Posted 6:19 PM by laura r.
Intimate Portrait of a Language, continued


It took me many years to understand the complexities of its mechanism. The more I learned other languages the more I became astonished with my own.
The foreigner, curious, unprepared, who by a whim or any other contingency is brought to the study of the Hungarian language, finds that at the beginning it seems attractively easy, since it is lacking the usual stumbling-blocks found in other languages.
The spelling is one of the easiest in the world, since it is almost entirely phonetic: one sound is always represented by the same letters. The orthographic vocabularies of the Hungarian Academy have been used without signficant changes for more than one hundred years. The plethora of symbols which alarm the curious in their first look at a Hungarian text are not accents which are more or less unnecessary, but integral parts of their respective vowels, and designate sounds which are so different that there is no possibility of confusing them. (In the homework of Hungarian students confusion or omission of “accents” is extremely rare.)
Pronunciation, in spite of the existence of some sounds, especially that of the a, which will always give away a foreigner (there is no foreigner who is able to pronounce magyar), offers the great consolation of uniform accentuation: it is always the first syllable that is accented.
The grammar has other surprisingly attractive features. Above all, there is no grammatical gender, nor even those few vestiges (personal pronounds etc.) which are still present in English. This lack is not a problem. During the Reform of the Language (a conscious movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century to enrich the language, which managed to impose an extraordinary number of innovations in the area of vocabulary), a certain writer tried to create a feminine personal pronoun, which he felt the lack of in his translations from German and French. The innovation was accepted by no one and fell into derision.
Another delight is the inexistence in Hungarian of most of the verb tenses. There is only a past, with no difference between imperfect preterite, perfect, and pluperfect. Likewise there is no future, since this tense is always expressed by the present or with an auxiliary verb. Thus there is also no coordination of tenses.
If we further mention that the adjective, which is necessarily uniform (since there is no gender), does not agree in number with the noun, the reader will, for a moment, think that Hungarian is a language of ideal simplicity, which could serve as model for the rest.
Unfortunately, from other points of view, it presents a jungle of opaque labyrinths in places where other languages offer wide and sunny highways for the tourist.
It possesses, for example, one of the most highly developed declensions in the world, so terrifyingly complex that teachers in high schools conceal its existence, and authors of writing manuals make two thirds of it disappear, trying to make the credulous think that the schema is like that of Latin, with its six cases. One needs to study Finnish (a punishment reserved for the teacher of Hungarian) to discover that, alongside the classical nominative, accusative, and such, there thrives a whole extended family of ilatives, adlatives, elatives, sociative-instrumentals and who knows how many others, corresponding to an infinite number of relations, such “going into”, “by the side of”, “from within”, etc.
The indigenes escape the horrors of this perfection by ignoring them; the hapless tourist, however, gets hopelessly lost in them.

more to come

Posted 6:17 PM by laura r.
The Languages I Didn't Learn , continued
by Paulo Rónai


