading: Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Watching: John Merriman, "The Origins of World War I" (Yale lecture via AcademicEarth.org)
Listening to: Elton John, Greatest Hits

Babel, by any other name

To all the Krisztian's or Ajtony's in the world, happy name day! I'm late to discover this Hungarian custom, which is like a mini-holiday and which other countries in the region practice, too. Each day of the year is dedicated to a different name (sometimes two) and on your name day, friends wish you a "Boldog nevnapot!" maybe celebrating with flowers or drinks. I found it odd and random at first, until I remembered similar obsessions with Western and Eastern astrology.

Of course the names are generally Hungarian, so the closest I could find for myself was "Lenke" (23 July), not exactly a direct translation. Other names are easier to link - Karolina, Zsuzsanna, Tamas, Pal. For a long time, though, I considered it strange, on the brink of offensive, that people should translate names at all. If your parents gave you the name "Mateo," that is your name, not "Matt." I reasoned that it's one thing to translate a word: clearly when a Briton says "summer" and a Vietnamese says "mua he," they refer to the same season. But it's quite another thing to say that Mateo is the same person as Matt, as there is no universal definition of a person by this name, so what are we referring to?

I've since softened my position on the issue to consider that there are examples like St. Matthew from which we derive names, and that names do have other meanings even if they sound nothing alike (I noticed this with "Smith" and the Hungarian "Kovacs").

But I don't know if I can be as accommodating of country names. Why do we say/spell Germany, Brazil, or Vietnam in place of Deutschland, Brasil or Viet Nam? It only makes sense to me in needing to make a country name pronouncable, e.g., from Chinese or Arabic characters, but in most cases that's not a problem.

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Listening to: Royal Philharmonic plays Queen

Terror Haza

If the House of Terror did not enclose such a grim legacy - Hungary's more than four decades of terror under Nazi and then Soviet occupations - it would almost succumb to the absurdity in much of tourism. The museum alternates between the poignant (interviews with former prisoners, fascist and Communist propaganda, a preserved basement of torture and incarceration) and the cheesy (a video of actors changing clothes as they found new roles under changing regimes, a pig because collective welfare made it difficult to own your own). I don't know if cheesy is the right word, because I couldn't decide whether to admire the curators for mixing history with symbolism (as that would make them artistic) or dismiss them for trying too hard to please tourists (as that would make them cheesy, like the Buda labyrinth).

But if there's any place a tourist should see in Budapest, this is probably it. The Terror House grabs attention easily, for a few reasons: 1) its name, even if people first think it's a Halloween attraction; 2) its odd location on Andrassy Avenue, known for shopping and its UNESCO World Heritage recognition; and 3) its facade, an overhang with the word "TERROR" carved out like stencils so that the sun writes the letters on the sidewalk below.

Beyond the initial impressions, the museum delivers. This is probably due to its small size, but I've never seen a museum presented as such a complete package that is simultaneously concise and dramatic. The first image that greets visitors is the wall of victims: thousands of low relief, black-and-white head shots, about a square foot each, depicting the deceased and inscribed along a central wall that spans all three floors and the elevator. In the basement is the smaller portion of the wall, that of the victimizers. Their faces are smaller, but they have names and dates, many showing the victimizers to be alive still - hence the debate over what should be done with them and whether they should be allowed into public office.

Like the wall (and like a good meal), the exhibition rooms also rely on the power of presentation for impact. I've realized most of them are works of art in themselves, often for their symbolic significance. One room made manifest the dualism of oppression under fascists and Communists by screening footage on either side of the same wall in the center of the room, Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other. Working with the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, both at different times controlled Hungary, which seemed to trade one form of totalitarianism for another.

Another room shipped us off to Siberia, as the condemned Hungarians were once expelled. Horizontal wood paneling lined the walls, with windows simulated by TV screens showing the landscape roll by. A carpet map began in Hungary at the entrance and ended in the Soviet far east at the exit. Then there was (what I call) the Warhol room of '60s ads denoting the prosperity and consumption under socialism; the Catholic room, along the length of which ran a huge white cross "exposed" by floorboards pulled aside; and the black-and-white Gabor Peter room, white where the Communist police chief enjoyed a clean office, black where the Jewish Hungarian served a prison sentence under the system he once controlled.

All of this trimming disappears, however, once you walk through the rooms of the basement. For solitary confinement, you have the choice of a closet big enough to hold one person, a larger room just three feet high, or a wet cell. There's a Hungarian flag with the Soviet emblem cut out, a common image during the 1956 Revolution. A gallows is intact. Interviews run on a loop, men and women lamenting the senselessness of their subjugation. A young woman reads the names of the dead. And in the background plays a Hungarian version of Lili Marleen.

Boldog Nonapot!

