Polyglot

Warning. This is a rant about how mean we can be. But  when out Hair Product in Chief incites a crowd to chant, "Send Them Back", I get angry at our own stupidity and meanness.

I've mentioned before. This country doesn't even have its own name, but that doesn't stop some people from waving flags and taking it out on others.

Yeah, it's the United States of America. But then there is the United States of Brazil, and also the United Mexican States, but at least they have their own unique name. There's nothing unique about "America", but we throw the label around as if Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America aren't in the Americas.

It's arrogant. That's an epithet the USA'ns earned a long time ago. The Ugly American.

Now we have crowds happily chanting, "Make America Great Again" and "Send Them Back". That's disgusting.

You are uncomfortable with dark colored skin? Deal with it. You bristle at not understanding someone talking in a foreign language. Deal with it. You don't like people wearing ethnic clothes, whether a head scarf or baggy shorts hanging off someone's butt? Deal with it. Because the problem is you, not them.

You want to blame others for your problems? Stifle the urge because you are either a hypocrite or a conspiracy theorist; probably both. Go join a religion. They cater to such weak minds.

I'm angry at the intentional ignorance and ugliness in this country. People are actually proud of being nasty, vicious, even violent. I am angry at Fox Noise for making money by inciting the meanness in people. I am angry at a Republican party that shamelessly incites and exploits its nasty, vicious and mean base. Hypocrisy doesn't begin to describe such low-lifes.

But mostly I am angry at people who vote for such low-lifes. Or don't bother to vote. It's not like any of this is news. But hatred, even if contrived, is powerful.

The world is getting smaller. Cultures, languages, and skin color are getting a lot less isolated. Deal with it. "French", "English" and "Italian" are getting new meanings. Yes, it's shaking up our cultural identities. Deal with it. Maybe it's karma: just deserts for centuries of imperial and religious exploitation. And you complain?

And who is leading the free world in this orgy of hatred against "others"? Why, one of the most polyglot societies of them all. The political collective that shamelessly cleansed a half a continent of its inhabitants, and imported slaves and the poor in order to exploit and exhaust its natural resources, a political collective that doesn't even have its own name.

We have to deal with this. We have to do better. The alternative is too ugly to imagine.

Eger Stars

Its fascinating to be immersed in another’s world; another’s fantasy world. The images, characters, costumes, and customs linger in the mind, if only for a short time, like a dream.

A good movie can draw me in. Each movie and TV program is someone's creation of a re-playable dream. Most are silly endless chase scenes, unnecessarily violent, unduly salacious, and/or simply boring. I prefer to go to bed and create my own dreams. But some movies draw me in, typically period pieces, foreign settings, intelligent dialogue, and gorgeous cinematography.

Nowadays we watch movies on a television with all the distractions of domestic life. When we were young, a trip to the movie theater was special: vivid colors projected onto a huge screen in a darkened theater supported by a sound system that moved across the walls. I remember receiving printed programs, even assigned seating, to showings of Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and the Walt Disney Sydney premiere of Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Remember the after matinee surprise of emerging from the theater to see sunshine illuminating a familiar world that, for an instant, seemed very strange?

The fact that we were younger then is relevant. We are more impressionable before our imaginations became prejudiced with the familiarity of ordinary reality.

Think of reading books. They too are someone's creation of a dream, another world. Reading books is uncanny. What is it about reading that inherently triggers our imagination? They are only printed letters forming words that the eye reads and the mind silently interprets as sounds. There is no soundtrack and no moving images. Illustrations play a minor role compared to cinematography. Yet as abstract as the printed word is, and although reading requires more effort than passively watching moving images accompanied by sound, books are more engrossing. Images, characters, customs, even costumes and scenery, all conjured up with twenty-six outlined shapes symbolizing sounds, linger in the mind.

All art does that. Music, the most abstract and powerful form of human creation, painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, gardening, cooking, even straightening up the house are expressions of creativity and opportunities to be drawn into a different world.

But it's a book that is now lingering in my mind and competing with the ordinary around me. Actually, it's not just a book. It's a triple or quadruple whammy of a classic novel, a period piece, and an iconic Hungarian story in Hungarian, a language intimately familiar to me from childhood which, anymore, I use talking to myself or the dog, or composing emails to my cousins in Hungary.

I am laboriously translating Egri Csillagok (Stars of Eger) by Géza Gárdonyi and originally published in 1901. It begins in 1533 and ends in 1552 with a small Hungarian force defending the fortress of Eger from a large army of Ottoman Turk besiegers. It's required reading for a Hungarian education.

