With Fresh Ink

BY GABRIELLA KOMÁROMI
AND BÉLA RIGÓ

What Are Hungarian Books for Children Like Today?

My title alludes to that of a recently appeared anthology (Fresh Ink!, Children's Verse Today, 2005). As the collection in question gives a panorama of contemporary poems written for children, so is my intention to introduce Hungarian children's books of our days in general. Writers, poets, illustrators, generations, phenomena and tendencies. This is another panorama. I could say as well that my time allows me only a look round, and I choose a path to do so. Genres will be my sign-posts, and I won't look back into distant past without a good reason.
Nevertheless I must remark that this panorama is taken in a moment, when one would expect that the prestige of children's culture is necessarily heightened in Hungary. After Britain and Germany we, too, have had our Big Book since Christmas 2005, and it is Stars of Eger (1901) by Géza Gárdonyi, i.e. a juvenile romance of history. It beat two further juvenile novels in the final: The Paul Street Boys (1907), a book about young teenage boys that attained world-wide fame, and Abigél (1970), a novel for adolescent girls. All the three have earned fame abroad in translations and have been adapted to the screen. - Ever since we have been puzzled by that outcome. Is it possible that children are not as bad readers compared to grownups as we have come to believe? Or is it so that grownups who don't read any more cherish only the reminiscences of their favourite childhood readings? - On the other hand: one of our most prestigious cultural prizes (Prima Primissima) was recently awarded to Ervin Lázár, an outstanding writer of tales. Does this herald a new era of children's books? It's a pity that I must doubt it at once.
"But who shall I bite into if there's no law against that which is called children's literature?" asked László Németh, a major author of ours more than fifty years ago. And there have always been others who said so. Softer or louder. "Children's literature - is it literature at all? It ought to be so. There are many proofs that it can be so, from Andersen to Weöres. Yet how many are the proofs against it: the rubbish that literary bunglers manufacture for the use of each new generation of children!" (Balázs Vargha). Dilettantism and the dictates of the market are equally harmful to children's books - in our country as well as abroad. This is true even so that Hungarian children are exceptionally lucky from this point of view. Many of our greatest authors have left one or more stories, tales, novels or poems for children, or works that have become favourite readings for the youngest. The same attitude is palpable in contemporary authors.
We are looking back no farther than the last decades, which on the time scale of literary history equals a glance from today to yesterday, but we first stop in an exceptional moment at Bologna. At the important book fair where Hungary presents herself as honorary guest, and in the moment when we celebrate a centenary, that of the birth of modern Hungarian children's literature. It happened a hundred years ago that Ferenc Molnár, a playwright of world-wide popularity to this day, published between October 1905 and March 1906 the weekly instalments of The Boys from Pál Street in a Sunday school magazine. The work appeared in book form one year later, so in fact we consider 1907 the birth year of Hungarian children's literature.
"I almost fear whether we will be able to appreciate adequately the work that Ferenc Molnár has accomplished for us, when he laid the foundation of modern Hungarian children's literature so wide, so strong and so embellished that it seems a roofing as well" - meant the first and by now forgotten critic of the novel. There are few Hungarian books with a career in the world comparable to that of the first masterpiece in our modern juvenile literature. The Boys from Pál Street can be read in Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish languages. It was published in New York and Yerevan, and within ten years from its birth the German and in 1927 the English translations were on the market. It was an obligatory school reading in the United States, in Brasil, and some say that it is so in Italy even today. After the Hungarian screen versions of 1917 and 1924 the American Frank Borza took the topic up, and made his film in 1934 with the title No Greater Glory. In 1935 a prize of the Venice Substandard Film Festival was awarded to the Italian film I ragazzi della Via Paal with Mario Monicelli as one of the script writers. A memorably beautiful movie was shot by Zoltán Fábri in 1968 in American-English-Hungarian co-production. It was nominated in 1969 to Oscar Prize. A recent, controversial TV film series of ten episodes was shot again in Italy. The global success was no doubt due partly to the fact that Ferenc Molnár was a favourite author of the world stage from the nineteen-teens; he lived from the twenties mainly in Vienna and Berlin, and in hotel rooms all around Europe. In 1931 Molnár left Hungary for good, he settled in 1940 as an emigrant in the United States, and lived the rest of his life there.
The popular playwright belonged to the wide world, and so did his juvenile novel. Yet the final factor of success is of course the inner value of the book. Every aspect of life is present in it: life and death, heroism and treason, and forgiveness. Love alone is missing, what would be indispensable in a youth romance today. A major virtue of the book is that all these remain inside the world of the kid, everything is shown us through their eyes - great human emotions as well as the never realized beautiful ideas of liberalism. Everything is true to the adolescent world (the conflict, the things at stake) and everything is adapted to it (handling time and the mechanisms of dynamics). Means and solutions were probably prompted by the circumstances. He wrote his book within some weeks in instalments, in cafés, to the tunes of military bands playing outside. He was hardly twenty-eight in the autumn or winter of 1905 when he wrote down the concluding sentence of his most lasting work. We have a scribbling into a school book from a young girl in the nineteen twenties: "He who wrote this was an angel!"
This centenary flashback done, we are going to look round among the children's books of today and yesterday. First among books of verse. I think it proper to note here that in Hungarian children's literature, as well as in general literature, there are no boundaries, that is to say, a part of it is written beyond the frontiers, in Slovakia, Rumania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and in Austria's province Burgenland. Historical frontiers survive in literature.

