Éva Bonczidai: “All homesickness came from the sky” – in memory of Ádám Makkai
“It’s all miracles or nothing” is the admonition or encouragement on the memorial plaque of Sándor Török, but for me it is also linked to Ádám Makkai. I felt this way even before I knew that he had been a student of Sándor Török, that he had taught him how to think about the world, how to find ways of knowing, that he had published an interesting volume of translations in Chicago in 1987 by Michael Alexander. The book dedicated to the memory of Sándor Török is unique in that its author, Michael Alexander, never existed, the book was written down by Ádám Makkai, and is actually based on the teachings of Sándor Török. These teachings led the later renowned linguist, translator and poet Rudolf Steiner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to his life’s work and to the idea that there could be one primordial poem, one poem from which all others could be derived.
Perhaps Ádám Makkai’s most outrageous attempt is related to this: he collected various translations of Goethe’s poem Wanderers Nachtlied (The Wanderer’s Night Song) – several in Hungarian: Sándor Weöres, Dezső Kosztolányi, Lőrinc Szabó, Zsigmond Móricz, but also texts by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lermontov and others – and translated them back into the original language from each language. This resulted in a two hundred and fifty page book, Cantio Nocturna Peregrini Aviumque, which presents the same poem in different forms. In one of our conversations, Ádám Makkai said that this was his most important job.
I also feel it appropriate to emphasise this now, because when Ádám Makkai is mentioned, the significance of his life’s work is often obscured by the exciting family novel into which he was born: the child of János Makkai, Member of Parliament, and Rózsa Ignácz, writer and actress, has been given a special fate, one that is full of stories to tell, and the lives of his parents and grandparents are also worthy of a novel, just like his own. Ádám Makkai received a child paralysis in the summer of 1945, but God took special care of him and he survived. “While the other kids were playing football, I was reading Dante’s Inferno in Babits’ translation” – that’s how he used to sum up his childhood.
In 1956, during the “free week”, he wrote two newspaper articles which, although they were not published, could have got him several years in prison, and so, like many others, he left the country. Following his father, who had emigrated earlier, he went to America, first to work in a hotel kitchen, and after a month he was accepted at Harvard. After graduating, he taught at a high school in Hawaii, then continued his studies at Yale, and later taught at universities in Kuala Lumpur and several in the US. From 1969 to 2004, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, but has also taught in Singapore and Hong Kong.
He became a renowned professor of linguistics, founded a linguists’ association, a journal called Forum Linguisticum and a publishing house called Atlantis-Centaur. His doctoral dissertation, Idiom Structure in English, has become one of the foundational books in English linguistics.
During his decades in exile, he created an exceptional oeuvre of poetry and literary translation. His gigantic work, begun jointly with Pál Tábori and Tamás Kabdebó, is a two-volume anthology of Hungarian poetry, In Quest of the Miracle Stag, which presents Hungarian poetry from ancient poetry to the present day in two 1200-page volumes. In 2011 he was awarded the Kossuth Prize for his work, and in 2016 his life’s work was recognised with the Kossuth Grand Prize. In 2015 he moved from Hawaii to his hometown Budapest, and in 2016 he was awarded the Order of St. Stephen of Hungary by President János Áder.
I met him for the first time in 2010, when he and his wife and sister-in-law visited me during a trip to Transylvania – I was living in a village, sometimes feeling like I was at the end of the world. A few weeks ago, I was studying Noam Chomsky’s theories for an exam, and I was trying to accept the idea of language as a formula. Then – a real miracle – Adam Makkai, one of Chomsky’s critics, sat opposite me, riding my one-year-old son on his knee, talking about the need to synthesise the scientific nature of linguistics with the fact that man also has insights into the spiritual sciences, arguing for the legitimacy of the anthropological point of view against the doctrine of communication derived from the equivalence of sentences – all exemplified by idioms. The child watched in awe and occasionally giggled as Adam spelled out a name or a foreign phrase in his good professor’s way.
When I hear Ádám Makkai’s name, this is the image that always comes to mind, or the way he and his wife, Ágnes Arany, recite Sándor Weöres’ poem “Galagonya” (The Hawthorn) in Hungarian and English in front of an astonished audience at the Petőfi Literary Museum. This is one of the brilliant translations of the work, and Sándor Weöres even made a bet with Makkai that he would not be able to translate it into English. “It is a sacred job”, Ádám Makkai said about literary translation, considering it a mission to make Hungarian poetry understood by the world. This patriotic sense of mission, this stubbornness, which also gave rise to the idea of researching the ancient poem, combined with the knowledge of an exceptional linguist and the impudence of a clever rebel – it takes the attention of a man of similar qualities to finally appreciate the life’s work of Ádám Makkai in a worthy manner.
He also wove into his writings the burden of his particular experience of sonship, his commitment to the eternal, his wise and provocative questions. We were awaiting the publication of his new volumes when Ádám Makkai passed away at the age of 85 – let us now also pay our respects to the poet. In his poem “Honvágy vagy, vagy vágy-hon?” (Homesickness or desired home), for example, after the contradictions he says “Minden honvágy az égből származott” (All homesickness came from the sky). The day after his death, flipping through this twelve-part poem, it’s as if the poet is speaking back from the other side: “Bármit tegyek is, csak Neked csinálom, / az angol nyelvtan is csak vers, Neked. / Ereimben az erő megreked, és kába nappalom merev kín, álom. / Mitől vagyok így elanyátlanodva?”, majd „Bármit tegyek is, Hazámnak csinálom, / nyelvtan a vers is. Ragozom Neked. / A könyvkiadás otthon megreked: / a költők léte kínos, merev álom. / Mitől vagytok úgy elanyátlanodva?”
Magyar Nemzet, 2019. 01. 20.
https://magyarnemzet.hu/kultura/minden-honvagy-az-egbol-szarmazott-7686689/