Hungarian Helicon [antikvár]

MAGYAR is an agglutinative Finno-Ugrian language, distantly related to Finnish, Estonian, Lappish, Ostiak and Vogul. Transplanted bodily to the Carpathian basin from Asia in a mass migration on horseback nearly eleven centuries ago, it has survived being overlaid by the Latin culture of the Román Catholic Church and by the administrative overlordship of the German-speaking Habsburgs, and is today still the vigorous and musical speech of a nation of ten millión people. Long centuries of depopulation and recolonization have so blended the racial ingredients, however, that physical anthropologists, dealing in averages, find little physical difference today between the populations of Magyar-speaking Hungary and Germán-speaking Austria, and almost none at all between the Magyars and the Slovaks. 1 On the other hand, its sense of a national identity (based on language) has been strong for the past century and a half; and in this emerging self-consciousness the Magyar poets have had a major share. Hungary's literary beginnings were tentative and spasmodic. First came somé naive religious verse - chiefly hymns and saints' chronicles in the 13th and 14th centuries. An apparently firm foundation for a national culture came under King Lajos the Great (1342-82), who founded the University of Pécs in 1367 (earlier than Heidelberg, Ferrara, St. Andrew's or Seville) and under King Mátyás Hunyadi (1458-90) with superb Corvinus Library and his university foundations in Pozsony (Bratislava) and Buda. Contacts with contemporary Italy were frequent and fruitful and blossomed into a Latinate literature. The bloody advance of Turkish conquest was destined presently to obliterate all this cultural promise, following the nation's defeat at Mohács in 1526 and the occupation of Buda and Central Hungary in 1541. But there had been an interlude of glory. Thus a major Hungárián poet in Latin emerged in the 15th century. This was Bishop János Csezmiczei (1434-72), of Pécs (the university centre, in the South), better known as "Janus Pannonius," a cultured Platonist and complete Renaissance man of letters, who had been educated at the universities of Ferrara and Padua, had translated on a large scale into Latin from the Greek of 1 See for example the anthropometrical tables in G.M. Moranfs The Races of Central Europe (London, 1939), pages 37, 46, 81, 83 and 94.