All posts in category Literature

Zoltán Zelk, “Dorosic Nightfall, 1943”

The original Hungarian text of this poem by Zoltán Zelk has been published many times: most recently, with carefully corrected title, in the literary journal Eső (Winter 2018), where I first encountered it. To my knowledge, the only translation into English is my own, which I present here, in honor of the international Holocaust Remembrance Day. I hope that showing it here on my blog will not stand in the way of its publication elsewhere one day. The poem deserves to be known around the world.

I read this translation aloud at a special private lucheon held by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and its Cowan Center for Education in the fall of 2019; Gyula Jenei (poet and founding editor of Eső), Marianna Fekete, and I were the featured guests of the Cowan Center’s 2019 Education Forum, of which the luncheon was the closing event. At this luncheon we met Will Evans, founder and publisher of Deep Vellum, who will be publishing my translation of Jenei’s collection Mindig más in February 2022. We also had the honor of meeting the poet Frederick Turner, who has collaborated with the scholar, writer, and Holocaust survivor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth on numerous translations. It was a sincere and momentous occasion, worthy of long memory. We are so grateful for the hospitality of Claudia MacMillan, Larry Allums, all the staff, and everyone who attended the luncheon and other events.

For the Hungarian text (“Dorosici alkony, 1943”), please go here.

Dorosic Nightfall, 1943

Zoltán Zelk

Translated by Diana Senechal

Thirty-three have perished in the pit.
The thirty-fourth collapsed before our eyes.
How many we have buried in two weeks!
we could have stacked the bodies to the skies.

And then we did! The dreadful grey tower!
Too much to bear, even in the sky;
staggering down the tower’s countless stairs,
beside the grave appeared Adonai.

And then he wailed an upward-swelling prayer,
its melody the tint of smoke and char—
and trembling they whirled below the earth,
the typhus-decimated legs and arms.

He tore his chest apart, burned all his rags,
fell to the ground, and soaked himself in mud;
cursing the Sixth Day of his creation,
he called back the Darkness and the Void.

My terrified companions might have whispered:
“An unhinged cantor… burying his brother…”
but I knew well that this was: Adonai!
and each one fallen in the pit, his brother.

Everything here is his brother, child, and sin,
everything that he long ago released:
the fire, the lice, the plague, and the infected
summer nightfall with its sour green taste.

Pounding his forehead into root and stone,
this is why he bows before Affliction,
this is why he moans with barren lip;
he is as speechless as before Creation.

Only the smoke of his terrible song came out,
and even it got stuck on top of a thin
branch, and in the sudden lack of sound,
we felt raw terror freezing on our skin.

And once again the curses and the blows,
—our numbed guards snapped back into their mien—
again the movement throbbing to the bone,
the failing muscles’ lousy dance again.

Always one and the same insensate rhythm.
But our shovels kept on tossing, tossing high,
and clods of earth rained down upon the heavens,
and in this way we buried Adonai.

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by Diana Senechal on April 8, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on April 8, 2021

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“The Vanished City Hall”

On Monday, January 13, 2020, around 7:45 a.m., I bicycled past Szolnok’s city hall on my way to school, just to make sure it was still there, and took the above photo. Earlier in the morning, I had read Zsolt Bajnai’s story “Az eltűnt városháza” (“The Vanished City Hall”); while I realized it was satire, I couldn’t discount its plausibility, since the days had indeed been foggy, the story had a bite to it, and such things do happen in the world…. A year and nearly three months later, my translation of the story has been published on the Asymptote Blog, in its Translation Tuesday feature!

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2021/04/06/translation-tuesday-the-vanished-city-hall-by-zsolt-bajnai/

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by Diana Senechal on April 6, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on April 6, 2021

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Are Hungarians Especially Sad?

Yesterday evening a former student wrote to me to wish me a happy Women’s Day and to ask what I thought of a certain Mariana Hernández’s comment on Quora that Hungary is the saddest country in Europe. “I can say I have never seen such bitter, depressed people as the Hungarians,” writes Ms. Hernández, who has been living in Hungary for eight years. She goes on to explain that she loves Hungarians and considers them open-minded, peace-loving, freedom-loving. They just have an extremely pessimistic outlook (in her opinion), don’t believe dreams can come true, and rarely smile.