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so maybe I should have given voice to the quiet feminist in me, but the commemorations around Budapest were nearly as quiet, so I'd rather use the holiday as an excuse to make some observations about romance. In fact I didn't know about Nonap until reading a sign that mentioned it. But after that I did notice women carrying gifts from men and Eliza Doolittle's approaching people in restaurants and cars at stoplights to peddle their flowers. And one friend always brings flowers to his mother and has lunch with her on Nonap.

I don't think I would be exaggerating in saying Hungarians treat Nonap almost like Valentine's Day (plus I've just watched the V-Day episode of The Office and my sense of time is a little off). Not that they don't celebrate Feb. 14, too, because there were plenty of red candy boxes and other useful heart-shaped things in stock a month ago. But, strangely, I was in Vienna that day and was hardpressed to find any Valentine paraphernalia there (nor in Bratislava).

In just about each European city I've visited so far, though, love is evidently in the air. In Rome, it could have been that the city just inspires romance. My friend and I even received roses during our last dinner there (OK, they were dying, and we never figured out if they came from the waiter or the septuagenarian who winked at us, but still). But I don't think it was Rome. Public displays of affection reign everywhere on the continent, and somehow the couples transcend the realm of distastefulness and are actually sweet to see.

The countryside, caves, and a castle

Miskolc is a university town two hours northeast of Budapest, but I'm afraid in the two days out there I didn't see much of the university or the town. Instead much of my attention went to the drive (to Miskolc, as well as to Aggtelek) and to the sights: a castle, a cave (pictured), and a bath inside a cave. On the way we stopped for gas, which is paid for after filling up the tank, the reverse of what I'm used to. "But what if people just drive off without paying?" I asked my friend. The answer was cameras, both at the gas station and all over the highway, which also means drivers can receive fines (for speeding, or anything else) a month after the fact.

California has conditioned me to love driving and the whole process of a drive, but even then a cruise through the countryside seems like it'll always be an unexpected pleasure. It was better often to watch rather than talk during the hours driving from Miskolc to Aggtelek and back: brown leaves with hints of burgundy and gold still clung to the trees as if it were autumn, and clouds hung low in the sky, so low some wrapped around villages and mountains like smoke, and others moved so quickly over the land we seemed to be driving alongside them. I forget too that these highways pass through villages simultaneously cut off from the world (a woman pumping water in front of her home) and connected to it (satellites on top of every other house).

In Aggtelek we descended 270 steps to reach the two-million-year-old cave shared with Slovakia. Like clouds, the stalactites (from the ceiling), stalagmites (from the gound), and stalagnates (combining the two) form recognizable images, from Santa Claus to dolphins to Romeo and Juliet, and they continue to form. Others have fallen (some more than once), but the tallest stalagmite is 19 meters, and in Giant's Hall (main photo) the ceiling is 27 meters high. The entire UNESCO site is 25 kilometers, so although our tour was under two hours, I can see how others last for seven.

That was conducted in Hungarian, but earlier, I took a shorter, bilingual tour of Diosgyor Castle in Miskolc. Aside from my friend and I, just four teenage girls went on the tour, so it was as though I had a private guide because I was the only one who needed English. It's dedicated to King Louis the Great, who ruled Hungary and Poland in the 14th century, so the small castle has a wax museum depicting the life of the times, which evidently meant leprosy from an appalling sewage system (dumping trash out windows), belief in a hell modeled after Where the Wild Things Are, and non-lethal combats as sport (the winner gets a flower). The guide said this was the largest collection of wax figures in Central Europe - odd for just half a dozen small rooms, but there was a lot of supporting cast.

As for the castle itself, four stone block towers rise up from the corners, with similarly wrought walls and a bridge connecting to the surrounding land. Most of the space is occupied by a courtyard with a platform at the east end. Not much fills the small rooms, but to reach some you can walk underground, and (better yet) others you can reach by climbing four or five sets of stairs inside the towers, where it is wonderful to look out over Miskolc as the sun sets.

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Reading: Ferenc Molnar, The Paul Street Boys
Listening to: Sheryl Crow, "Sweet Child of Mine"

Civizational clash: nationalism and stereotypes

The trip to Eger on Sunday was an educational one even before we arrived, in that I learned how the main roads work. Turning into an exit, we encountered highway patrol parked there to check whether drivers had paid the fee to use the highway. Luckily my friends had, because I think it's similar to the hit-or-miss enforcement of the metro. Speaking of which, the subway is slightly less enigmatic now, and I bet Hungarians have figured out how to cheat the system because it's not difficult over time to get a sense of where guards will be checking tickets - the exception being the one time I came across a guard who actually hopped onto a train to see our tickets.

Anyway, the highway procedure should not be so surprising, I'm just used to U.S. tax policy. What my friends did on the other hand was buy a day pass at a gas station. You can buy passes for any range of times, and by SMS as well, which is funny because you could theoretically have to keep your confirmation SMS for a year to show as proof.

The remaining enlightenment that I derived from Eger was similarly not direct nor immediate, creeping up on me days later.