Children's Poetry in Hungary

The last fifty years of Hungarian children's poetry is one of the most indisputable achievements in the whole of our literature. The list and hierarchy of the best poets is almost identical in both realms. Moreover, in children's literature the best poets are at the same time the most popular, and politics had a smaller impact on their evaluation during the socialist era. Those blacklisted or simply tolerated elsewhere could be even celebrated in the juvenile field. It is a fact that the rhymesters of pioneer poetry were soon ousted from school readers.
In the hypocritical dictatorship namely the ideas of education were rather liberal. Play gained superiority to didactics. This made it possible that Sándor Weöres, one of the geniuses of living Hungarian poetry, became a determinant model for children's poetry. His sense of music, humour and boundless pictorial fantasy made his verse easy to recite, sing and receive even when the lines carried some philosophical message. This reception may be fragmentary, but even so children are touched by the world of emotions, moods and values in the poems. An early encounter with them prepares the later fuller comprehension.
Other outstanding poets also profited from the model of Weöres. Yet Zoltán Zelk brought his imagery from more realistic traditions, like Imre Csanádi with his rural roots. Ágnes Nemes Nagy and, later, Ottó Orbán experimented with prosodies less attached to traditions, while Károly Tamkó Sirató based his playful language on avant-gardism.
Until the end of the nineteeneighties the whole of Hungarian children's poetry looked like a linguistic, rhythmic and iconographic atelier where the poets from A to Z (from István Ágh to Tibor Zalán) could experiment with creating new prosody and verse forms undisturbed by too severe criticism.
In that golden age verse epic had a renascence. The Quince books of István Kormos even with their ironic didacticism made an epoch. Other cycles of epic character were Aunt Pepper by Ágnes Nemes Nagy and The Calendar of Oona Mona by István Bella.

Minor Epics

In this field Sándor Kányádi of Transylvania is the most influential. Hungarian poets outside Hungary are expected to meet more direct exigencies from school and general audience. That's why all of them produce children's poems meant for effective recital. Ottó Tolnai in Serbia as well as Sándor Gál in Slovakia. A researcher of the flourishing Hungarian children's verse in Transylvania will find tendencies that diverge from those in Hungary. And yet, cultural frontiers became more permeable when the state monopoly of publishing disappeared. The present followers of Domokos Szilágyi or Géza Páskándi are more like us than they were to our predecessors. Few readers know that András Ferenc Kovács, one of the most versatile authors of our contemporary children's verse lives in Rumania. The dominance of the Weöres School was first, at the close of the nineteen-seventies, challenged by a world-wide paradigm shift of educational character that made itself felt also in Hungary. Instead of common play, dialogue became the highest value in child-adult connection. All around the world a child's monologue in plain words was the most fashionable. Following the vogue, children's poems quickly pulled off rhymes and metre and all poetic finery which they had so proudly worn as distinction from the long-time slackness of adult verse.