No, this is not my experience. First of all, I would avoid any sweeping generalizations. I know Hungarians who are generally cheerful, Hungarians who are generally gloomy, and many whose mood and outlook fluctuate. That said, Hungarians do tend to be less optimistic on the surface than many U.S. Americans I know, but they also work toward what they want to do. If that isn’t optimistic, I don’t know what is. There’s a sense that life is difficult but that if you’re alert, clever, and persistent, you can find solutions to problems, and learn things while you’re at it. Also, here people are generally more open about their problems than in the U.S. (where such disclosures can come across as “too much information”). Maybe all of us have sadness, but some cultures show it more than others.

I have a hard time measuring happiness and sadness anyway, because they have so much to do with each other. They are intermeshed. I think of the stanza from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939“):

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Or a haunting poem by Endre Ady that I read recently, “A sorsom ellopója” (“Thief of My Destiny”), which begins:

Ki az én sorsomat ellopta,
Láttam,
Nipponban vagy Amerikában,
Nem emlékszem:
Álmomban láttam.

The one who stole my destiny,
I saw,
In Nippon or America,
I don’t remember:
In my dream I saw him.

I wouldn’t say that these poems bring happiness, but they do bring a kind of joy, since they give form to something hidden in us. Form is one of the biggest longings, one of the biggest fears, in a human life; we don’t want imposed forms, outworn forms, forms that fit us badly, but we want form in a deeper sense.

There are certainly Hungarians who believe that the current forms in the country are rotten: that the economy, government, and infrastructure have been overtaken by human greed, and that nothing better can possibly come, since human nature will not improve. But there are others who focus on doing their best with whatever they have and showing kindness to those around them. And having a good laugh here and there. The humor here is wonderful.

Just an example of basic goodwill: last week I went to see my general practitioner for the first time, so that he could enter my information in their system and then let me know when it’s my turn for a vaccination. The doctor’s office is on my street (the address is officially on Indóház, but the entrance is actually on Vörösmarty utca). I waited in the waiting room for just 15 minutes or so, and then I could go in. He and two assistants were in the office; the phones were constantly ringing, and he cheerfully handled the appointment while he or one of the two women took the calls (people calling anxiously with questions about the vaccines). It seemed hectic to me, but they were handling it all so skillfully and calmly, just taking the work as it came along. Doctors don’t get paid much in Hungary, and only the fanciest places have actual receptionists in the waiting area. But they admitted me cheerfully and charged me nothing.

Or another: last week I got an official letter in the mail, written in intimidating bureaucratic language (which I now understand, though I sometimes have to read it slowly), which informed me that I had to appear at the government office to apply for an address card and personal ID (which are required now that I have a permanent residence card), and that I had to bring certain documents, including a birth certificate with official translation. I despaired at this momentarily, because I had sent the official translation to Debrecen when applying for the residence permit, and had not received it back. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need it again.

Then, just when I was about to go to the translation office, I received word of the new lockdown. All services and stores, except for the essential ones, were to be closed for two weeks. So I raced to the translation office and explained the situation. The OFFI worker looked me up and saw that the translation was still in the system; all I needed was to order an official copy, which she could have ready by Monday. I asked whether the office would be open, and she said she wasn’t sure, but she’d call me on Monday morning, and if I couldn’t come in, she’d mail it to me. “Megoldjuk” (“we’ll solve it”), she said. And indeed: she called me on Monday and said I could come pick it up.

This kind of thing has happened many times, at school as well. There’s a willingness to solve problems, as well as an eagerness to do good even on a small scale. How many times a colleague has left a bag of fruit tea, or a piece of chocolate, on my desk? How many thoughtful gestures have I received? There has to be some kind of optimism in this. But it’s just not the “pumped-up, rah-rah” kind.

This week I brough George Saunders’s story “Winky”—one of my favorite stories in the world—to my twelfth-grade students. Reading it with Hungarians was very interesting (and moving) because of what they understood. They didn’t all grasp the first part, at the Seminar led by Tom Rodgers. They understood that it was a kind of success workshop, and a few figured out that Tom Rodgers was a con man, but the situation itself wasn’t familiar to them. The self-improvement craze hasn’t reached the same extremes here. But the parts they understood profoundly had to do with Neil Yaniky and his somewhat dimwitted but kindhearted sister, Winky. They understood Yaniky’s error: his belief that if he got rid of his sister, if he just told her to leave, he could succeed at last. And they understood how deluded this was.

