Medieval Typos

In studiolum we have finally published the digital edition of a medieval codex to be published together with the Cathedral Library of Kalocsa as the second volume of the “Treasures of Kalocsa” series. This beautiful 13th-century Parisian manuscript contains the epistles of Saint Paul, accompanied by the detailed verse-by-verse commentaries by Petrus Lombardus, in 300 parchment leaves all in all.

This voluminous codex was produced with the working method of the pecia, already widespread at the Paris university at that time. The exemplar kept in the library of the university was divided in sheets and distributed among several copyists at the same time, so that a complete new copy could be produced in a relatively short time. The copied sheets were then collected, and miniators painted large initial letters with alternating red and blue colors in the spaces left blank at the beginning of the biblical verses commented.

This procedure, according to the glorious Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental edited by Chartier and Cavallo – that we had the honor of translating into Hungarian – already foreshadowed the working method of the book press, where single sheets were prepared by different compositors, and – at least in the first decades of the printing era – the initials were painted by miniators in the spaces left blank. The more so, because – as we will see below – together with this new method apparently the printer's devil was born as well – some two hundred years before the very invention of printing itself!

Namely, this method assumed that the miniators knew the text, and always painted the appropriate initial in the given space. However, this was not always the case. Apparently the miniator often just casted a short glance at the text to be complemented, and then quickly painted the letter he felt most logical – but which sometimes in fact differed from the sacred text.

So he did, for example, on fol. 264r (Heb 2:7), where he read and complemented the initial word of the verse as “Innuisti” (‘you consented’). Right after that, however, he realized his error, and initialized the commentary at the right of the verse with the correct word “Minuisti” (‘you diminished’).


In other cases, however, it fell to the stationarius – the librarian responsible for the distribution of the sheets and then for the revision of the copies – to correct the error afterwards. Thus for example on fol. 233v (2Cor 16:21), where the miniator complemented the initial word “...alutatio” as “Laudatio” – a frequent initial word in liturgical texts – both in the verse and in the commentary. In the latter it was the corrector who wrote the black ‘S’ in the middle of the red ‘L’, thus changing the word in the correct “Salutatio”.


The same he did on fol. 286r (Heb 10:7), where a little black ‘T’ got into the initial red ‘N’ of the commentary, thus changing the erroneous “Nunc” (‘now’) in a correct “Tunc” (‘therefore’).


In some cases the attention of the corrector grew slack too. Thus for example on fol. 247v (2Tim 1:16), where the miniator had imagined – and created – a “Sed” (‘but’) in place of the relatively rare “Det” (‘let him give’). This example, together with the above quoted misreading of “...alutatio” as “Laudatio” permits us to hypothesize that the miniator did not feel a sharp difference between phonemas ‘t’ and ‘d’.


And finally a very subtle case. On fol. 292r (Heb 11:22), at the right of the verse beginning as “Fide Ioseph”, the initial word of the commentary was complemented as “Mosep”, instead of “Iosep”. Why then?


In this passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle enumerates the examples of faith from the patriarch to the prophets. The verse beginning with “Fide Ioseph moriens” is preceded – on the previous page – by a very similar verse beginning with “Fide Iacob moriens” but mentioning “Ioseph” as well, and is followed by another one beginning with “Fide Moyses”. Perhaps the miniator, arriving to the line “Fide Ioseph”, lost track for a moment, and remembering that he had already painted an initial to such phrase on the previous page, he complemented the initial word “...osep” of the commentary as “Mosep” that almost corresponded to the initial word of the following verse. Later this typo was corrected as well with a small black ‘J’ written into the large red ‘M’.

Any moral? Perhaps that errare was humanum already eight hundred years ago. This certainly will not be different with our edition either. We can only hope that the errors of this one will not cause annoyance to the Benevolent User, only some lenient serenity, just like those of the medieval miniator did to us.

Adiós

Ibn al-Labbâna (11th c.):   Mallorca مدینة میورقة      بلد اعارته الحمامة طو قها       وکساه حلة ریشه الطاووس وکانما تلك المیاه مدامة       وکان قیعان الدیار کئوس Medina Mayurqa This city has taken from the dove her collar        and the peacock clothed her with her feathers. The water of her fountains is like wine        and her courtyards are similar to goblets.