A Child's Monologue

It began with a slim volume of contemporary Swedish children's verse collected and translated by István Tótfalusi (Have a Voice in It, 1975). The collection won first the readers, reviewers took notice only of the sudden success. Monologues had had their tradition, but only in prose. The picture books of Éva Janikovszky, translated to 35 languages, have a more elaborated text than many of the new-type books of verse born in quick succession had. Ágnes Ágai was the first to come out with a "Hungswedish" volume, soon followed by many, and the demand for such has not worn off yet (see the poems of Béla Horgas, Béla Rigó, Ferenc Kenéz and others). The best of the kind, however, were written by István Eörsi and Tibor Gyurkovics who stole back the traditional metres and rhymes. It may seem a paradox, yet is apt concerning a good proportion of children's verse, what Eörsi said in a TV interview about his poem The Sick Crab: "You may call it a children's verse only if children don't understand it at all."
Exactly when poems in prose were spreading appeared a new kind - like a reaction -, poems set to music and sung. The overture was a cassette by the band Kaláka (Do you have pets at home?) Many fine poems of Weöres, Nemes Nagy and others have been imprinted as songs in the memory of successive generations.
The bulk of children's poetry today still tries to exploit further the possibilities of monologue and dialogue (see poems by Péter Kántor, Ottó Kiss, Endre Kukorelly, János Lackfi, András Petőcz). A novelty is the harsh play upon words following the tradition of Russian avant-garde in Ákos Szilágyi's volumes. The most promising talent among the youngest is Dániel Varró; in his poems the genuine infant soul gets a counterpoint with a superb mastery of forms fit for an adult verse. Beyond Smudge Hill (2003) is basically a volume of poetry in the guise of a children's tale. This book is already the beginning of a new period, still a paradigm shift is visible only in blurred outlines. The anthology Fresh Ink! (2005) gives a real panorama of this present state in our children's poetry. It introduces generations of poets, poets from this and that side of the frontier, well-known poets and fresh ones.

The Prose for Children

The golden age of children's verse was also a heyday of prose. As the sky of verse had its constellations, in prose the great triad was István Csukás, Éva Janikovszky and Ervin Lázár. Several of their works are classic today: The Seven Headed Fairy, The Square Round Wood by Lázár, Dopey the Dragon, Tales of Pom Pom by Csukás and If I Were a Grown-Up, Who Does This Kid Take After? by Janikovszky. We speak of these books as of Bóbita in poetry; and their heroes have grown mythical. The triad was joined in 1983 by Pál Békés with his tale The Ham-handed Wizard which now is read in a number of important languages.
Near the close of the last century tales flourished all over the world. The greatest names were Ottfried Preussler, Michael Ende, Astrid Lindgren, Gianni Rodari, I.B. Singer, Roald Dahl, Jostein Gaarder, while in the home front the list consists of Zoltán Zelk, István Kormos, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Miklós Mészöly, Ervin Lázár, István Csukás, Sándor Fodor, Sándor Kányádi, Géza Páskándi, Béla Horgas, Pál Békés, Ákos Tordon, Ede Tarbay, Margit Petrolay, Gizella Hervay, Alíz Mosonyi, Éva Fésűs, Katalin Mezei. Near the turn of the century and later appeared László Darvasi, Ferenc Szijj, János Háy, Ildikó Boldizsár, Erika Lajta, Viktória Lugosi, Gyula Böszörményi, István Kamarás, István Vörös, Géza Szávai, Gergely Péterfy and Dániel Varró.