Despite all my qualms about spoilers, I have to quote the ending of “Winky” to explain what I mean. At the Seminar, Yaniky has been convinced that Winky is the one who has been standing in his way, (“crapping in his oatmeal,” to paraphrase Tom Rodgers), and that now is the time for him to win. He gets all geared up for his great moment. In the meantime Winky is happily getting ready for her brother to come home, walking around with a sock over her shoulder and a piece of molding under her arm. And when he gets home, he just can’t do it.

… and as he pushed by her into the tea-smelling house the years ahead stretched out bleak and joyless in his imagination and his chest went suddenly dense with rage.

“Neil-Neil,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

And he wanted to smack her, insult her, say something to wake her up, but only kept moving toward his room, calling her terrible names under his breath.

He isn’t happier, he hasn’t had some rosy realization that family is what really matters in the world, but we are the ones left relieved. As a student said, “They have a history together.” Something in him can’t go against that. Maybe it’s cowardice, maybe it’s weakness, but whatever it is, it keeps him from doing that awful thing, and my students knew that it would have been awful, sending Winky out into a world she had no idea how to face.

Human nature is no better in one country than in another. But in my experience, Hungarians know that there’s something to be said for being among others and treating them well, even with imperfections and limitations (on all sides). Like Yaniky, Hungarians may mutter terrible names under their breath, but they (or many of them) reject the ultimate selfishness. And if that isn’t hopeful, I don’t know what is.

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by Diana Senechal on March 9, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on March 9, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/03/09/are-hungarians-especially-sad/

ALSCW Zoom event, March 21: Zsolt Bajnai and Marcell Bajnai (3 p.m. EDT, 8 p.m. CET)

Zsolt Bajnai’s photography opening at the Tisza Mozi on September 2, 2020.
From left to right on stage: Marcell Bajnai, Gábor Benő Pogány, Zsolt Bajnai.

I am excited to announce that on Sunday, March 21, at 3 p.m. EDT (8 p.m. CET), in a Zoom event hosted by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), I will be interviewing the fiction writer, journalist, and blogger Zsolt Bajnai and his son, the songwriter, musician, and university student Marcell Bajnai. After the interview, the father will read several of his stories, and the son will play his own songs in between them. A Facebook event page has been set up. Please come and invite others! Here’s the Zoom information:

Ernest F Suarez is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
https://cua.zoom.us/j/87577216462?pwd=cXNMaUhkOVRmUCs2K0pZcEJIdDQ3UT09
Meeting ID: 875 7721 6462
Passcode: 442761

The Bajnais are exceptional contributors to cultural life in Szolnok and Hungary. Zsolt’s wife, Judit Bajnai, is an editor and reporter for SzolnokTV, with a focus on culture. Her eye and ear for what is worth reporting, her interview questions, her way of engaging with the guests, and her speaking voice all contribute to making her programs enlightening and beautiful.

Judit Bajnai interviews the cellist Éva Nagyné Csontos and the actor Botond Barabás on SzolnokTV.

Kata Bajnai, Marcell’s sister, is a young playwright, actress, director, and university students. Her plays have won awards here in Szolnok and have been performed by the Varga Drama Club at venues around the city; I translated her darkly whimsical and satirical Farkasok (Wolves) with hopes that the Varga Drama Club could perform it at the Veszprém English-Language Drama Festival, but unfortunately Covid delayed those plans. Kata has a lot coming; I am eager to see what she does in the future.

Performance of Kata Bajnai’s Farkasok by the Varga Drama Club at the Verseghy Ferenc Könyvtár, June 22, 2019.
Third from left: Kata Bajnai.

The family doesn’t end there; the grandparents come to the events full of love and pride (and kindness—they have welcomed me warmly, and we sat together at the performance below), and there are other relatives I haven’t met yet.

