The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (41. évfolyam, 160. szám)
BOOKS AND AUTHORS - István Rácz: Johnny Grain-O'-Corn, the Hungarian Hero (Petőfi in English)
István Rócz Johnny Grain-o'-Corn, the Hungarian Hero Sándor Petőfi: John the Valiant - János vitéz. A bilingual edition. Translated by John Ridland, illustrated by Peter Meller. Budapest, Corvina, 1999, 177 pp. S ándor Petőfi is one of the first names Hungarians learn as young children. The average child in Hungaiy will have memorized some lines of his, even some short poems before he or she learns to read or write. One should add straightaway that Petőfi's poetry does not need to be forced down schoolchildren’s throats: they almost always learn these poems with pleasure. In nursery schools they enjoy the smooth rhythm, in their early school years they are enchanted by his descriptions of landscapes with their remarkable precision in representing the plants and animals of the Hungarian plain; in their adolescent years they admire his political courage, and once they become adult readers (if they still keep on reading) they discover Petőfi the intellectual poet. Petőfi means all this and much more: although he only lived to be twenty-six, in his short career as a poet and politician he became a national hero, an emblem of Hungarian independence. The versatility of his poetry is amazing, but John the Valiant (in an earlier translation: Sir John) is one of his central and best known works with a diversity of tones in itself, showing nearly all the virtues Petőfi is known for: the moving expression of love, the representation of innocent eroticism, his power in relating heroism in battles and, not least, brilliantly comic passages replete with humour, sarcasm and irony. It is a children's classic in Hungaiy, which is re-read and re discovered by adults (as children's classics usually are). Petőfi criticism often discusses John the Valiant and A helység kalapácsa (The Hammer of the Village) together. The latter was written a few months earlier than John the Valiant (1844), and is noted as a hilariously funny parody of epics, showing Petőfi's "irreverence" (as George F. Cushing rightfully termed it) at its best. (Adolescent Hungarians, although they may be too irreverent themselves to accept anything put on their reading list, always revere Petőfi for this poem.) It is perhaps not the last mock-heroic epic in world literature, but it is certainly one of the best of its kind. Whereas in A helység kalapácsa, Petőfi caricatured a mode of writing that he István Rácz teaches British studies at the University of Debrecen. Mainly interested in post-1945 British poetry, he wrote his most recent book (1999) on Philip Larkin. 144 The Hungarian Quarterly