Modern Tale

Tales and picture books for the youngest - in this field Ágnes Bálint, Mária Szepes and Veronika Marék did the most and best, to the enjoyment of a couple of generations.
Speaking of modern tales we mostly think of blending and contrasting traditional motives with the gadgets of our age, say magic wand vs. remote control. This phenomenon may doubtlessly give the reader a feeling of "de te fabula narratur". But such a blend is by no means unprecedented. Even hundred years back witches might have phoned, the seven princes eaten sirloin steak as naturally as a cellular phone starts buzzing under the wing of a sea-gull. But the otherness of modern tale is more than these.
"The shaping of the tradition of tales means not only a handing down of inheritance from one generation to the other, but also a constant blending anew of the inherited elements" (W. Iser). The rules of this blending anew are always changing. Tales were born differently in the nineteen-seventies or -eighties than quite recently. It had a different relation to tradition, a different process of creation. One was nearer to "play", the other to "sorcery".
During "play" the imprints of the genre are playing with tradition: turn it inside out and outside in, give it a twist or two. The tale remains what it is, though the fairy may be seven-headed or the witch benevolent; a dragon may chase butterflies on the meadow and the lion may come swaying a white flag and with sorrow and peace in the heart. The imprints of genre are present not only in the author but in the reader as well. When the author turns something with the wrong side out, the common pleasure of the play is derived from the awareness in the recipient of how the story and the characters ought to be "normally". This polyphonic "play" has enhanced the parabolic qualities in our tales. The oeuvre of Ervin Lázár consists mostly of many-layered texts with multiple meaning. His absurd wood is round and square at the same time. There you may attain an inner freedom, yet a Smallheaded-Bigheaded Thunderblunder may pop up any moment. So is, in a way, his world like the one we live in. Those polyphonic worlds of tales send us uncommon messages like: "To turn into a monster is easy, very easy; not to turn into a monster, that's really difficult." (Pál Békés: Mr. Scarefear, 1991).
Modern tales are parades of contrasts and paradoxes. Sequels of surrealistic adventures. Their main source of humour is the sudden juxtaposition of fabulous and trivial or of fairy-like and down-to-earth, sometimes ingenious verbal plays with well-known poetic phrases which render the tales of Lázár or Békés difficult to translate.
Modern Hungarian tales are tales of surprise. The tale-teller counts on us to bear many text structures of folk tales in mind, and plays with us by constantly baffling our expectations. Even the moral of the tale may turn upside down, good people get punishment or the happy ending is missing. As a matter of fact, such things were not quite uncommon with Andersen or Wilde, and we may count with their influence here.
That authors today work on a different basis means a different attitude to tradition. They take its essence in earnest: the incredible wondrous story. The miraculous actions mean a blending anew of fable, myth and magic, as in the tale-like novel sequel of Gyula Böszörményi. The wonders of the tale become so natural in such stories that we cannot easily spot them.
The fabulous novels and fantasies of the last decade are works of good writers. Their books are interesting, adventurous, they teem with colourful figures and witty tricks. They take the attraction of "to be continued" for granted. Nevertheless these fortes have their wrong side as well: gags run wild, stories get inflated. Authors seem to forget that they write for children, who may have unlimited fantasy, but their capacity to receive and remember do have their limits.
It pertains to the character of our tales today that several of them were written directly for the TV screen, or their success is inseparable from the media. The main characters in the tales of István Csukás are factual media stars. It happened with innumerable tale characters that they began as heroes of TV series, radio plays, puppet plays or animation films, and finished only in the end as those of books.
"Times change and we change in them". Young readers have changed as well as their readings. From one moment to the other they entered, together with us, a new century. They are far not only from the pig-tailed Heidi of the 19th century, they have no more in common with the boys in navy collars and knee pants or with the girls wearing ribbons and hats in the early 20th century. Boys do not want to identify themselves with little Nemecsek among the boys of Pál Street or with Misi Nyilas in Be Good As Long As You Live, though they, too, are anguished, but about other things, and they, too, may be orphans, only in a different way. They have no respect for authority, they abhor edifying stories, and they would rather identify themselves with Harry Potter or Hermione.

Juvenile novels

Compared to our children's poetry and the choice of tales, the bulk of novels seems somewhat grey. From among a host of them only a handful produced sensation during many decades (see Csutak and the Grey Horse by Iván Mándy, 1959; Thorn Castle by István Fekete, 1957; Abigail by Magda Szabó, 1970; Salvo for a Black Buffalo by Nándor Gion, 1982). We can say of them that they all were converted to films and became known abroad. The heroes of Mándy are worthy followers of the boys from Pál Street. Abigail seems to lose none of its freshness with the passing years; we may even be justified to think that it belongs to the best novels in the world written for young girls. Novels for teenage boys are less lasting in comparison. For the umpteenth impression either the name of a renowned author is needed (like that of Magda Szabó or Éva Janikovszky), or a great success in the movies as in the case of Bowl Hat and Potato Nose. The film shot from this novel by István Csukás won the prize "Children's Film of the Year" in Hollywood (1975). Many novels for the youth were written in the earlier decades by Erzsébet Kertész, Anna Dániel, Miklós Rónaszegi, Zsuzsa Kántor, Katalin Nagy, Tibor Fehér, Ágnes Bálint, András Mezei, Tibor Gyurkovics and many others. This type of books in Hungary has undoubtedly its debts. Neither the Holocaust nor the Hungarian revolution of 1956 has got its adequate representation in a moving novel of high literary quality. And it is also rare that a Romany child could find in them a character he or she could identify with.
The most successful authors of the last decade are such that feel and reflect the world-wide changes (like Gábor Nógrádi, Edit Sohonyai, Viktória Bosnyák). During the last twenty-thirty years youth romance has gone through a revolution of frankness and outspokenness. A handful of taboos are broken to pieces: the secret of birth, sexuality, divorce, death and others. Motifs and types have disappeared (paternal authority, the idealized image of the mother). The conflict of father and son gets its counterpart in that of mother and daughter, mischievous boys find their equivalent in mischievous girls. In depicting rough reality we have got as far as we could go. This came about everywhere in the world, with more or less phase delay. And to a certain extent it impoverished children's literature by eliminating its basic themes which didn't fit the idea of everydayness. By the end of the century, however, this literature had luckily found its way back to the realm of fantasy. This happened also in our literature (see Gyula Böszörményi, Viktória Bosnyák). And yet it isn't by chance that, in Hungary, for some time translations have played the main role in this field. Prose for the youth might have chosen another path, as children's literature is a changing and boundless region, and juvenile prose is particularly so. There would be much to learn and appropriate from adult literature.
Prizes