Now for our featured guests. When I first discovered Zsolt Bajnai’s blogSzolnok—an exploration of Szolnok’s history through postcards, photographs, maps, and other artifacts—I knew I had come upon a treasure. What can you learn from a postcard? Much more than I had considered before: you can figure out when the photo was taken, what its significance was, what buildings looked like at the time, what the postcard-writer was doing, and much more. I made a practice (which has since slowed, because of the demands on my time) of reading the blog every day, as this allowed me to practice Hungarian and learn about Szolnok, both at once. Mr. Bajnai also gives (or, until Covid, gave) lectures based on his blog; people crowd into rooms at community centers, libraries, and other places to hear him speak, share memories of the past, and ask questions. Soon after finding the blog, I came upon his first two collections of fiction and started reading them. When I read “Korrupcióterápia” (“Corruption Therapy”), I knew it had to be translated. The satire is dead-on and pertinent to us all; the story has a lively rhythm and musical feel, with motifs and phrases cycling and returning. I especially enjoy hearing Mr. Bajnai read it at events, because of this and the audience’s laughter. (My translation was published a little over a year ago in The Satirist; you can read it here.) His most recent collection, Az eltűnt városháza (“The Vanished City Hall”), came out last April. Just a few days after its release (this was during the first Covid lockdown), I received a phone call from Mr. Bajnai himself. He asked what my address was, and I thought he was going to mail me the book. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang, and there he was on his bike, with an autographed copy in hand! That not only made my day but opened up hours of enjoyable reading. The title story tells the incredible (and fortunately fictional and satirical) story of the disappearance of Szolnok’s beautiful city hall; the events are so close to reality that, after first reading the story on his blog, I had to bicycle past the city hall to make sure it was still there.

Marcell Bajnai was my student in 2018–2019, the year when his band 1LIFE (now Idea) released their first album, Nincsen kérdés (There Is No Question). I remember when the album came out; one of my colleagues told me about it and even procured an autographed copy for me. The first listen called for many more. One tuneful, energetic, thoughtful song after another; the three band members together fill the air with sound but also know how to texture the songs so that you can hear everything. I was amazed and moved by the song “Maradok ember” (translatable as “I remain human,” “I will remain a person,” and similar variations), to the point of covering it on cello. I listened (and listen) to the band many times: on CD, at concerts, and online. In addition to being the band’s lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Marcell—currently a student of Hungarian at the Faculty of Arts of the Eötvös Loránd University, where he studies literature and linguistics—has been writing songs for years and has begun a solo project. The songs move people of many ages; they show young wisdom, courage, and a love of working with words and music together. The songs truly play, even in sadness; they take up a theme and turn it in different directions. One of my recent favorites is “dühöngő” (“raging”), which you can hear below.

People often talk about the importance of contributing to a community, but the Bajnais bring meaning and life to this concept. I could go on, but you will get to hear Zsolt and Marcell yourselves, if you attend on the 21st. I am happy and grateful that during this new lockdown—except for grocery stores and private health care, all stores and services are closed until March 22—we can come together for an interview, stories, and music. Please do join us.

Photo credits: Szolnoki Koncertek (photo of Zsolt Bajnai’s photography opening at the Tisza Mozi), Verseghy Ferenc Könyvtár (photo of the curtain call of Kata Bajnai’s Farkasok).

Update: The event went wonderfully; thanks to everyone who came, and thanks for the many enthusiastic comments we received afterward! Also, on a related subject, my translation of Zsolt Bajnai’s story “Az eltűnt városháza” (“The Vanished City Hall”) will be published on the Asymptote Blog on April 6!

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by Diana Senechal on March 7, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on March 7, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/03/07/alscw-zoom-event-march-21-zsolt-bajnai-and-marcell-bajnai-3-p-m-edt-8-p-m-cet/

Légszomj (diary-poems by Gyula Jenei, art by György Verebes)

Légszomj (Shortness of Breath), a pandemic diary of verse by Gyula Jenei and graphics by György Verebes, came out in mid-December, but since I was finishing up the manuscript of poetry translations and reading a couple of other books,it took me a little while to begin reading. When I did, it took me in with its humor, deadpan truth, terse comments on human nature and death, and details and places, many of them familiar to me. I loved it and read it in a few sittings, looking up only a few words in the dictionary. The art is dreamy (in a nightmarish sort of way) and dancelike.

Two thoughts come to mind. First, while this book is topical and timely to some extent, I believe it will outlive the pandemic, assuming the latter fades away. It’s about what we are going through now, but it is full of grim, matter-of-fact, resilient humor. It doesn’t leave the mind easily, and I am confident that it will continue to be pulled out of the bookshelf over the years. Along these lines, I think someone, or many people, should translate it into other languages. Not in a rush, but in good time, with care.

The first entry, “Day 1 / March 11” begins, “azon nevettek a feleségével, meséli ismerősöm, / hogy tegnap este a bevásárlóközpontban / miképp óvatoskodtak az emberek.” (“My acqaintance tells me that he and his wife laughed / over how, last night at the mall, / the people were so cautious around each other.”) The acquaintance goes on to describe how, if one person blew his nose, the faces of those around him would purse up; the mouths would get narrow. And the narrator laughs too, imagining these people, and imagining himself too; and then, at the end of the poem, the three of them (acquaintance, acquaintance’s wife, narrator) are laughing with self-abandon, to the point where they no longer know who is imagining whom, just that “lepkeként verdes bennünk / a szorongás” (“anxiety is beating inside us / in the manner of a moth”).