Espacios en blanco

En una vieja arca llena de papeles familiares acabamos de encontrar un pequeño legajo con tres documentos manuscritos firmados en el pueblo de Canales de la Sierra, dos de ellos son escrituras públicas fechadas en 1683 y otro, de carácter eclesiástico, en 1763; y hay también otro documento eclesiástico fechado en Pamplona en 1688 pero con asuntos relativos asimismo a la villa de Canales. Ignoramos completamente cómo llegaron hasta nuestra casa y qué relación guarda aquella lejana zona con nuestros antepasados. Intentaremos averiguarlo.

Pero el legajo, además, guarda un impreso curioso. Se trata de una «Carta de Esclavitud» o declaración de ingreso en la Cofradía de los Esclavos de la Virgen. Aún hoy, en ese hermoso pueblo de Canales, en el que solo quedan unos 80 habitantes censados, se celebran fiestas a su patrona, la Virgen de la Soledad, el último sábado de agosto. El eje de la celebración es la romería a la Ermita de La Soledad, allí donde debió haberse firmado el documento que reproducimos y que por su aspecto parece de inicios del siglo XVIII. Quizá alguno de nuestros ancestros se sintió atraído por la Cofradía y acarició en sus manos este papel cuyos blancos tenía que rellenar con su nombre, el de los santos de su devoción, y luego fecharlo y rubricarlo. No lo hizo. El papel quedó olvidado en un arca que por casualidad hoy hemos abierto. Un pequeño misterio entre tantos. Como decía la buena de Dorotea en el capítulo 30 de la primera parte del Quijote: «Todo es milagro y misterio el discurso de mi vida».

Smokescreen

Zoltán Móser: Mondottam, ember... Képek Madáchhoz [Man I have spoken... Photos to Madách], Budapest: Masszi Publisher, 2002. With the foreword of István Jelenits

“Coincidence that connects far away worlds” has arranged it so that just one day after I have reported on the visit of Rodin’s statues in Mallorca, the same burgher of Calais, Jacques de Wissant whom I had photographed in Palma looked back at me from a title page at a book sale. This photo album is signed by Zoltán Móser (1946), author of thirty books, photo illustrator of fifty other ones, participant of two hundred exhibitions, professor of theory, practice and aesthetics of photography at the Péter Pázmány Catholic University, and guest professor of the Sapientia University in Kolozsvár (Cluj). Besides the photo on the title page it includes thirty-six more portraits of men, women and statues of angels, apparently from Transylvania, accompanied by quotations from the renowned 19th-century drama by Imre Madách, The tragedy of man.

When dipping into the book, the first thing I notice is that these photos, in the majority representing beautiful, sharp-featured and often upsetting faces of old peasant men and women, absolutely do not move me. They leave me cold. These faces in real life would stir up definite feelings, interest, sympathy or antipathy in me, but while browsing through their photos I only feel bored. This contrast is so strong that I’m constrained to think about its reason.

When glancing over the book the second time, I discover that the photos are unfocused. They are slushy. Without exception. The details of the faces, of the hair and of the clothes are fuzzy, they get lost. Thus some powerful elements – the eyes, some deeper wrinkles, but principally the nose and the mouth – dominate the impression. The face becomes a mask. Its individual traits are eclipsed, it becomes schematic.

On a third glance I have to establish that this effect is not accidental, but intentional. Each image is pointed to a small morality, just like the “little colored articles” of the newspapers of the seventies. The photographer did not intend to photograph persons, but rather roles and clichés. Genre figures. Sentimental photographic commonplaces, whose theatrical compositions rise from the peasant romanticism of the late nineteenth century, spanning without rupture (occasionally with some Socialist by-paths) to the nostalgic Transylvanian photo albums at the end of the twentieth century.

When a photo moves me, when I find it a good picture, it usually comes from the impression that the photographer is interested in reality, he is able to look at it in astonishment, he permits it to touch him personally, and it is this unique encounter that he is photographing.

This is not what I see on these pictures. This person is not interested in reality, but in finding some matter for his well-trained sentimental clichés. He is photographing such commonplaces in a row that have been photographed by many others for the past fifty years. He avoids encounter. This is not what he sees. This is what is customary to see.

And, in addition, his clichés are but limited to a well-defined stock of the several clichés in circulation. To those ones that represent their subjects from outside and from above. With aloofness, in a stiffened posture, degraded to objects, as simplified figures reduced to their momentary role. Without love. For the consumption of the petty bourgeois who is filled with satisfaction by the easily receivable anecdotal, populist tone on the one hand, and on the other hand by the safety that he stands above the subject of the image, that it is him who looks at the person represented while it does not look back at him, and that he does not have to enter into relation with it as a person. That he can avoid the encounter.