Perhaps in an Icelandic book I would have found the answers to my questions; maybe the poet who best expressed my angst did so in Japanese haikus. But we never were to meet, as if they did not exist, or as if I myself did not exist.
What most torments me are the languages which I began to study and then abandoned for lack of time, of enthusiasm, of perseverance.
I am unconsolable for not having learned Hebrew, which they taught me for several years. To read the prophets, the Song of Songs in the original! But my teachers did not have the least notion of pedagogy: they chopped the text up into little pieces of four or five words and gave the corresponding translation, literally, stupidly. We memorized it and then recited it, painfully sounding out the original – and that was enough to inspire in the child an insuperable aversion to those hieratical characters, which in the beginning had attracted him so.
Another language which I lost, when already an adult, was Finnish. By virtue of its pallid and distant connection with Hungarian, a candidate for teaching Hungarian had to study it. I was one of those. Finnish grammar taught me a lot: for example, that my mother tongue had declensions with more than a dozen cases, and that, up until that point I had used them marvelously well without even suspecting their existence. I envied the Finnish their possession of a verb of negation which allowed to negate in a vague way, without specifying what was being negated – an excellent verb for ladies; and I felt sorry for them in their lack of precisely the letter F and the corresponding sound. None of that, however, was of interest to my examiner; he only wanted to know of me the development of the labiodentals in Finnish, Estonian, Vogul, Ostiac, and Zurienian. I passed the examination, but nevermore set foot in the classroom of that famous linguist, who in only fifty years managed to sap the will of an entire country to get to know another one.
A similar case was that of Sanskrit, for which I could sense the beginning of a passion. Unhappily for my master the holy language of India had no words: it was a collection of pure radicals. The blackboard was filled with arrows, lines and mathematical symbols which linked the Sanskrit root to the Greek flower or the Roman fruit which sprouted from it. Only years later did I discover that Sanskrit also possessed complete words and even sentences; but it was already too late.
A third professor, whom I only saw once, posted himself at the door of Danish to bar me from entering. It was the first class of a course at the Sorbonne. There were, in addition to me, another five students, all Swedes. The professor spent all of his time correcting their pronunciation, contaminated by Swedish influence. As my pronunciation had not been contaminated by anything, I did not appear at the second class, nor at any of the others.
More forgivable, I think, is my ignorance of Etruscan. Even though there was a course in Etruscology at the University of Perugia. To give us a taste of the discipline, the professor took us to see a famous Etruscan tomb in the vicinity of the old city. But the Etruscans of the tomb were too dead, in contrast with a blond Norwegian student named Solveig. I gave up on Etruscan.
I let Turkish escape due to a grammar which had too few rules, fewer readings and no conversational exercises, but an enormous number of proverbs. Some of them were even nice, such as: “Death is a black camel, it kneels at every door.” I would have preferred more practical lessons and put the book down in spite of really enjoying the law of vocalic assimiliation, which produced words of ten syllables with as many is and us. Perhaps things might have turned out differently, if the book had contained at least one of those long stories told entirely in the gerund: “A hermit, passing through the forest, hearing the song of a little bird, pausing and delighting in the song...” with a single perfect preterite – in the rapid and brutal conclusion: “was devoured by a tiger.”
But they only told me that later.
There were languages, there’s no point in denying it, which I failed to learn through my own fault. It was frivolous, if not a crime, not to have studied Chinese with my friend Kan Woo in Paris, where he, as strange as it may seem, was collecting materials for a study on Hungarian literature. But certain of his confidences frightened me. We lunched together almost every day in the Chinese restaurant in Rue Victor Cousin, he using chopsticks, I, through a special dispensation from the waiter, with spoon and fork.
“How is the essay going, Mr. Kan Woo?” I asked him one day.
“It is almost leady” he answered in his languid but correct language. “It just needs to be copied.”
The study had been completed in two months. The copying had been dragging on for a year, and it still was not done. When I expressed my surprise, my friend explained: the hard thing was not to write the study, but rather to do the calligraphy.
“You know, I am tlying to intloduce in the middle some vely complicated chalacters that have not been used for more than a century. It is also not always easy to find the third lhyme. And then there are the allitelations!”
I did not want to believe that a simple essay demanded rhyme, alliteration, and such elaborate characters, but my friend assured me that this was actually the case. And a year later the magazine Ki ta wen hio yen tsi k’ouan arrived from Shanghai – even today I keep it with special affection – in which Kan Woo showed me my name in Roman letters, surrounded by the most peculiar hieroglyphs.
“It’s a dedication that I did for you” he said to me. “There are two vely lare letters.”
If only I had studied Sogdian. In one of the thousands of “work camps”invented by the Nazis, where I spent five months, I came upon a dear friend one day, a specialist, who was already famous, in oriental languages. We defended ourselves against despair by reading during the hours when we were not spending in tearing down one house in order to construct another identical, five meters farther along. My friend used to carry in his pocket a Sogdian text. It was, if I recall, the holy language of ancient Persia, known – he explained to me – by about ten philologists in the entire world. And I could be the eleventh. But in the stable where we gathered to spend the nights I had an astrologer as a neighbor. He predicted that I would escape from the camp, arrive in a distant land, and begin an entirely new career. And in this case Sogdian could be dispensed with.. (Is the poor astrologer still alive? And my wise philologist, who was so out of his element in that inhuman reality? Will he have survived the concentration camp, the deportation, the killings?)
There were other languages within my reach which I could not touch, since they belonged exclusively to friends. To touch on Catalan would have been to enter the dominions of a good friend, who, years later, would teach Hungarian (to whom?) at the University of Barcelona. Another young man in my circle appropriated Japanese. And most especially each of the Finno-Ugric languages, poor relations of Hungarian, had its own master. A friend had annexed Tcheremissian, and no one could dislodge him. During the First World War he had discovered, amongst thousands of Russian prisoners, an illiterate Tcheremissian, and with the approval of the authorities, took responsibiity for him, squeezing out of his brain volumes of folk tales, which appeared in an alphabet especially invented for the purpose. (One of these stories appears in the first volume of the Sea of Stories. Another acquaintance had shown me, along the family mementos, a thick monograph by his father on Voguish pronouns. No one was to be poking around in those.
But what is the use of blaming men, books and circumstances? What there was to be learned, was learned. Twenty years ago, in passing by a used bookshop in Paris, I saw on the street an enormous Portuguese dictionary for ten francs. I was going to buy it, but the person I was with dissuaded me:
“Come now! You will never need a Portuguese dictionary.
But, coming back through the same street, alone, two hours later, I couldn’t resist temptation and went to look for my dictionary. They had sold it, and I thought that my relations with the last flower of Latium were at an end.
Perhaps it may even be for the best that so many languages remained closed to me, refusing to reveal their mysteries. What a disappointment if I had discovered that Armenian was also rich in clichés and that the language of Hafiz was excellently suited to the most depraved platitudes!