The fifth entry, “Day 6 / March 16,” describes a faculty meeting that I also attended. I remember exactly the scene described; a few people in the room were coughing, and you could sense others looking nervously around. In the poem, someone starts to say, “we will begin our next meeting with….” and the narrator whispers to his neighbor, “standing in a moment of silence,” and then, in the poem, compares this to the moment at a burial when the priest calls on the people to pray for our brother who will be next to go, and then he (the narrator) wonders who they will stand in memory of at the next meeting; and what if he is the one?

I have a few favorite poems in the book, including the two above; “Day 27 / April 6,” a winding reflection on how power and vulnerability change people, but not down to the essence; how humans remain more or less the same, and the vulnerable are not more virtuous than the powerful; and “Day 31 / April 10,” about the profusion of videos of quarantine poetry readings on the internet, and how the narrator really doesn’t enjoy them, doesn’t enjoy readings in person either, except for a few, and how he makes a video himself at the library’s request, after quite a bit of trial and error. But the last and longest entry, that of November 2, is my favorite of all, I think, with its allusion to Sophocles’s “Ode To Man” (in Antigone) and its commentary on Covid vogues:

az elején sokan mondogatták, divat volt mondogatni:
a járvány után nemcsak más,
de jobb lesz a világ.
emberibb.
mintha lehetne mérni a jóságot mérlegen vagy centivel.
pedig a görögöktől is tudhatjuk, az ember nem jó,
csak csodálatos.
más fordításban: a sok szörnyű csodafajzat között
a legszörnyebb.

In informal translation:

in the beginning many people kept saying, it was in vogue to say:
after the pandemic, the world will be
not just different, but better.
more humane.
as though you could measure goodness on a scale or with a ruler.
but we can know from the greeks that a human is not good,
just wondrous.
in a different translation: among the many terrible wonders
the most terrible.

The art is integral to this volume; the figures–humans, lungs, gestures?–can be seen breathing, imagining, playing, huddling, extending an oversized hand, lying down. Look closely, and the relations between the pictures and the poems start to come through. One can read and enjoy the book in many ways: in sequence or not, quickly or slowly, silently or out loud, with or without a mask. But however read, it will provoke recognition of one kind or another.

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by Diana Senechal on February 28, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on February 28, 2021

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The Winter 2020–2021 Issue of Folyosó

It is here! Peruse it with abandon, and leave a comment if you wish! I have copied my Letter from the Editor below.

Folyosó began in the spring of 2020, when school in Hungary had gone online in response to COVID-19. After a brief interlude of in-person classes in the fall, we have been back online since mid-November, with ongoing hopes of returning to school. During this time, students have written essays, stories, short scenes, contest entries, and more; this issue features some of these winter fruits, along with Lilla Kassai’s art.

We proudly present our first international contest, for which students wrote pieces about imaginary inventions. The jury (Judit Kéri, Anikó Bánhegyesi, Nándor Szűcs, Edit Göröcs, and I) had a difficult time ranking the ten finalists; while we eventually chose winners, we are delighted to publish all ten pieces here. It was an honor to receive entries from the Lycée Sainte-Pulchérie in Istanbul, as well as from many Varga students; we hope to bring the two schools and others together for an online Folyosó event this spring.

For the scenes based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, students were supposed to start with something in the play and take it in a surprising direction. The scenes published here—Áron Antal’s “Something Even Stranger,” Gréta Tóth’s “A Midsummer Night’s Gestalt,” Gergely Sülye’s “As from a Voyage,” Dorottya Turza’s “The Surprise of the Century,” Dávid Csáki’s “Let Him Roar Again,” Bertalan Szegi’s “Act 1, Scene 1,” and Zsófia Szabina Gávris’s “A Nice Article”—abound with wit, emotion, and surprise.

This is also the first time that we feature writers from Class 9.B (which I teach once a week); I have been impressed with this class’s imagination and look forward to publishing more of their work.

The winter issue does not include any writings from the Orwell project, but we may publish a few of them in the spring. For this project, Varga students joined with a class of tenth-graders at Columbia Secondary School to read and discuss Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was a great experience; you can read much more about it on the project website.

