The Tree That Set Forth: the Hungarian Tagore

The Tree that Set Forth: The Hungarian Tagore

Imre Bangha (Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, The Oriental Institute, Pusey Lane, Oxford, OX1 2LE, UK, )

This chapter presents Tagore’s reception in writings in Hungarian or by Hungarians publishing in other languages. This means that sources that appeared both within and outside the political boundaries of the country will be examined. In fact, some of the most appreciative Hungarian responses to Tagore appeared outside Hungary.

India and Hungary

Direct cultural contacts between India and Hungary date back to the time of the traveller-scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784-1842), the author of the first scholarly Tibetan grammar and dictionary. Csoma worked mainly in Calcutta between 1828 and 1842 and learned Sanskrit and Bengali among other languages. In the nineteenth century — apart from the accounts of some travellers — Sanskrit literature represented the culture of the subcontinent for Hungarians. The only specimen of contemporary literature before 1913 was the English adventure novel 1001 Indian Nightsby Sharat Kumar Ghosh (1883-?) translated in 1908. Tagore’s Nobel Prize informed the larger public in Hungary that contemporary India possessed a dynamic literature, which was, however, mostly perceived as the continuous presence of a timeless India and, in the first half of the century, was represented exclusively by Bengali authors. Emphases shifted with the establishment of the communist regime after World War II, and the 1950s saw a wide range of modern translations from a variety of modern Indian languages. Third-world countries struggling with extreme poverty presented the best examples of the cruelty of capitalism. In the second half of the century modern Indian literature became an accepted part of world literature. The decades that followed the collapse of communism in 1989 saw the revival of a popular interest in the spiritual East and the emergence of post-colonial literatures.

In 1913 Rabindranath surprised Hungarian readership as an oriental man heralding the end of Europe’s cultural hegemony. The initial enthusiasm lasted only for a few months and soon gave way to perplexity and then to oblivion. In the 1920s Tagore became a prophet with a spiritual message showing hope to a civilisation immersed in materialism and drenched in blood. After the establishment of Indo-Soviet friendship in 1955 the Soviet Block saw Tagore as an anti-imperialist thinker with a progressive social message and an iconic figure of the cultural richness of the emerging colonial and postcolonial world.

The first reactions

The first reports about the Indian poet misspelled his name, misread his age (actually 52) and apparently confused him with the musicologist Raja Sourindra Mohan Tagore (1840-1914),

The Nobel Prize for literature, this year, was awarded by the committee to Rayen Dranatto Tagore. Tagore is a musical composer and a historian of music. He lives in Calcutta and he is eighty-two.[1]

Although the correct details arrived the next day, this short piece of news is indicative of European discourse about the Orient that was not inclined to acknowledge that Asia possessed a living modern culture. As has been spectacularly emphasised by Edward Said to the global public in his Orientalism, the “Orientalist discourse” worked with stereotypes that cast the orient as timeless, old, effeminate, anarchic etc. The image of an 82-year-old man represented this timeless Orient. Moreover, Tagore, who was awarded the Nobel Prize as just past his middleage, accepted the role of the old prophet that Europe imposed upon him.

Following the initial reports Hungarian intellectuals began to reflect on the change in world literature initiated by Tagore's Nobel Prize.[2] Two weeks after the announcement of the Prize a leading Hungarian poet, Mihály Babits (1883-1941), published the prose translation of three poems from English and wrote an article about Tagore, whom — following Yeats — he compared to St. Francis of Assisi. Another leading poet, Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936), without reading much of Tagore, meditated on the end of the hegemony of European culture. After the Nobel Prize the strange-sounding name of Rabindranath Tagore started to feature in Hungarian life so much so that the pronunciation of the poet’s name became a way of testing drunkenness: the person who was able to do it was proven not to be drunk.[3] Soon, in 1914 Ferenc Kelen (1869-?), the Hungarian translator of Schopenhauer and Oscar Wilde, produced a volume of Rabindranath’s poems in Hungarian.

The dominant literary movement of the first half of the 20th century was the one marked with the name of the magazine Nyugat (Occident) that endeavoured to modernise Hungarian literature by taking inspiration from the best achievements of modern Western authors. Even if the leading exponents of this movement, Babits and Kosztolányi, were enthusiastic about Tagore in their first reactions, their generation initially did not pay much attention to Eastern literatures. The western orientation of this powerful movement can be taken as one of the reasons for the emerging negligence or antipathy towards Tagore.

The most interesting piece of the emerging Tagore-antipathy is a humoresque by Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938), the best Hungarian literary parodist of the 20th century, who also belonged to the circle of Nyugat. Karinthy has produced excellent caricatures of the leading literary figures of his time and later collected them into the volumes of Így írtok ti, "This is how you write". In his short piece Pályázom a Nobel-díjra "I am applying for the Nobel Prize"[4] Karinthy produced a parody of Tagore. Although the English Gitanjalihas hardly any Indian words or cultural references the Hungarian humorist explains the success of Tagore's poems by his use of exoticgibberish.

