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Joanna Tokarska-Bakir w rozmowie z Martą Duch-Dyngosz
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For almost a century “crossing the frontier” has been an almost omnipresent metaphor in poetic and intellectual life. That should not perhaps astonish us in the aftermath of a war that first destroyed the frontiers dividing Europe and then drew new ones in the devastated continent. Frontiers and the states they enclosed could hardly seem so “natural” in this world of new maps.
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Although the present study frequently refers to Germany, I believe that my conclusions apply more generally to ageing European societies and to the impact of migration from poor to rich countries. Like much of Europe, Germany is an ageing society. The proportion of the working age population is falling, while the proportion of pensioners or the elderly is rising.1 Therefore, it seems like a plausible idea to close this demographic gap with those mostly young people who are clamouring for access to Europe’s welfare states. More and more people want to come to Germany and other rich European countries from Africa and Middle Eastern countries ravaged by civil war and repression, or even from impoverished countries in the Balkans where many people have lost hope of ever finding a job in the formal economy and earning a decent wage. Hence optimists believe that the needs of ageing European economies and the needs of would-be immigrants knocking at our doors complement each other. We open our doors for refugees and people trying to escape from civil war, hunger and poverty. They come. Host countries, refugees and other immigrants improve their lives. The world becomes a better place.
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In the late 19th century the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt warned against “these terrible simplificateurs who one day will descend upon our old Europe…”. Today’s economic, political, societal and social reality is even more complex than in the days of Burckhardt and the temptation to oversimplify is as great as ever before.
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Europe’s dependency on Russian energy is sometimes presented as a largely unalterable fact of life when in reality there is much that Europeans can do to reduce this dependency and indeed have already begun to do so. Commentators are also apt to overlook the extent to which market conditions are making Gazprom, the major government-owned and government-regulated gas producer in Russia, more like a conventional commercial entity, one which is less likely to be influenced by political considerations in contract negotiations today than in the past.
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With Nobel Prize winners and businessmen all over the world, with a NATO army and locally produced aircraft, Turkey is easily the most successful Moslem country. But the problems begin with this statement. Have the Turks a native talent for adapting to whichever empire they happen to encounter, in modern times the American? Or is it that there is a special form of Turkish Islam? Or does it come from the simple fact that the Ottoman Empire, taking over from Byzantium, was originally largely Christian? Another conflict divides the nation, and, now, almost to the point of civil war. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the famous figure of Turkish modern history. As military leader, he led the fight for independence, and defeated all comers. Then, before he died in 1938, he introduced reforms of a thoroughgoing sort, including the exclusion from public life of all religion. Is the vast difference between Turkey and her neighbours to east and south ascribable to these reforms – an introduction of the European Enlightenment in a Moslem heartland? The Islamists were prevented from persecuting and have never stopped complaining that they were thereby persecuted. In today’s Turkey they are taking a certain revenge, and a tense election is coming up.
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Keeping the third part of my Hungarian Review interview series on the governmental work of 1990 on the back burner, in this issue, I have proposed to print one of my unpublished talks from 1996. It is a short essay on the experience of initiation into politics, as lived by former opposition intellectuals turned government officials in 1990–94. Former Polish Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka, whom I quote in this essay, was on the panel with me. The wit she demonstrates in the anecdote quoted perhaps strikes a happy balance with the occasionally stilted tone that strikes me today in my 1996 statement. This is how I look back in 2015 on how I looked back on 1990 in 1996. But, essentially, I still read it as an authentic record.
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It is instructive to compare Hitler and Churchill as boys in school. Churchill at St George’s School, Ascot (1884). Headmaster’s remarks. General conduct: “very – bad – is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape. He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere. He has very great abilities.”
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When in the Michaelmas Term of 1911–12 Ferenc Békássy began his studies at King’s College, Cambridge, he was not long in earning the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Fellow of the College. Keynes was bisexual, before World War I heavily engaging in homosexual affairs, for many years a lover of the painter Duncan Grant, and also having casual affairs with many others. It seems that his interest in young Békássy was at first rather platonic. He described him in his letters to Duncan Grant as “the Hun” but over time became a self-appointed mentor and friend of the younger man, eventually promoting his rapid election to the exclusive debating society known as “The Apostles”. Békássy, who came from a family of landed nobility in western Hungary, had impressed Keynes not just with his looks, but also his intelligence, and near-perfect English thanks to his education in Bedales School, Hampshire.