Some of the pieces in this issue grapple with difficult problems: isolation, introspection, death and grief, political vanity, and disillusionment; others delight in books, friendship, everyday mishaps and mistakes, and visions of the future. The issue’s overall spirit brings to mind William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence“: not just the famous lines

It is right it should be so 
Man was made for Joy & Woe 
And when this we rightly know 
Thro the World we safely go 

but much more. In this issue you will find a procession of experience, thoughts, questions: from Szabina Tamara Da Cunha Carvalho’s essay “The Problem with BLM Movements in Hungary” to Hunor Gangel’s “From Late to Early”; from Gergely Sülye’s “Transformation” to Lili Forgács’s “The Truth”; from Sándor Tor’s “Is This the Future?” to Zsófia Vona’s “A Dream Come True”; from Sándor Szakács’s “Challenging Times” to Adél Mihályi’s “Personalities”; from Bettina Czékus’s “Arbya” to Eszter Aletta Hevesi’s “The Story of Gen E”; from Tamás Takács’s “Michael the Caterpillar” to Botond Vass’s “The Shelter.”

We wish you good health, happy winter reading, and many returns! As ever, we welcome your submissions and comments.

Sincerely,

Diana Senechal
English and Civilization Teacher
Editor of Folyosó

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by Diana Senechal on February 14, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on February 14, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/02/14/the-winter-2020-2021-issue-of-folyoso/

Announcements and Pictures

This is one of my favorite photos that I have taken in Hungary. My friend Jenny Golub asked about it, and I replied:

The Tisza river, just a few meters away from this photo, is famous for its mayflies, which emerge from the river by the thousands for a few hours in late June. They do a mating dance in the air and mate, the females lay eggs in the water, and then they die. I haven’t managed to see them yet–you have to catch them at just the right time–but when it happens, the air shimmers with mayflies. We have an annual Mayfly Festival (Tiszavirág Fesztivál) which we missed sorely last June because of Covid. It’s one of Szolnok’s treasured events; bands play, food and beer abound, and you can have a great evening (or two or three) by the river.

These are two statues of mayflies. In the background, a beautiful Calvinist church. I see the mayfly statues almost every day–but have never seen them catch the light in this way before. It was raining lightly, there was a light fog, and everything was glowing. I took a picture in the other direction too, looking toward the former synagogue (now Szolnok’s gallery).

The first of my announcements is long in advance—but mark your calendars now!

On Sunday, March 21, at 3 p.m. EDT, in an event in the ALSCW Winter/Spring Zoom Series, I will be interviewing the writer Zsolt Bajnai and his son, the songwriter and musician Marcell Bajnai, in Hungarian with English translation. After the interview, Zsolt Bajnai will read a few of his stories, and Marcell will play his own songs between them. Please come and invite others! It will take place at 12 noon PST,  3 p.m. EDT,  8 p.m. in Hungary. (This is a rare weekend when the time difference between NYC and Hungary is only five hours, because of the different dates for the Daylight Savings Time switch.) I will send the Zoom information as soon as it is available.

You can read more about the Bajnais in the official event description: https://alscw.org/news/alscw-winter-spring-zoom-series/. In addition, you can read my translation of Zsolt Bajnai’s story “Corruption Therapy,” published in The Satirist, and listen to Marcell Bajnai’s song “dühöngő.”

The second is just two days in advance: on Monday, February 15, the Winter 2020–2021 issue of Folyosó will appear! You will be able to read the contest winners, Shakespeare-inspired scenes, stories, and essays. Here’s the beautiful cover (art by Lilla Kassai):

And here is one more photo, taken on the same evening as the one at the top. This is of Szolnok’s gallery, formerly a synagogue. I have taken many pictures of the inside and outside and posted many on this blog. This time I love it against the evening blue.

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by Diana Senechal on February 13, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on February 13, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/announcements-and-pictures/

A Colorful February

The days have been muddy and rainy, not as in the photo above (which I took a week ago), but still beautiful in an indoor way. The Orwell project—in which my students in Class 10.C joined Professor Attridge’s tenth-grade class at Columbia Secondary School for a series of joint online discussions of 1984—went so well that we decided to have an online gathering, which took place yesterday evening and was great fun.

