I learned to hear English and to speak English before I learned to read and to write English, but I long ago lost my awareness of English as a system of sounds. I learned to hear and to speak and to read and to write Hungarian all during the same time, but I am able with only a little effort, while I speak or recite or sing or merely listen, to become aware of Hungarian as mostly sounds. I can never be unaware of the written language. Somewhere in my mind the words go on appearing as writing. But the consistent sounds of Hungarian vowels and consonants and the strangely uniform pattern of stresses (only the first syllable of any word is stressed) take my attention away from the writing.
It may be an unhelpful comparison, but if an English word or phrase is a pane of clear glass with something called a meaning on its far side, a Hungarian word is a pane of coloured glass. The meaning on the other side of that glass is apparent to me, but I can never be unaware of the rich tints of the glass.
In the fourth year of my learning Hungarian and the first year of my friendship with Joe Kulcsar, I happened to hear from a community radio station a recitation of a long poem. Its title in English is ‘Ode to the Hungarian Language’. The poet is György Faludy. The recitation lasted for perhaps eight minutes. It was sufficiently slow and clear for me to understand the outline of the poem, although much of the vocabulary was strange to me. What I most noticed was the sound of the poem. Some passages seemed to have been written especially to allow the sounds of Hungarian to come into play. Twenty years earlier, while I read an English translation of the prose of Gyula Illyés, I had vowed one day to read the original in Hungarian. Now, listening to György Faludy’s ‘Ode’, I vowed to find the text and to learn it by heart.
On my next visit to Joe Kulcsar, I described what I had heard from the radio. I spoke as though Joe himself might not have heard of the poem. When I had finished speaking, Joe drew himself up in his chair and recited by heart the whole of ‘Ode to the Hungarian Language’. Afterwards, he handed me a copy of the text so that I could learn it for myself, and before I left him that day he took me through the poem, explaining difficult passages and historical allusions.
One such allusion occurs in the very first lines of the poem and is relevant for my purposes in this writing. The first four lines may be paraphrased thus in English prose:
Now, as the darkness of evening reaches into my room, you come to my mind, servant-girl of Saint Gerard, and your lips from which, under the trees at evening, the first sad Hungarian song burst out.
What these lines allude to, so Joe explained, is the earliest known reference to the distinctive music of the Hungarians. Saint Gerard was a Venetian missionary to Hungary during the eleventh century, when the nation was converting voluntarily to Christianity. A chronicle of those times reports Gerard’s having heard one evening from his garden a Magyar servant-girl singing while she turned a hand-mill and his having been much affected, although he knew not a word of the Hungarian language.
I soon learned the poem by heart, although I could not say even today, several years later, that I have discovered all its meaning. During much of the poem, the poet considers by turns some of the lexical and grammatical components of his native language. Each of these he apprehends through his senses, so to speak. The ending of the past tense is the black crow’s-wing of Hungarian history, for example, and the dark shadow of the gallows, the stake, and the cross. Adjectives are an endless flowering furrow. Obsolete words are deserted villages. But these few examples of mine can barely hint at the richness of the poem, which leads my thoughts through a quite different sequence of visual imagery whenever I recite it.
I have recited ‘Ode to the Hungarian Language’ many times since I first learned it. During most of my recitations I have had in mind one or another of the sequences of imagery mentioned in the previous paragraph, but I have not infrequently lost sight of the visual imagery and heard line after line as I first heard them from the radio; heard myself reciting only the sounds of the mysterious Magyar tongue. (In Hungarian, the same word, nyelv, means both ‘language’ and ‘tongue’.) It has not yet happened to me, but it surely will happen to me that those sounds will bring to my mind images of a certain horse-race. Or, if the sounds of György Faludy’s poem never give rise to those images, then the sounds of some other Hungarian poem, as yet unknown to me, surely will.
I have glimpsed already some of the details of that race. I know already that the name of the horse most prominent in the blanket finish of the race will be Angel’s Son. The person looking out from the rear of the grandstand appears as a young female, perhaps the dark-haired young female denoted in so many Hungarian poems and songs by the phrase barna kislány. The rider of the horse Angel’s Son will lower his whip gracefully an instant before the horse reaches the finish-line. What prompts the rider to do this is an event such as could happen only on a racecourse in the mind of such a person as can visualise only a racecourse whenever he looks for a meaning of meanings. The event may be either the rider’s hearing in his own mind or, more likely, the person’s hearing in his own mind as well as in the rider’s mind one or another passage of Hungarian music in the traditional mode, which uses the same pentatonic scale as was used by the Catholic Church for all its Latin Hymns.
During one of my visits to Joe Kulcsar in the last year of his life, I tried to explain to him in Hungarian something of what I have tried to explain in this essay. He heard me out politely enough, but I wondered afterwards how much I had managed to explain. Then, a few months later, I read a report of an interview with Joe in the Hungarian-language weekly, Magyar Élet. The interviewer, Livia Bagin, at one point asked Joe about the Australian writer who was learning Hungarian from him. Joe spoke briefly about me and then, in one neat Hungarian sentence, reported what must have seemed to him the best summary of all he had heard from me about my reasons for making an old, Asian tongue my second language.
Azt mondja, hogy az angyalok mennyországban magyarul beszélnek.
He says that the angels in heaven speak Hungarian.
(Eggplant Dreaming, HEAT 5, new series, 2003)
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