I have a bad habit with reading, I read quickly in order to get the plot. When I was in high school, I read Jane Eyre in one day; War and Peace in three. I rarely slow down to appreciate style or description. Which is why I do not read Hungarian. It’s a language I know from simple conversation. I was never schooled in it. I'm impatient. Sentence structure is different, the relationships of words are embedded in suffixes, strokes and dots over vowels change pronunciation and meanings, and my vocabulary is about third grade, at best.

Fortunately, many years ago my Uncle Zoltán gifted me with a two-volume Hungarian-English dictionary, each volume some twelve hundred pages of eight point font. It is invaluable. I relied upon it extensively to translate my father's memoirs. Since then, Google Translate has become most helpful, but one has to be suspicious and cross-check with a real dictionary. Still, Translate is a time saver for me because it helps with spelling and I know enough Hungarian to recognize when Translate is off base. I have a great story of my cousin's email greeting to Shari, kezit csókolom (“I kiss your hand”) translated as “I handcuff you.” In fact, I just plugged in kezit csokolom (no accent over the “o”) and got “hands with chocolate” in return. Well, if you know a little Hungarian, you would never confuse csokoládé (chocolate) with csókol (kiss), Hershy’s notwithstanding.

I tried reading Egri Csillagok in Hungarian decades ago and gave up after a dozen pages, and even then I barely got the gist of what was going on. I am too impatient to look up two or three words per sentence, then spend time figuring out how they are related: which word is subject, what is the action and what the object, and who belongs to whom. There was no English translation at that time.

As I approach my golden years of retirement, I need hobbies. Why not give Egri Csillagok another try? I looked for an English translation. All that is available are used, hardcover editions running thirty or more dollars a copy. The only available ebook was in Hungarian. I got it. My mind clouded over trying to read and understand. I realized that to read it, I had to take the time and the trouble to write down an English translation. Why not translate the entire book? I managed to translate my father’s writing, I have my dictionary and Translate, and I boast about using my Hungarian skills two years ago when I was in Budapest and visiting cousins in Hungary.

So off an on for the last fortnight I have been translating Egri Csillagok into English. Actually, it’s been more than off-and-on because when I am “on” it's very intense. I am immersed in Hungarian text for many hours at a time, figuring out the meanings of literary words, even medieval Hungarian words and archaic Hungarian expressions. Fortunately, Gárdonyi's prose is elegantly simple, often terse, but that still leaves plenty to decipher.

I was about a tenth of the way through when I decided to splurge and buy the hardcover English translation. I was apprehensive. For several days after the book arrived, I didn't open it, nor did I work with the Hungarian ebook. I was afraid that reading it in English would be too easy and would detract form my self-imposed discipline. In turn, I was afraid that the translation would take too long and have little value if there was already a good one. But I had already collected twenty or more Hungarian words highlighted in yellow for which I could find no translation. So I turned to the English book.

Fortunately, it’s a flawed translation. Although the Hungarian is mostly all there and translated, Mr. George Cushing felt it necessary to contribute his inventions to Gárdonyi's novel. At first I thought that maybe the Hungarian ebook I had purchased cheap from Walmart and Kobo had been dumbed down. I found another ebook version on a Hungarian library website and downloaded it. It is identical to the Walmart-Kobo version. Son of a gun. In addition to the pastime pleasure of translating an interesting Hungarian story, my translation would not only be more faithful to the original, it could be made available as an ebook.

I use Cushing’s version as resource to translate the occasional word (which I cross-check with my English-Hungarian dictionary volume) and, in the odd sentence, to occasionally check for relationships of who is doing what to whom.

What is amazing to me is becoming more familiar with reading Hungarian. My vocabulary isn’t increasing appreciably, at least not so far. I find myself looking up zarándók (pilgrim) again and again, but maybe with repetition and time, words and meanings will attach themselves in my mind. But it has become much easier for me to recognize and read familiar words whose sounds I know but whose spellings are unfamiliar with accented vowels and odd combinations of consonants.

Most amazing of all, I find myself immersed in a Hungary of the 16th Century with wagons, horses, swords and clumsy guns, castles and fortified village houses, children skinny dipping, peasant villages and paprikás stews cooking in cauldrons over fires, dusty, rutted cart trails, brutal janissaries and marauding akindji raiders, vitéz (heroic, Hungarian, of course) fighters, Catholic, Protestant and Moslem adversaries, and intrigues and names familiar from Hungarian history and geography.

It’s a fascinating world. The images, characters, costumes, customs and Hungarian words linger sweetly in my mind.