Hungarian Studies Review Vol. 1., 1974
WATSON KIRKCONNELL: A Canadian Meets the Magyars
been High Commissioner in 1918 were presently handed over to a new "Jugoslavia" in the peace treaties, the Payerle family all migrated to Canada.** For the project that he urged, I had Arthur Yolland's excellent Hungarian-English dictionary and Kont's Petite grammaire hongroise. For originals I had a superb two-volume anthology of Hungarian poets (Magyar koltok, 1928), edited by Aladdr Zlinszky and Ldszlo Vajtho. For background reading, I had Jeno Pinter's two-volume History of Hungarian Literature, also freshly published (in Magyar) in 1928. With Bela to help me in deciphering the fundamental meaning of the Magyar, and with my own flair and passion for recreating the lines in English, the Hungarian anthology in English took shape with exhilarating rapidity. Actually, the completion of a large book manuscript was the least of our problems. The Great Depression had seen the financial sky fall down in November 1929. My publishers, Carrier & Isles, went bankrupt in the summer of 1930, leaving me to pay the printers and binders of my Icelandic Verse out of my own professorial pocket. Two of my other publishers, Graphic Press and Ariston Press, also went to the wall. Further book publication seemed as remote as Australia. As early as October 1929, the eminent Budapest novelist and academician, Ferencz Herczeg, had promised me an Introduction, but this solved no financial problems. In the meantime, a number of my verse translations were published in the Kanadai Magyar Ujsag. Next, about Christmas 1930, I mailed a clutch of nine poems to Sir Bernard Pares, editor of the University of London's Slavonic and East European Review. Included were a number in the Greek classical metres that were long popular in Hungary, in this case, Ferenc Kazinczy's "Our Tongue" (epic hexameters), Benedek Virag's "Invocation" (alcaics), Daniel Berzsenyi's "My Lot" (sapphics) and "Invocation" (alcaics) and Karoly Kisfaludy's "Mohacs" (elegiac couplets). In more modern metres were poems by Endre Ady, Dezs6 Kosztoldnyi, "Mikl<5s Bard" and Geza Gyoni. Sir Bernard's 6-page answer of January 17, 1931, was full of enthusiasm: "Your sapphics are real sapphics, not the kind of jingle which passes for sapphics in England. It is of course, as you have made it, a **Typical of our contacts with another phase of the Magyar tradition was a dinner-party for six at the home of the Schefbeck-Pete'nyis in the early 1930s, when I and my bride (a Canadian cousin of Earl Kitchener) were fellow-guests along with Bela and his bride, Lulu Putnik (a Winnipeg pianist, fresh from study in Paris and a Budapest recital), as well as Lulu's uncle Dezso Mahalek (soon to be 1st cellist in the Vancouver Symphony) and his wife, the golden soprano, "Carrie Henderson." Other Hungarian musicians, who were our house-guests during my presidency at Acadia University in 1948-64 were Joseph Szigeti (violinist), Bela Boszormenyi-Nagy (pianist) and Ge'za de Kresz (founder of the Hart House String Quartet) with his wife, "Norah Drewett" (concert pianist).