Then this morning I had the honor of announcing the results of Folyosó’s first international contest. The decision was extremely difficult, because the ten finalists were so good. There were five of us on the jury: my colleagues Judit Kéri, Edit Göröcs, Anikó Bánhegyesi, Nándor Szűcs, and myself. The winners are as follows:

  • Grand Prize: Bernadett Sági (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), Virtual or Reality
  • First Place: Deniz Pala (Lycée Sainte-Pulchérie, Istanbul), Stronger Links
  • Second Place: Gergely Sülye (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), In an Arm’s Reach, and Kázmér Kaposvári (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), Salvation or the End
  • Third Place: Defne Lal Koçer (Lycée Sainte-Pulchérie, Istanbul), Life Consists of Choices, and Lilla Kassai (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), Bringing Dragons to Life
  • Honorable Mention: Lili Forgács (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), The Language-Capsule; Ahmet Yavuz Kaya (Lycée Sainte-Pulchérie, Istanbul), Muter3000; Eszter Aletta Hevesi (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), The Portal; and Alexandra Klaudia Süveges (Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok), Camping with a Little Bit of Magic.

All of these pieces, along with many others, will be published in the Winter 2020-2021 issue of Folyosó, which appears on Monday.

That has to be all for now; much more is coming soon. I’ll just add that even in the rain, things can be colorful, outside as well as in.

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by Diana Senechal on February 10, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on February 10, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/02/10/a-colorful-february/

Done and Not Done

With writing, you get used to not being done. You have deadlines and stages, and you work toward them, making your text as perfect as possible, but you know there will be more. Still, I am proud that my translation of Gyula Jenei’s poetry collection Mindig más (Always Different) are now a complete manuscript, which I have reviewed carefully and will send to the publisher, Deep Vellum, tomorrow. The book should appear within the next year; if all goes well, it might even come out in late 2021. This has been a project of more than two years; over those two years, my Hungarian has taken shape, my familiarity with the poems has deepened, and Marianna, Gyula, and I have had many conversations about the book. Their help was tremendous; they reviewed each of my translations, of all forty-eight poems, sometimes in several stages, and sent me comments; generally the corrections and suggestions were few but essential. A particular event turned these translations toward a book: our visit in October 2019 to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, where we were the featured guests of the Cowan Center’s Education Forum, and where we met Will Evans, the publisher of Deep Vellum.

So the manuscript is done, but that’s not the end; the publisher may request or make edits, and there may be several stages of review. Still, the book is much closer than it was, and I think people will love the poems in English, as many have so far. Five have been published in Literary Matters; another one will appear soon in The Massachusetts Review.

The picture above appeared in a May 2019 post, “A Perfect Imperfection“; I took it at a local cafe, near school, where I used to go to work on the translations (on Wednesdays, when I had a substantial break during the day). It was usually quiet there, so I could sink into the poems with no distractions. The following year, my schedule changed, so the work was relegated to evenings and weekends (and picked up pace, too). This fall was the real crunch; I translated two poems per week, and then even more at the end. But it also grew slower and more leisurely, since the basic translating had grown easier and I could focus on details.

A book is not a book until it is, so there’s still a ways to go. But existence comes in degrees, and in that respect, the book’s has gotten warmer.

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by Diana Senechal on January 31, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on January 31, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/01/31/done-and-not-done/

A Kind of Puzzle

I am almost always working on a story in my head; eventually it gets down on paper. Somewhere along the way, I run into the story’s puzzle. When it’s in its beginning stages, I know where it’s going, more or less, but don’t know what it’s about, until something clicks, a piece that fits right in the middle, or a little off to the side. One of these years, I will have a story collection out, even though publishers, I hear, avoid story collections like grilled dill pickles with chilled vanilla filling. It has been a long-term dream; years ago, I intrigued an agent slightly with my collection-in-progress The Dog Park, and Other Tales of a Wounded Ego. The title will be different, but the collection will come.

I was recently reading Tad Friend’s great, long piece in The New Yorker on Bill Hader, which mentions that Hader met with George Saunders and Tobias Wolff for dinner at one point. I had a flash of jealousy: why did he get to have dinner with them, two of my favorite story writers? Why did they get to have dinner with him, one of my favorite actors, screenwriters, comedians, interviewees, lovers of literature? (Here he is on SNL with one of his classic Keith Morrison impressions.) Why do celebrities float around in a world where they need only utter a wish, a dinner invitation, and it’s “Open Sesame”? Not that that’s really how it is. But then I felt better when I learned that Saunders and Wolff would be speaking over Zoom at the Bay Area Book Festival–about Russian literature, no less! (The event, “Writing, Reading, and Being All Too Gloriously Human: George Saunders with Tobias Wolff on the Storytelling Greats,” takes place today at 7 p.m.—so, 4 a.m. tomorrow my time.) I signed up and paid the registration fee, only to be informed that the event was only for people in the U.S., according to the terms of a contract. My registration fee was refunded, but the excitement was not. Oh well. (Update: The Bay Area Book Festival kindly sent me the link to the video they made of the talk, so I will be able to hear it after all.)

