The New Hungarian Quarterly Summer 1973. [antikvár]

NUMBER 50 The fiftieth number of a journal is never an event of indifference, especially in the case of a quarterly, and it is a rarer occurrence still if that journal appears in a language that is not its editors' native one. The editor may add, casting modesty aside on this jubilee occasion, that it is an even rarer phenomenon that a journal published in a foreign language finds its way into the hands and onto the bookshelves of those for whom it was intended. He speaks pro dorno sua, of course, since this has been no small undertaking for Hungarians, and now I quote from the first number of the first volume of The New Hungárián Quartely, which appeared in September 1960: "It is quite an undertaking for Hungarians to edit and pub-lish in Budapest an English-language periodical intended to be read in the English speaking world. In the audacity and difíiculty of this task—and it is not only the linguistic difíiculty we have in mind—there is something of what the Hungárián language denotes by the word virtus. This term is not identical with the Latin virtus, from which it derives, and is only a remote relatíve of the English virtue. Virtus is an undertaking which at first sight surpasses the strength of a person or of a group, but in itself or in its aims is too significant and attractive for its challenge to be resisted* "Could a more attractive task be conceived of than to afford English-speaking readers, one of the world's largest language groups, an insight into the life and thinking of a small but much-talked-about, and so often misrepresented, nation? Moreover, what aim could be more significant than that of promoting mutual knowledge and deeper understanding among the nations?" So run the first sentences of the introduction written twelve years ago. Has The New Hungárián Quartely succeeded in its aims? Was the virtus, which we were afraid would be greater than our strength, in vain? In his office, the editor, looking over the forty-nine issues published so far, representing the