Translations

In the first half of the century many members of the Hungarian middle class also read German and a considerable number of German translations of Tagore were available in Hungary. Nevertheless, most of his works available in English were translated into Hungarian in the early 1920s. Among his different writings, naturally, his poetry was the most popular in Hungary (The Gardener, Gitanjali, The Crescent Moon, Fruit Gathering, Lover’s Gift, Stray Birds, Crossing – the first three of which appeared in two or three different full or partial translations). At the same time four dramas (Chitra, Sacrifice, The King of the Dark Chamber, The Post Office), three novels (The Home and the World, The Wreck, Gora), four collections of short stories (Mashi, Auspicious Moment, Hungry Stones, Homecoming) with some twenty stories in total, three books of essays (Sadhana, The Inspiration of the Soul[5], Nationalism) as well as My Reminiscences came out in Hungarian. The volumes were produced fast and they usually lacked introductions and notes. Their most prolific translator was the lacklustre Zoltán Bartos (1890-1981). In some books his translations were complemented by those of Márton Sármay (pseudonym for Erzsébet Bleuer). Publishing Tagore’s books in the early twenties was a good business and Bartos and Sármay faced competition from others.

The Hungarian Sadhana published in 1921, in contrast with the other Tagore volumes, had a foreword. Its author was Mihály Földi (1894-1943), who, experimenting with psychology in his early writings, published several short stories in the magazine Nyugat. Later, in the thirties, he produced bestsellers with superficial religious messages. In his foreword Földi emphasised that Tagore’s teaching about love and the harmony of man and nature is not a new idea but rather something that is forgotten again and again and mankind needs to be reminded of it.[6] He also treated at relative length Tagore’s efforts to conciliate the fundamental antagonisms of life. Although both publisher and reader expect a foreword to be appreciative, in his conclusion written in a language full of biblical expressions, Földi presents his doubts,

Are people in India happy and equanimous?... How can India as a state-creating nation be compared to the stout and pertinacious European race?... But will love be realised on Earth?... The suggestive force of god-men so far proved to be too weak.[7]

Tagore’s poetry has been widely translated into Hungarian and one can distinguish various patterns. Among the earliest translators Mihály Babits preferred the naïve prose versions to the elaborately simple Bengali originals because the prose poems reminded him of the straightforward, terse poetry of Saint Francis of Assisi.

There were others who made an effort to move closer to the Bengali original by introducing strophic pattern with metre and rhyme in Hungarian. As early as 1914 the journalist-translator Vilmos Zoltán(1869-1929) published some Hungarian versions in verse that allegedly reflected the Bengali originals. Later, having heard Rabindranath reciting his poems in Vienna, Zoltán came out with a whole volume of similar translations selected from the Gitanjali and the Gardener. The forms of his translations rely on traditional Hungarian patterns close to the rhythm of folk songs.

Bringing Tagore close to folk songs is a step towards the original, although it reflects only one facet of his Bengali poetry and the elaborate or the experimental aspect of his forms is lost. There are several reasons for the emergence of these folk-song type translations. The rhythmical pattern of Hungarian folk songs is in a way similar to the Bengali dalabritta rhythm, where syllables are counted. The most popular Hungarian patterns consist of lines of 8 or 12 syllables divided into two equal units with stressed syllables at their beginning. The folk songs suggest a naïve, unsophisticated approach to life so much longed for by urban people. Thus Tagore could be presented as someone who is not detached from nature. Hungarian conservative critics, influenced by nineteenth-century romanticism, held poetry inspired by folk literature in high esteem and in all probability welcomed such translations. In fact, conservative circlesprepared the Indian poet’s visit to Hungary in 1926.

Verse translations of Tagore, however, was not the exclusive domain of conservative writers. One of the leading Hungarian poets of the Nyugat circle, Dezső Kosztolányi, who attended Tagore’s lecture in Budapest,prepared three verse translations from English. He felt free not only to create iambic strophes, but also to deviate from the original text. He may also have felt justified in his creative approach to the text by his awareness that, in his English, Tagore had deviated from the Bengali, at least in his poetic forms. Kosztolányi made the poems sound more unambiguous in their vocabulary and emotionally more intense. For example, the pious Buddhist story of Upagupta in the poem The Dancing-girl(Fruit Gathering XXXVII) celebrates the discipline and steadfastness of the monk and shows that the problem of momentary happiness turning into suffering is solved by a renunciation of the world before suffering comes. Kosztolányi was not interested in the ideals of Buddhism and he removed the didactic layer. At the same time he made the figures less serene and more vulnerable to emotions. In the Hungarian version the dancing girl is explicit about her love for Upagupta and the sadness of the ascetic suggests that he also had a touch of it. It should also be mentioned that Kosztolányi was not alone in his free approach to the contents and form. One of the leading poets of a later generation, Sándor Weöres (1913-1989), took a similar attitude. He translated Tagore into iambic strophes and changed the content freely.

