Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange ed. by András Kiséry, Zsolt T. Komaromy, and Zsuzsanna Vara (review)

Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange is a collection of twelve thought-provoking essays on the place of Hungarian literature in an intercultural and transnational context. The essays are organized chronologically and discuss Hungarian literature from the nineteenth century until the present day. The volume seeks to set a new light on Hungarian literature in the context of world literature. Instead of looking at world literature as an external force affecting the essentially national Hungarian literature, the texts discover the ways in which interculturality is organically present in Hungarian literature and how it played an essential role in forming what we think of as the "national" literary tradition. It contests essentialized notions and binary oppositions as East and West, remembering and forgetting, global and local, transnational and national. Instead of pure oppositions, the book aims to show the complexity of the relations in which these notions are intertwined. It does so by taking into account the various social, political, and personal contexts in which the examined literary works were created. The texts often refer to the question of cultural memory through which the authors can reveal the mechanisms of the creation and functioning of national narratives.

Zsolt Komáromy refers to this notion in the context of the Hungarian reception of Wordsworth. Examining the "blind spots" in literary reception, discovering which texts were seen as useless from the point of view of a national narrative and were collectively put in what Aleida Assmann calls "storage memory," Komáromy tells us just as much about the power-dynamics of the Hungarian literary field in the nineteenth century, as the discovery of the texts that were deliberately included in the canon and preserved in cultural memory. The process of forgetting Wordsworth helps us to reshape perspectives on the literary context of the time, and to show up what lies beyond the ruling national narrative of Hungarian literature. But we can learn just as much by examining what was remembered: Veronika Ruttkay's essay discusses the translation processes of the time and by looking at texts which were strongly included in the canon in an altered version of themselves. The problem of translation as appropriation and modification of the original text appears in this essay, which shows how during the translation of Robert Burns's poem Tam o'Shanter, acculturation succeeded over celebrating the poem's transgression. Even when a genre is defined as a particularly Hungarian genre which could serve as the mediator of a grand national narrative, we cannot neglect the intercultural exchange through which the genre was developed. Julia Bacskai-Atkari examines the Hungarian verse novel from a cross-cultural perspective. She shows that the stabilized "Hungarianness" of the genre came from the influence of Pushkin's Onegin and Byron's Don Juan, two texts which were written in an unstable genre in their original contexts.

Taking a fresh look at one's own cultural heritage and attempting recanonization is also an important part of developing a critical perspective on the seemingly homogeneous, linearly developing literary canon. Zsuzsanna Varga takes a close look at the life and work of two generations of émigré women who filled the important role of cultural transmitters after the Hungarian revolution of 1848, and who helped to establish the profession of the female authorship long before women were considered as creative artists in Hungary. Varga examines the social and personal factors which enabled a woman of the time to become part of the literary field. She is not the only one in the book who tries to build an alternative literary canon: Tamás Demény's essay, entitled Intercultural Matrices in Hungarian Roma and African American Life Writings is not only important because of the thorough comparison of minority identities in Richard Wright's...