Posted 8:26 AM by laura r.

How I Learned Portuguese, continued

by Paulo Rónai


I still remember the day when the first book in Portuguese came into my hands. It was the little anthology The Hundred Best Lyric Poems in Portuguese, by Carolina Michaelis. I had had in my collection other anthologies in the same series, in French, Italian and Spanish. I inferred that there had to be one in Portuguese as well, and ordered it from the Perche Bookshop in Paris.
The little book arrived at nine in the morning on one of the holidays around Christmas. By ten, I had already found the only Portuguese dictionary to be had in the bookshops in Budapest, the one by Luisa Ey, in German translation. I then threw myself into the poetry with avid curiosity. By three in the afternoon, the sonnet “Sonho Oriental” by Antero, had been translated into Hungarian verses; by five, it had been accepted by a magazine, which would publish it shortly thereafter.
Among all the Hungarian writers whom I knew, Desiderius Koszyolanyi was the only one who had gone so far as to approach the study of Portuguese. At one point he spoke to me in Portuguese, which he thought sounded as merry and sweet as the language of birds. For me, seeing it written, it gave the impression of Latin as spoken by children or old people – at any rate people with no teeth. If they had teeth, how could they have lost so many consonants? And I looked with alarm at words like lua, dor, pessoa, veia, trying to hang on to what there was left of the full and sonorous Latin originals.
It was in fact the pronunciation that was beginning to concern me.
The nasals, which were so numerous, gave me goosebumps, themore so as the grammar, which came from who knows where, shrouded them in deep mystery. It is impossible, said Gaspey, Otto and Sauer, to explain the pronunciation of such sounds; the only way to learn it was to ask a native of the country to pronounce them many times. But how was I to find a native of Portugal in Budapest? And I began to think about phonetic enigmas, as for example, the various sounds of x, which doesn’t even exist in Hungarian, and even in other languages is no more than vestigial, while in Portuguese it appears in four different forms.
I still remember some of my reactions to the phenomena of the new language. It was with a certain impatience that I accepted certain illogicalities which it presented me, totally forgetting those which I had swallowed without protest in my own language. In particular I could not get used to the feminine gender of the word criança. Nor did I wanted to permit such French nouns as chapéu or paletó to be incorporated into Portuguese without so much as a by your leave. But I recognized with excitement which had been carefully handed down from Latin and which other Romance languages had treated badly: lar and onus were old friends, made more beautiful by long tradition. Words in which I found traces of their Latin formation, such as bebedouro and nascedouro, and even horrendo and nefando, smiled at me. Vocabulary stemming from arabic seemed solemn, and much more closely connected to its origin than in fact it is; it seemed impossible to me that an alfaiate could sew coats and trouser in the English fashion, rather than only making albornozes.
Not only the vocabulary, but even the syntax provoked sentimental feelings in me.
The discovery of the personal infinitive was a surprise, and caused my patriotic pride to waver, since I had thought it was a treasure to be found only in Hungarian. I immediately felt warmly towards the mesoclitic forms of the verbs: falar-te-ei, lembrar-nos-íamos were like an anatomical slice into words that were irrevocably fused together in French or in Italian, and caused me to imagine gifts of analysis and synthesis in all those who empoyed them. I also admired the wise economy that was manifested in expressions made up of two adverbs, such as demorada e pacientemente, only imaginable in a language that had been persisten in not moving away from its etymological roots.
Little by little, still not knowing how to read out loud, I was puzzling out a new and different melody in Portuguese, and continued familiarizing myself with the little volume of one hundred poems. I translated “Os Cinco Sentidos” by Almeida Garrett, the romance of the “Nau Catrineta’, and a handful of quatrains, among which the beginning of “O anel que tu me deste” still today seems like like a miracle of pathetic simplicity.
The problem lay in getting hold of other books. From Strasburg I managed to get a copy of the Lusiads, in the Biblioteca Romanica. Thanks to a good Hungarian translation and the reminiscences of Virgil and Tasso, I was able to read them without much difficulty. But I still had not found a contemporary text, a document of living Portuguse.
That was when one of the booksellers, put on alert by me, unearthed an broken and filthy volume, by a modern Portuguese author – Samuel Ribeiro, if I remember correctly. And then things took a turn for the worse, since right on the first page there were twenty words not listed by Luisa Ey. It was a rustic story, probably rather regional, and the author seemed to take pleasure in calling the animals and plants by their pretty but incomprehensible names from Alentejo or Minho. Someone, in learning of my difficulty, introduced me to a functionary from the Brazilian Consulate to whom I showed the rebellious page. He examined it attentively and declared that either it was not Portuguese, or else that in Brazil they spoke some other language. As compensation, he pronounced various nasals for me, which I tried to imitate without much success.