Kosztolányi’s melodious translations are among the most popular Tagore verses in Hungarian. Moreover, they served as a basis for a later translation into the Gypsy language[8]and also inspired people to set Tagore’s poetry to music. György Káldas, anenthusiast of Hungarian songs in the folk style, set to music Kosztolányi’s translation of the Blind girl.[9]This was another attempt to present Rabindranath’s poems as songs close to folk literature.

Intellectual involvement with Tagore

The highest wave of Tagore’s celebrity came shortly after the First World War. Unlike the third wave in 1956–61, which disconnected itself markedly from the approach of the twenties, this second phase did not feel any discomfort in being linked to Tagore’s still-remembered reputation established in 1913-14.

Tagore’s mass popularity in Hungary also raised opposition to the poet. This opposition came from all directions and there was no organised political or ideological group behind it. Representatives of the churches attacked those who wanted to show Tagore as a prophet, a bearer of a new ideology, but they still recognised him as a poet: “Rabindranath Tagore is a true gem and we are free and right to study him as we do with the pagan poets of the Ancient Age.”[10] The extent of theCatholic Church’s concern is indicated by the fact that in 1926 an apologetic book about Rabindranath was produced by the theologian István Záborszky (1893-1949).[11] He examined Tagore’s ideas, interpreted them in terms of western philosophy and rejected the tenets that contradicted the teaching of the Catholic Church, such as pantheistic monism, salvation without the help of God, etc. Nevertheless, his book appreciated the noble features of the Indian poet’s approach. Although the author was aware of the variegated nature of Hinduism, he considered the Indian poet as its best representative, one who had reached the highest spiritual stages, and he valued Tagore’s notion of love, optimism and spiritual depth.[12]

Rabindranath received the strongest attack from a person who was far from sharing the ideas of the Church, Georg Lukács (1885-1971), who after the fall of a short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, settled in Vienna. He read The Home and the World and, in a German article published in 1922 from Berlin in the magazine Die rote Fahne, he labelled The Home and the World “a petit bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind” and explained Tagore’s international fame as politically motivated, "The British bourgeoisie... is repaying its intellectual agent in the struggle against the Indian freedom movement." Lukács’s attitude shows as much of his superficial understanding of Indian culture as his vision of Tagore as a rival to the communist movement. There were also journalists who criticised the Bengali poet.

In the 1920s leading intellectuals were less interested in Tagore than was the general public. However, writers like Sándor Márai (1900-1989), Zoltán Fábry (1897-1970) and Dezső Kosztolányi[13] — all hailing from regions that were absorbed into other countries after the war — expressed their mixed feelings about the unprecedented literary cult of the Bengali poet but eventually recognised his human value and his poetic achievement.

Two of the most outstanding authors from Transylvania, Aladár Kuncz (1885-1931) and Jenő Dsida (1907-1938), celebrated Tagore unreservedly. Comparing the most influential poet of his time, Endre Ady (1877-1919), to Tagore, Kuncz wrote[14] that one of the fundamental characteristics of Ady’s poetry was a constant emotional awareness of community with the world and with life, and consequently, in his poetry concepts such as Nature and Self, Life and Death live in unity. According to Kuncz, this realisation of unionis no different from the Indian idea of “tat tvam asi" and Ady is similar to Tagore, who lives in this unity. However, while Tagore wrote about the unity of life as the basic tenet of Indian philosophy, Ady did this on intuitive and emotional grounds. Kuncz also wrote a short story entitled “The tree that set forth. To the melody of Tagore”.[15]Jenő Dsida’s early poem Towards the Eastern Sunrise[16] is an example of Hungary’s disappointment with the West and its turn towards the East. Loaded with political allusions to the winning powers of the war, the poem expresses the author’s disenchantment with western civilisation, which destroyed the magic in the world, and salutes a turning towards the Orient, which he also took as the homeland of tales and the ancient homeland of the Hungarians. In this poem the West is symbolised by Paris and the cynicism of Anatole France, while Tagore is hailed as the representative of the brightness of the East.

In the 1920s, Tagore’s ideas received responses from authors who were born or lived in regions lost after the World War. As has been demonstrated recently by Ana Jelnikar, the positive reception of Tagore by those dislocated by war and experiencing oppression by the imperialism of western powers was an example of what Patrick Colm Hogan calls situational identification, “where we develop an immediate sense of intimacy with someone as we intuit shared feelings, ideas, references, [and] expectations”.[17]

Tagore's extraordinary popularity was followed by a period of amnesia starting in the late twenties, when even people who had earlier appreciated him became critical. An important document of this period is Rózsa Hajnóczy’s (1892-1944) voluminous book, the Fire of Bengal (1943), about her three years in Santiniketan as the wife of a visiting professor. The Fire of Bengal is a mixture of novel and travelogue. Despite the author’s superficial acquaintance with Bengali culture,the Fire of Bengal became the most popular Hungarian book about India and ran in eleven editions between 1943 and 1985. With a superimposed love story, it gives an account of life in Santiniketan in the early 1930s. The author presents Tagore as a tired old man. With its sense of wonderat India, its exotic romanticism, mysticism, and critique of Tagore, the Fire of Bengal superseded Tagore’s own works in Hungarian as the most widely-read book about India.