I was glad to have known about Egri Csillagok, the nationally required reading about Eger's uniquely successful defense against the expanding Ottomans in 1552. It means Stars of Eger, but is for some reason translated as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, and the writer Geza Gardonyi's grave can be found at the castle in Eger. I didn't learn much from the Hungarian tour guide, depending instead on what my friends could translate. While deciding on the obligatory wine (the city is known for it), one friend insisted I buy Egri Bikaver, i.e., Bull's Blood of Eger. The legend goes that in the days preparing for the Ottoman attack, Hungarians drank this red wine, which dripped down their lips and convinced the Ottomans that they had drank bull's blood, and that was why they were strong enough to defeat them.

The story, along with the history as a larger context, joins other sources of national pride (the unsuccessful 1848 rebellion against the Habsburgs, the disastrous 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, the smooth 1989 shedding of communism, etc.). These, in turn, have their part in the even larger context of the overall idea of any country's national legacies, which I have started to wonder about lately. Brainwashing is just the extreme form of a universal practice in national education systems of conditioning citizens to understand and support their countries. At least at a basic level this means emphasizing achievements over mistakes as proof of greatness. Doesn't a country founded on liberty sound better than one founded on tax evasion?

It's true that the events of 1989 and 1956 and 1848 durably shape the Hungary we see today. And if anyone is to inherit these legacies, mustn't it be the Hungarians? But my problem, or at least what I question, is whether and how much anyone has a right to claim these legacies. Yesterday I read this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure."

The Spain of today is not the Spain of the conquistadors. That is to say Prime Minister Zapatero's government had no say in the country's colonization decisions in the 16th century. What fidelity, then, do Latin Americans owe Spain? What accountability, then, does Spain owe them? I thought of this in more recent history when hearing that a French court blamed the country for deporting Jews during the Holocaust, and (in an Eastern/Central European class) that Polish people in the town of Jedwabne killed the Jewish half of their neighbors. In class my professor distinguished between guilt (as Sarkozy should not feel guilty for the choices of de Gaulle) and responsibility (as the Polish should admit historical accuracies).

If we take it for granted that, indeed, Belgium is liable for its colonial past or that Italians rightly take pride in the roots of the Renaissance, I think this implies some credence to Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. It divides the world and much of its history into seven main civilizations, which define conflict along cultural lines. It's not the best way to examine the aforementioned legacies, but in my mind there's a relevantly deterministic outlook. His theory has generally met resistance (including from me), probably because we dislike the idea of simplifying cultures so much that we say Germans behave that way because they're German. In this way it's 'wrong' to stereotype peoples, and yet right to identify them according to histories dating back decades, centuries, or millenniums. I'm still trying to reconcile this.

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Listening to: Dru Hill, "We're Not Making Love No More"
Reading: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Travel literature

Next on my reading list is Hungarian literature, which would happen to be perfect for later today when I visit Eger, a historical city within two hours northeast of Budapest. Somewhere I had heard vaguely of Geza Gardonyi's Egri Csillagok (Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, or technically, Stars of Eger), required reading for all Hungarian students. That's precisely what I wanted to read, the country's equivalent of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird. But I wasn't clearly reminded of it until a few days ago, not enough time to find a copy in English (let alone read it) before the day trip.

The best I could do was stumble upon an online, Hungarian version of the novel and translate it section by section through Google - wait, I've just realized I could have used the URL to translate the entire page instantly. No matter. I couldn't even get past the first of five sections, realizing that it was not enough to read a spotty computer translation, even just to get the gist of the plot. Naturally, plenty of words didn't make it through the translator (average of one per sentence, maybe more), and sometimes those that did were incorrectly translated. But I did learn that what a Hungarian friend told me was true, that English is simpler than Hungarian in that the latter has more precise words for ideas, which is why Hungarian texts are generally longer than their English counterparts.

Guess I'll have to wait to get a hard copy, but Egri Csillagok does seem worth reading. Among other topics, the book, published in 1899, is set in the historical context of the 1552 Siege of Eger, in which the city and its sturdy castle mark the rare achievement of fending off an Ottoman invasion.

On a related note, I just finished The History of Hungary After the Second World War, 1944-1980. That is to say, I reached the last page of the book, skimming or even skipping whole pages at a time. The problem I hadn't realized when checking out the book was that it was published in 1986, and as relatively progressive as Hungary was at the time, this didn't prevent the authors from propagating the party line. I could find no criticism of the Communist party, just applause for its successes, scant retelling of the 1956 Revolution, and even omission of the execution of Imre Nagy, the prime minister arrested during the Soviet crackdown on the revolution and not properly buried until 1989. The Hungarian writers also had some minor translation difficulties and focused far too much on political scheming and statistics, rather than events and implications. The search continues.

Meanwhile, off to Eger!

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Listening to: Supertramp, "Bloody Well Right"
Watching: Muhammad Yunus' speech at Columbia