Children's literature is always an integral part of children's culture, and the latter seems to have gained in prestige since the early nineties. Our highest distinction, Kossuth Prize was lately awarded to Ervin Lázár, István Csukás and Éva Janikovszky. We haven't got yet a holder of Andersen Prize, yet the valuable Andersen Diploma has been won by six writers (Sándor Török, Ervin Lázár, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, István Csukás, Ede Tarbay, Gábor Nógrádi) and by seven illustrators (László Réber, Károly Reich, Ádám Würtz, Emma Heinzelmann, Éva Gaál, Lívia Elek, Krisztina Rényi). The Hungarian section of IBBY founded and awards regularly "The Best of the Year" prizes in the categories of children's verse, prose fiction, popular science, illustration, translation, and summary prizes for publishing, research and life-work in the field of children's literature.

Periodicals

In a flood of comics magazines Hungarian children still have a literary monthly named Treasure Hunter, now in the 32nd year, one of the few "last Mohicans" in this field around the world. Outside Hungary a handful of children's monthlies have survived, mainly in Transylvania: Sunshine, Rainbow, Fellow, Good Friend. Since 2001 we have an orientating review of children's literature Magic Pencil; Book and Education was reborn in 1999, and from the same year has Turning Point appeared as an organ for the culture of reading.

Publishers

These days we have 10-15 publishing firms that produce books for children with a certain regularity, among them major houses like Magvető, Osiris and Holnap. The house Móra which, before 1990, had the monopoly in the field now has strong rivals in Animus, Ciceró, Egmont, Könyvmolyképző and Alexandra. Practically all publishers produce children's books now and then, as it was a rule between the world wars. Gaudy picture books dominate the market, though the former masters (László Réber, Ádám Würtz, Károly Reich) have their worthy younger followers in Ferenc Deák, Katalin Szegedi, Győző Vida, Krisztina Rényi and others, who rarely get commissions. The most successful Hungarian illustrator today is István Bányai with his book Zoom of world-wide popularity. We must admit, though, that the book was not born in Hungary, and even his name was hardly known here until recently.

Research

The chances for the research of children's literature are much worse in Hungary than in the western world. We have no scientific institute in the field, and it can be studied only as an optional subject on university level. The items of the specialised literature in this discipline have been, with few exceptions, written in one-person "ateliers", based on individual research. Here is a condensed list of the works appeared during the last ten years:
Sándor Borbély: They Wrote for Children, 1996; Sándor Borbély (editor) Fifty Very Important Books for Children, 1996; Margit Petrolay: A Book about Tales: The Memory of Humankind, 1996; Ede Tarbay: A Guide to Children's Literature, 1996; Ildikó Boldizsár: Witchcraft and Slimming Cure, 1997; Gabriella Komáromi: The Secret Garden of Children's Books, 1998; Sándor Komáromy: Poets and Works from the Children's Poetry of 20th Century, 1998; Gabriella Komáromi (editor): Children's Literature, 1999; Tas Bognár: Children's Verse in Hungary, 2001; Sándor Borbély, Gabriella Komáromi (editors): Contemporary Books for Children, 2001; Péter Bálint (editor); Approaching Tales, 2002; Tas Bognár: Prose for Children, 2004; Péter Bálint (editor): Variants of Tale Structure, 2004; Ildikó Boldizsár: The Poetics of Tales, 2004; Gabriella Komáromi: A Forgotten Literature, 2005. Books written and published outside Hungary: Judit Kiss: Introduction to Children's Literature, Cluj 2000; Zsuzsanna Kozsár: The Tree of Our Children's Literature, Bratislava 2002; Hajna Stoyan: Die phantastische Kinderbücher von Michael Ende (2004).
Scientific research in this discipline has indisputably come of age, while Hungarian children's literature itself - both within and outside the frontiers - has remained in a marginal status, and attracts far less attention than adult literature does. Just when a novel sequence for teenagers, Harry Potter has surpassed all books of the last hundred years in the figures of published, sold and read copies. Hungarian books for children may also have surprises in store.