I put aside Samuel Ribeiro’s book, and set myself to reading Brazilian poets.
My first Brazilian book was an Anthology of Paulista Poets, arranged through the offices of a Hungraian bookseller in Sao Paulo, whose address I happened to obtain. I still remember that little volume, poorly produced, very badly organized (and which I never managed to find here in Brazil.) It contained horrid portraits of thirty poets from Sao Paulo and one poem by each, usually a sonnet. My difficulties began with the title, since Luisa Ey’s Wörterbuch, of course, did not contain the word paulista.
Although I didn’t manage to understand the majority of the poems, I figured out the meaning of a few, and ended up translating a little poem by Correia Junior, which I published in a magazine. On re-reading my translation, some years later, here in Brazil already, I discovered with humiliation a enormous error. The poet was talking of the net (hammock) in which he was relaxing and awaiting his dreams; since I had never seen such a thing, I judged that it was a poetic image and put “the net of dreams woven by the imagination” in the Hungarian text.
Thereafter I “figured out” and translated a few more poems from the book. With a single exception, they were all, as I later learned with alarm, authors who were unknown in Rio de Janeiro. Happenstance caused one of these translations to fall into the hands of the Brazilian Consul in Budapest at the time, who called me, gave me a volume of Bilac, another one by Vicente de Carvalho, and three old numbers of the Correio da Manha.
To the latter I sent, with a brief letter, a clipping of the “first Brazilian poetry translated into Hungarian”. I never received an answer to the letter, but one day, to my great surprise, a large envelope arrived for me, covered with exotic stamps and full of poems, still unpublished, by a young poet from Rio, who having read a notice in the Correio about my strange mania, had judged me the most fitting person to pronounce the first judgement on his clandestine works.
This missive was followed by others, written by other readers of the newspaper, all poets. From then on I received an ample correspondence from Brazl: letters with typed verses, or clipped from newspapers, magazines, books. They arrived unsystematically, sent by offices, friends and strangers. Some were stalwart, others regular, and some weak. But I had no guide to orient me in that multitude of new names, to help me to establish a proper scale of value.
For some poets who were traditionalists in form and in expression I did not know if they were from 1850 or today. At the same time, I took for extremely original some fifteen-year old poets (whose unpublished work I received) since I was unaware of their models. Thus, when I finally obtained a volume of Jorge de Lima, this great poet’s work no longer gave me the pleasant surprise of a discovery, since I had already gotten to know various of his disciples.
Along with these uncertainties, there were those of the language, since I kept on with the little dictionary of Mrs. Ey, and a Portuguese-French dictionary, by Simoes da Fonseca, which was not much better, both European, and for that reason completely ignoring Brazilianisms. And so I had to rely once more on the dangerous system of conjecture.
Not all of them were easy. In the “Acalanto do Seringueiro”, by Mario de Andrade, the uirapuru had to be a bird. But how much time it took me to realize that the cabra resistente in the same poem, was not an animal, but a man.
In other cases, the lack of an equivalent notion in the Central-European milieu made a translation almost impossible. I had to torture my imagination in order to come up with a term made of three words (kaucsukfacaspoló) to translate seringueiro. I did not dare to use it until I had tried it out on various poet friends and verified their favorable reaction.
What really caused me to stumble, however, were the most common and simplest words. The wise glottologists of my cafe, had to agree with me, however reluctantly, when I demonstrated to them that one of the most difficult Brazilian words to translate and fit into a Hungarian verse was dezembro. Our December, etymologically identical, but which evoked notions of ice, snow and misery, would never produce for any Hungarian reader the image of Christmas in Rio, torrid and stifling. And then, what did the word Nordeste mean? A long letter from Ribeiro Couto (then secretary of the Brazilian Legation in the Netherlands) was necessary for me to get a rough idea of the complex geographical, anthropological, sociological and above all, poetical sense of the term.With his comprehensive intelligence, the poet of Província sketched out a succinct spiritual portrait of the Northeastern region, of which, as I was lacking other documentation, he drew me a schematic map. I was less lucy with a young adept of social poetry in whose poems I found innumerable references to the morros of Rio de Janeiro. Thinking I had not understood the word, he answered my query with a list of synonyms: hill, hillock etc. Only after another exchange of letters did I come to understand that, contrary to what was the case in my city, where the hills, covered with luxurious little palaces, only sheltered rich people, in Rio they were synonymous with favelas, that is “groupings of popular dwellings rudely constructed and unsupplied with hygienic resources.”