I had been thinking about parallels among three of my favorite stories: George Saunders’s “Winky,” to which I have returned again and again, Tobias Wolff’s “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”; also, in a way, “Fat Phils Day” by Hubert Selby Jr. These stories all end with a swift motion into some kind of revenge, retribution, or release–except that in the case of “The Overcoat,” it’s a bit of an oddity, a coda in the form of a ghost story, which seems disconnected from the main story but also not. And in the case of “Winky,” the ending seems both a victory and a defeat at the same time: Yaniky’s victory over the cult nonsense he has been fed, a gut inability to carry it through, but also, in his mind at the time, a terrible failure, because he will never be able to liberate himself from plain old life. But what I find in common is not the message of these endings, nor even the particular quality, but the motion itself, the way it brings everything together.

A great thing about writing is that you don’t have to meet other writers in person. In fact, if I did, I probably woudn’t know what to say, or even want to say much. Just by virtue of reading and writing, you are part of that world, and your work will speak for itself, as theirs does to you. I’m not saying this to console myself. It’s true: I would feel awkward at a party with writers I admire, though I’d happily take their classes or attend their readings. The work is the thing I am drawn to, though once in a while in my life, the writer has also become a friend. Some of this is set up in advance, by others; we know only of work that we have access to. Some writers’ work never makes it into print, unless they self-publish; some gets published here and there, and some takes off. There’s both justice and injustice to it all; lots of good work gets published, lots of mediocre stuff does too, but somewhere along the way, sooner or later, writers and readers find each other.

Therefore reading is part of the puzzle. If there weren’t readers, there would be no reason to write in the first place, and so reading completes the act, or maybe just continues it, since the things worth reading are worth reading again and again. I don’t read nearly as much or as quickly as I would like–but the reading that does take place is a kind of participation in the work itself. Today the Orwell project begins; a few of my students and I will join Columbia Secondary School students on Zoom to discuss the first few chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Over the next two weeks, we will read the entire novel together. And because this first joint class is happening in just a few hours, and I have some errands to run beforhand, I must leave off here.

I took these pictures yesterday.

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by Diana Senechal on January 15, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Diana Senechal on January 15, 2021

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/a-kind-of-puzzle/

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  • “To know that you can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with.”

    —Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

  • TEDx Talk

    Delivered at TEDx Upper West Side, April 26, 2016.

  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR

     

    Diana Senechal is the author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture and the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, awarded by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Her second book, Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in October 2018. In February 2022, Deep Vellum will publish her translation of Gyula Jenei's 2018 poetry collection Mindig Más.

    Since November 2017, she has been teaching English, American civilization, and British civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. From 2011 to 2016, she helped shape and teach the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering in New York City. In 2014, she and her students founded the philosophy journal CONTRARIWISE, which now has international participation and readership. In 2020, at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium, she and her students released the first issue of the online literary journal Folyosó.

  • INTERVIEWS AND TALKS

    On April 26, 2016, Diana Senechal delivered her talk "Take Away the Takeaway (Including This One)" at TEDx Upper West Side.
     

    Here is a video from the Dallas Institute's 2015 Education Forum.  Also see the video "Hiett Prize Winners Discuss the Future of the Humanities." 

    On April 19–21, 2014, Diana Senechal took part in a discussion of solitude on BBC World Service's programme The Forum.  

    On February 22, 2013, Diana Senechal was interviewed by Leah Wescott, editor-in-chief of The Cronk of Higher Education. Here is the podcast.

  • ABOUT THIS BLOG

    All blog contents are copyright © Diana Senechal. Anything on this blog may be quoted with proper attribution. Comments are welcome.

    On this blog, Take Away the Takeaway, I discuss literature, music, education, and other things. Some of the pieces are satirical and assigned (for clarity) to the satire category.

    When I revise a piece substantially after posting it, I note this at the end. Minor corrections (e.g., of punctuation and spelling) may go unannounced.

    Speaking of imperfection, my other blog, Megfogalmazások, abounds with imperfect Hungarian.

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