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Another problematic aspect of the contemporary art scene is the role of the state in promoting culture, which inevitably includes a good deal of junk culture. Much questionable artistic production today is financially underpinned by taxpayer’s money and the art of extracting money from the state for art projects is prone to landing up in the hands of well-organised cliques. This is a perennial grievance of the conservative press, whose readers resent having to pay for shows that a small clique of banal anarchists and revolutionary groupies (according to this view) foists on the general public. The left on the other hand believes that it is the mark of a civilised state to encourage dissidence in art as in everything else, sidestepping the fact that state-subsidised art has rather lost its martyr’s aura of bold contrarianism. Otto Mühl, for instance, was celebrated with two major shows of his work at Vienna’s Museum für Angewandte Kunst on exiting gaol in 1997, and thirteen years later he was also exhibited at the Leopold Museum. Both of these venues are sustained by taxpayers’ money. It is an open question whether the Mühl exhibitions, at least at the MAK whose Director was obsessed with fashionable provocation,1 were more designed to create a scandal (and thus attract visitors) than to celebrate an important artistic talent. Less open in retrospect is the question as to whether the Province of Burgenland should have supported Mühl’s authoritarian and partly criminal commune by offering building subsidies.
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In 1975, I co-edited a book entitled Pesnici Vojvodine (The Poets of Vojvodina). The purpose of the book was to present poems written in the languages spoken in Vojvodina: Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Ruthenian. I may add that – along with Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians and Ruthenians – Croats represent a minority within Vojvodina. Croatian poets have always claimed they were writing in Croatian – just as their Serbian counterparts have always insisted that they were writing in Serbian. Yet the two languages were – and are – very close, almost identical. Indeed, in 1975, the language was officially designated as Serbo-Croatian.) All poems were published in the language in which they had been written, as well as in English, French and Russian. In addition, poems written in the minority languages were translated into Serbo-Croatian. My task was to select Hungarian poems. I had to find a judicious balance between generations, and I weighed my options, consulted poets and literary critics. One thing was absolutely clear and obvious. I knew – and everybody I talked to knew – that Domonkos’s Kormanyeltoresben (Rudderless) had to be included. The only issue was that of volume. The anthology had to accommodate poems in all languages spoken in Vojvodina, as well as translations into several languages, so we had to work within strict constraints regarding length. Had we decided to publish Rudderless in its entirety, it would have taken almost all the space allotted to Hungarian poets. In this way, we had to content ourselves with excerpts rather than the whole poem. And it worked: we succeeded, at least in part, to make this truly exceptional poem available in other languages. This was in 1975. The excerpts were translated into English by an Irish writer, Alan McConnell Duff. The unabridged poem came out in English 40 years later, translated again by an Irishman, Owen Good. In 2015, the English version was published along with translations into 11 other languages. The full English text is now reproduced in Hungarian Review.
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It behoves the reviewer – and any author of non-fiction for that matter – to disclose her or his preconceived notions, reveal whatever conscious biases she or he may harbour. Indeed, I am predisposed to like the work of György Ferdinandy, for his journeys in exile have paralleled some of my own. We also share a birthplace, Hungary, the land from which we have both been exiled, and the time of our birth, a mere twenty-one days apart (as I found out in Wikipedia). After Hungary, both of us had a stopover in France, lasting eleven years in his case (compared to my two), before our crossing of the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. I, too, crossed the ocean, and eventually spent a few years in the “Colony”, the “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico”, where Ferdinandy lived for thirty-five years before returning to Hungary. I ran across his name when my first wife mentioned it, since he was one of her professors at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. Or was he the professor of her martyred sister, the nationalist student leader, Olga Viscal? I no longer recall. I never taught at that prestigious institution, which produced many an outstanding Puerto Rican intellectual. Instead, I taught at the Universidad Católica de Ponce, on the opposite, southern side of La Isla del Encanto (The Magical Island). Indeed, the two of us have much in common, yet our lives are far from parallel, as I see time and again in my reading of his recent book.
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It is difficult to say anything new about the work of Ádám Farkas. His evolving oeuvre has been followed for over four decades by sharp-eyed artists and sharpwitted critics. It is an oeuvre that has evolved from a handful of seemingly digestible principles, which the artist himself has repeatedly explained in his exquisitely written meditations. These cardinal principles include organicism, the involvement of nature in the creative process, the love of materials, and inspira tion drawn from the forms observed in the microcosm and the macrocosm.
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Dear Gyula, For some time I have been meaning to write in order to commend you on the extraordinarily fine quality of Hungarian Review. In issue after issue it brilliantly serves the purpose of presenting a compelling and thoughtful portrait of the complex life and culture of Hungary past and present to the outside world. But just as importantly, the various articles in each issue provide an immensely challenging and comprehensive perspective on the outside world itself from a distinctively Hungarian perspective.
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