The publication in newspapers and magazines of some of these translations of Brazilian poetry produced some curious episodes. In one of my Latin classes, for example, a student asked, with his colleagues looking on derisively, that I explain to him a strange poem he had read the night before and began to recite “No Meio do Caminho” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Although I didn’t like to interrupt my classes, this time I gave into temptation and quoted other verses by the poet. I spoke of the necessary iconoclasm of modern poetry, of the healthy reaction to the stereotypical “poetic”, of the deep value of primitive and virgin sensations; I showed how the demands of lyricism and logic are different; I insisted on the emotional power of the grotesque element; I talked about the importance of the collaboration of the reader with the poet. The explanation had transformed itself, by this point, into an animated conversation, and by the end my students agreed with me that each age has its own literary expression, different from those which came before. Having arrived at this conclusion, we could return to reading Horace. And then my students read with much greater interest the ode in which the Roman poet, considered until that point by many of them a versifier of clichés, excused himself for the revolutionary boldness with which he had introduced into Latin literature forms and expressions “never before made public”.
The appearance of the translations in a volume entitled Message from Brazil was welcome by the critics with the interest that the moment permitted. (It was August of 1939). For the first time in Central Europe Brazilian verses were read, and one could gete a glimpse of the existence in Brazil, until that point only known as a producer of coffee, of civilization worthy of study and even of admiration. The critic Gyorgy Bálint – later to be murdered by the Nazis – gave his article the title “Brazil comes closer”.
This was really my impression for three days. On the fourth, the German tanks crossed the Polish border. A curtain of smoke came to hide Brazil, poetry, the joy of living.
And then, after fifteen months, whose sufferings and anguish I will not relate here, there I was with bags packed and ready to get to know Brazil up close. My trip had to be made through Portugal, the only exit from a Europe which was already in flames. I headed for Lisbon with all the preoccupations of the exile, but somewhat consoled by the interesting linguistic experience that was waiting for me. What could happen to me, if I already knew the mesoclitic forms and the personal infinitive?
I suffered, however, a great disappointment. I spent six weeks in Lisbon without being able to understand anything of the spoken language. I picked up the newspaper and understood perfectly; the doorman at the hotel or the waiter in the cafe would speak three words, and once again I was lost in the jungle. An even greater humiliation: the Portuguese intellectuals to whom I was introduced, after trying with frustration to speak their language with me, resorted to French. I went to a play (by Carlos Selvagem, if I remember correctly), without understanding the plot; to a high school class, without knowing if the students had answered correctly or not; to a defense in the Faculty of Philosophy, without ever discovering the topic addressed by the candidate. What would the philologists of Budapest have said if they had seen me in such straits?
During my stay in the Portuguese captial I used to take a particular trolley every day and get off the same stop, where the same conductor would call out the same location. I sat near the man, listened hard, trying to understand him, all in vain. I could have asked, of course, but that wouldn’t have been fair play; I preferred to get off, ashamed and unhappy, until, the day before I left, the revelation came. What the conductor was shouting was Restauradores; it was just that he was suppressing three of the vowels, exaggerating the r’s and hissing the s’s. I went running to check the sign at the corner: I had it! But it was already too late. The next day I embarked on the Cabo de Hornos for Rio de Janeiro, tormented by dark premonitions.
I arrived twenty days later. What a relief as soon as I arrived! Brazil received me with a clear language, without mysteries. I had not even disembarked, and yet I didn’t lose a single word of the stevedore, who, in compensation, lost one of my trunks. I understood the functionary from the customs office just as well; and was so happy that I did not rebut his surprising declaration that Portuguese and Hungarian were sister tongues. My amazement continued in the street, in my first taxi, in the hotel. The language I had learned in Budapest really was Portuguese!


translation by Tom Moore