In memory of János Benyhe

In front of the memorial plaque of János Benyhe

János Benyhe is best remembered by people reading the column of Heti Válasz, Dohogó. Fewer people knew that the excellent short essays about the use of our mother tongue are the fruits of a long-life language cultivation workshop. My father, János Benyhe was born on 8 November 1926 in Hódmezővásárhely. His poor, but culturally open family did not encourage their son János to study, but seeing his eagerness, they helped him in every way. When he showed an interest in music, he was willingly allowed to learn to play the organ in the Reformed church, learning the cantor’s movements. At the age of five, he learned his first foreign language from the daughter of a Bulgarian baker. He was barely in school when he made a lifelong commitment to languages and later to music.

His excellent grades and the recommendation of his teachers brought him to the prestigious Eötvös College, where he attended classes as an English-French major and enrolled at the Academy of Music. During the years of hardship on the academy, he was removed from the college and he had to leave the Academy of Music, but he managed to complete his university studies and, because he spoke almost every major living European language to a good standard, he soon found his first job as an editor at Europa Publishers. It was also the beginning of his career as a translator and editor.

For decades, he has helped to interpret the greats of European literature to a national audience, and has made excellent friends among the bests. István Kormos, Mátyás Domokos, Zoltán Zelk, László Lator, István Vas, Pál Réz, István Csurka, Tamás Katona, Ferenc Szőnyi and many others were close to him. At the age of nearly sixty, he joined Corvina publishing house, where he was editor-in-chief and helped to publish Hungarian works in foreign languages.

His versatility, his excellent knowledge of about ten European languages and his amazing literacy, his musical literacy and his professional contacts also attracted the attention of Hungarian cultural policy. The first Hungarian government after the fall of communism considered him the best person to represent Hungary as ambassador to Brazil, the largest country in South America, whose literature he knew well and was a well-known translator of several Brazilian works.

Already at Eötvös College, he noticed that students from different parts of the country not only speak differently, use different accents, accents and dialects, but also have different ways of thinking in sentences. In his thoughts and translations, he explored why the same mother tongue sounds different on the lips of different Hungarian cultures. And if it sounds different, what is the reason? Why do the sentences of one author give him a sense of security, stability and home, while the texts of others make him feel unsure, sometimes not quite understanding, sometimes impatient. He was already a well-known literary translator when he came across János Fogarasi’s book on the metaphysics of the Hungarian language, on the spirit of the Hungarian language. Together with the dictionary written by Fogarasi and Gergel Czuczor, these works were the key to beautiful and expressive Hungarian speech and correct Hungarian sentence structure. From this, he understood how our non-Indo-European language can perfectly reproduce even the most sophisticated phrases of European cultural languages. The Hungarian language of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, one of the greatest literary translators’ undertakings, has provided a masterpiece of his ideas on sentence formation in Hungarian, a kind of literary ars poetics. His translations, articles and studies all encouraged and helped us to use the Hungarian language, which is beautiful and linguistically appropriate to our own characteristics. Nowadays, education is the main provider of family and religious value transmission, and János Benyhe was sad to see that the most important provider of education, teacher training, has also become insecure, little concern for language security, and with its atrophy, reading, the Gutenberg Galaxy, has less and less influence on the new generations. He has had serious debates with the uncritical tolerators and accommodation-makers of linguistic modernity, who, regardless of the structure of our language, allow in not only the words and expressions of foreign languages, but also their structural solutions and thought patterns. He called them for linguists, who merely register and acknowledge the establishment and literacy of linguistic fashions foreign to Hungarian. Outside of his works, he summarised his linguistic insights in his most enduring writings, “Dohogó”. The series of essays published in Heti Válasz until his death was published in three collected volumes (the last one posthumously) and can be considered János Benyhe’s last will and testament.

The fear of the mother tongue and the recognition of the power of the concise Hungarian linguistic structure to preserve the nation soon turned him away from the idea of exclusive Finno-Ugric linguistic affinity, and he increasingly attributed the unprecedented adaptability and the unbreakable structural foundations of our language to the structural influences of Asian, Lowland Turkic languages. This led him to become a mother tongue advocate, which is why he took up an office in the Translators’ Section of the Writers’ Union and why he accepted the post of Secretary General of the Hungarian PEN Club when his ambassadorial mandate ended.

János Benyhe has had a great career from Hódmezővásárhely to the peaks of Hungarian and European culture. He avoided the political upheavals of these turbulent times by ensuring that his knowledge and expertise could not be taken away, that he could not be expropriated, and that he was needed. The party state therefore forgave him for not joining its ranks or any other political organisation. He was one of the few people who could make a living almost undistracted by politics. He has never sought to be close to political parties. After returning home from Brazil, he was sad to find that previous friendships had been poisoned by politics and party sympathies. He remained a lover of the mother tongue, a committed member of the Hungarian linguistic and national community and, consequently, an internationally renowned representative of Hungarian independence and national sovereignty. As Secretary General of the PEN Club and on behalf of the Writers’ Union’s Translators’ Section, went to the headquarters of the Writers’ Union on 23 October 2010 to lay a wreath. He died on the way. The Creator gave him the chance to fall in such a way that, on the 56th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, his body, with its bloody forehead, could be seen in the streets of Pest, showing by his own example: we will defend Hungarians to the last minute, because we are not given a different language, a different life, a different destiny.

István Benyhe