Hungarian Book Review 1980/4. [antikvár]

Chronicle gin March 1980, at the invitation of the Dutch PEN Club, László Kéry, Secretary General of the Hungarian PEN Club, visited Holland in the company of poets Gábor Görgey and Ottó Orbán. A reception given by the Dutch PEN Club in honour of the Hungarian delegation was hosted by Daniel de Lange, Chairman of the Dutch PEN Club. The Hungarian delegation also visited the office of the "Foundation for the Promotion of the Translation of Dutch Literary Works". ¦ Mrs. Mineke Schipper, Secretary General of the Dutch PEN Club, Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, visited Hungary. Mrs. Schipper, who specializes in African literature, addressed, on the occasion of her visit, the Hungarian PEN Club and the Faculty of Arts of Eötvös Loránd University on some characteristics of African literature. She proposed that the next congress on African studies should be held in Budapest. I In April a delegation of West German authors visited Hungary, headed by Walter Jens, Chairman of the PEN centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. The members of the delegation included Thaddäus Troll, Frank Benseler, Erwin Sylvanus, Walter Helmut Fritz and Walter Neumann. The guests visited also the Hungarian Writers' Associaton. I The International PEN Club held a delegates' meeting and a literary round table at Bled, in Yugoslavia, between May 7 and 10, 1980. Twenty-five PEN centres were represented at the meeting. The delegates' meeting was preceded by a session of the Programme and Translation Committee which discussed publishing plans concerning the less-known literatures. The Committee has launched a series entitled "International PEN Books" in which an anthology of Hungarian prose is already under preparation. Another project under way concerns a series of bilingual poetic anthologies, and the manuscript of a Hungarian-Flemish and a Flemish-Hungarian poetic anthology is ready for the press. I In May, the American author Joyce Carol Dates and her husband, the critic Raymond Smith, met the Hungarian readers. Three novels and one volume of short stories by Ms. Dates have been published in Hungarian. m Carl Rakosi, an American author of Hungarian descent and one of the representatives of the objectivist poetry which made its appearance in the thirties, held a lecture on objectivism, the birth of the movement and its place in American poetry. He also read poems by objectivist poets, including some of his own. I Due to the work of the translators' workshop of the Hungarian PEN Club and in co-operation with André Doms, poetry editor of the Belgian Journal des Poetes, a small volume of poems by Gyula Illyés and another by Agnes Nemes Nagy were published in the series entitled "Atelier de traduction". The April issue of Journal des Poetes presented poems by the Hungarian poets Károly Bari, Attila Béres, György Czi-gány, Péter Dobai, Amy Károlyi, Mihály Ladányi, László Marsall, Imre Dravecz, Ottó Orbán, Imre Simonyi and Dezső Tandori. I In spring 1980 the periodical Vérités devoted a special issue to Hungarian poetry. It presented poems by twenty lyrical poets and printed a bibliography of Hungarian poetic anthologies and volumes of poetry available in French. 1 During the National Book Week of 1980, a delegation arrived from the Federal Republic of Germany as guests of the Insti- tute of Cultural Relations. The delegation, sent by the Foreign Affairs Institute of North Rhine-Westphalen (RWAG), was headed by the author Volker Degener, Chairman of the North Rhine-Westphalen Writers' Association, and the cultural institution was represented by Wilhelm Stehling. The visitors included the publisher and translator Hildegard Grosche, an active and successful promoter of Hungarian literature, who sold 100,000 copies of László Németh's novel "Revulsion" in the FRG, and who has since translated István Örkény and many other important Hungarian authors. The editor of the radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Regina Gossmann, prepared a longer series of cultural broadcasts. Like Volker Degener, the other author in the delegation, the poet Ludwig Sumagne, is a member of the European Writers' Organization "DIE KDGGE". With the assistance of the Hungarian Publishers' and Booksellers' Association, our guests participated at the opening ceremonies of the National Book Week in Budapest and in the country (in Szeged), held discussions with publishers, gave a press reception, gathered information on Hungarian literary and cultural life, and examined the opportunities for further co-operation between the two countries. ¦ In 1980, the ethnographer Iván Balassa was awarded the Herder Prize. The panel awarding the prize emphasized his achievement in the research of the material culture of the Hungarian people. His most recently published work is Hungarian Ethnography, which he wrote together with the late Gyula Drtutay, another Herder Prize winner. The German and English language editions of the book will soon be published by Corvina. H The German edition of "Rákóczi", a historical novel by Géza