The Essential Guide to Being Hungarian
The Essential Guide to Being Hungarian

Author: ISTVAN BORI

Publisher: New Europe Books

Published: 2012-07-24

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0982578164

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What is it to be Hungarian? What does it feel like? Most Hungarians are convinced that the rest of the world just doesn't get them. They are right. True, much of the world thinks highly of Hungarians--for reasons ranging from their heroism in the 1956 revolution to their genius as mathematicians, physicists, and financiers. But Hungarians do often seem to be living proof of the old joke that Magyars are in fact Martians: they may be situated in the very heart of Europe, but they are equipped with a confounding language, extraterrestrial (albeit endearing) accents, and an unearthly way of thinking. What most Hungarians learn from life about the Magyar mind is now available, for the first time, in this user-friendly guide to what being Hungarian is all about. The Essential Guide to Being Hungarian brings together twelve authors well-versed in the quintessential ingredients of being Hungarian--from the stereotypical Magyar man to the stereotypical Magyar woman, foods to folk customs, livestock to literature, film to philosophy, politics to porcelain, and scientists to sports. In fifty short, highly readable, often witty, sometimes politically incorrect, but always candid articles, the authors demonstrate that being credibly Hungarian--like being French, Polish or Japanese--is largely a matter of carrying around in your head a potpourri of conceptions and preconceptions acquired over the years from your elders, society, school, the streets, and mass media. Compacting this wealth of knowledge into an irresistible little book, The Essential Guide to Being Hungarian is an indispensable reference that will teach you how to be Hungarian, even if you already are.

Chicago of the Balkans
Chicago of the Balkans

Author: Gwen Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1351572172

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

At the point of its creation in 1873, Budapest was intended to be a pleasant rallying point of orderliness, high culture and elevated social principles: the jewel in the national crown. From the turn of the century to World War II, however, the Hungarian capital was described, variously, as: Judapest, the sinful city, not in Hungary, and the Chicago of the Balkans. This is the first English-language study of competing metropolitan narratives in Hungarian literature that spans both the liberal late Habsburg and post-liberal, 'Christian-national' eras, at the same time as the 'Jewish Question' became increasingly inseparable from representations of the city. Works by writers from a wide variety of backgrounds are discussed, from Jewish satirists to icons of the radical Right, representatives of conservative national schools, and modernist, avant-garde and 'peasantist' authors. Gwen Jones is Hon. Research Associate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.

Worlds of Hungarian Writing
Worlds of Hungarian Writing

Author: András Kiséry

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781611478402

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book discusses modern Hungarian literary culture as a site of intercultural exchange, suggesting through a variety of case-studies that encounters with foreign literatures are integral to national literary tradition, and studying them renews critical perspectives on national literary history. It contributes to current reconsiderations of methods of literary historiography, and will appeal to readers interested in Hungarian literature, and to scholars of reception study, cultural memory, comparative literary study, and of world literature.

Light within the Shade
Light within the Shade

Author: Zsuzsanna Ozsvath

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2014-07-02

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0815652747

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The pure verbal energy characterizing Hungarian poetry may be regarded as one of the most striking components of Hungarian culture. More than 800 years ago, under the inspiration of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Hungarian poets began to craft a rich chain of poetic designs, much of it in response to the country’s cataclysmic history. With precision, depth, and great intensity, these verses give accounts of their authors’ vision of themselves as participants in history and their most personal experience in the world. Light within the Shade includes 135 of the most important Hungarian poems ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Organized in chronological order, the poems are followed by an essay by Ozsváth providing the historical, biographical, and cultural background of the poets and the poetry. The book concludes with Turner’s essay on the special thematic and literary qualities of Hungarian poetry, as well as notes on translation practices. This essential volume exposes English-speaking readers to Hungarian poetry’s artistic achievement in history and culture, its evolutionary development as a tradition, and its significance within the context of world literature.

Letters From Turkey
Letters From Turkey

Author: Keleman Mikes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1136175547

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 2000. Letters from Turkey, considered the best Hun,garian prose of the eighteenth century, is written by Kelemen Mikes, a Transylvanian nobleman who went into exile with Ferenc Rakoczi II, the Prince of Transylvania, after the War of Independence in 1704 - 1711 in which the Prince fought to preserve independent Transylvania. The Prince and his entourage spent some years in France, and were then invited to Turkey by Sultan Ahmed III, going there in 1717. Some of the party eventually left, but, like Rakoczi, Mikes spent the rest of life in exile in Turkey. This memoir had a considerable vogue in Transylvania at the time, and Mikes writes in a well-established tradition. The 207 letters, never before translated from Hungarian, were addressed over some forty years to an aunt in Constantinople. In them, Mikes speaks of the Hungarians' daily life, their hopes and disappointments, and of current events in Turkey and beyond; he describes the deaths of some of the party including that of the Prince himself. He also gives an account of a military campaign along the Danube and an embassy to Moldova, ranging over religious, historical and philosophical topics and recounting numerous anecdotes. All the while his patriotic feelings never leave him, nor does his affection, not unblinkered, for his Prince. The last letter, written four years before his death, sees him become head of the Hungarian community in Turkey, last survivor of the original band of Transylvanian nobles exiled to a far country.

Today
Today

Author: Magyar Írók Szövetsége

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Melancholy
Melancholy

Author: László F. Földényi (Foldenyi)

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0300220693

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one’s life. This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time.

The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volumes II & III
The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volumes II & III

Author: Miklos Banffy

Publisher: Everyman's Library

Published: 2013-07-02

Total Pages: 842

ISBN-13: 0375712305

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

**Washington Post Best Books of 2013** The celebrated TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY by Count Miklós Bánffy is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in Hungary, Bánffy’s novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical acclaim and appear here for the first time in hardcover. They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, the second and third novels in the trilogy, continue the story of the two aristocratic cousins introduced in They Were Counted as they navigate a dissolute society teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Count Balint Abády, a liberal politician who defends his homeland’s downtrodden Romanian peasants, loses his beautiful lover, Adrienne, who is married to a sinister and dangerously insane man, while his cousin László loses himself in reckless and self-destructive addictions. Meanwhile, no one seems to notice the gathering clouds that are threatening the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that will soon lead to the brutal dismemberment of their country. Set amid magnificent scenery of wild forests, snowcapped mountains, and ancient castles, THE TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY combines a Proustian nostalgia for a lost world, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.