And the murkiness, fuzziness, lack of sharpness of the images – well, that is Art. The feeling of “cloud of unknowing” and of “seeing but a poor reflection as in a mirror” added afterwards to camouflage its triviality. The three points quivering for a long time after an empty phrase. A smokescreen.

With the examples below I have also juxtaposed some images comparable with them. I had no large pool to choose from, only a few albums I had within reach at home. The photos in them were mostly small-sized, so they get somewhat grainy when enlarged, while the album of Móser is of large format, thus its images come in a better quality.

Besides, the images of Móser become sharper when reduced in size, thus for the original impression you should enlarge them by clicking on them.

Left: Irén Ács, Meeting in the cooperative, Kondoros, 1959 (from the album Magyarország Otthon (Hungary at home), detail, below it the full image. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „Do I not feel the blessed daylight, The sweet delight of being alive...”

Left: Irén Ács, Couple, Füzesgyarmat, 1963. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „And even when imagination raise me Mere hunger plucks me down and humbles me, And makes me descend once more into base matter.”

Left: Irén Ács, The dustman, 1970, detail, below it the full image. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „...is life more than a dream?”

Left: Irén Ács, Mosonmagyaróvár, 1965, detail, below it the full image. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „A broken heart is quickly enough mended...”

Left: Irén Ács, István Hunya, a leader of the movement of Hungarian construction workers, 1972 - Right: Zoltán Móser, „...I have been racked by fearful visions, And I cannot tell which of them is true” (detail)

Left: Péter Korniss, Christmas, Tiszaeszlár 1985 (From the album The Guest Worker) - Right: Zoltán Móser, „Let us be wise, like god [sic]”

Left: Photo taken in Ladakh by Zsolt Sütő, 2007 (detail) - Right: Zoltán Móser, „All earth can know of joy is in my smile...”

Below: Zoltán Móser, „See there, the eagle circling in the clouds...” - Below it: Ferenc Olasz, Galgó (from the album Dicsértessék [Glory be to Him], 1989)


The smokescreen covering the angels even sends forth stink of sulphur. It would come in handy to the author if he could divide the book in a perfect symmetry to three times twelve images, by illustrating the male portraits with verses pronounced by Adam, the female ones with quotations from Eve, and those of the angels with verses sung by the angels in The tragedy of man. However, the angels have but limited opportunity to speak in the Tragedy. The one who in turn speaks profusely is Lucifer. Therefore the author tacks a tiny bit of an epilogue onto the images with the subtitle “whether it is permitted to tease the angels” in which he, after a ritual act of touching every holy cow from Tamási to Rilke and Klee declares that he will illustrate the photos of angel statues – photos that are even more wasted, inexpressive and taken without love than those of the persons – with quotations from the Satan. A gruesome blasphemy indeed, which is nevertheless assisted by the Piarist professor István Jelenits who authorized the book with his foreword.

By the way, the work of Madách is a true classical collection of sentences, of which any verse selected at random can be used as a motto for anything, as it is well attested by the above captions of Móser’s photos. The album of Móser, for example, would perfectly match those verses from the twelfth scene:

Thou hast been sunk in dreaming phantasies,
And left to stray the herd thou shouldest watch.

But even more those sentences of Péter Korniss from his Transylvanian photo album Inventory:

Robert Capa, the legendary photographer of Hungarian origin used to say, “If your picture is not good enough, you were not close enough to your subject.”

I changed this motto to “If your picture is not good enough, you were not close enough to the person.”

Rodin in Mallorca

The Caixà Bank has brought from the Rodin Museum in Paris to Palma, and installed on the promenade leading to the seaside cathedral seven masterpieces of Rodin, the six figures of the Burghers of Calais and the Thinker. A gesture of grand seigneur, the more so because at this time, in January there are hardly any visitors in Mallorca: this gift is addressed to the city. As on the way from the airport at the cathedral we wind upwards on the Passeig des Born, the seven statues are standing there on the promenade, so naturally as if they had been intended for here, mingling with the burghers of Mallorca. Their black surface that after moulding had been polished to mirror-like finish through weeks by Rodin, comes into such a new life in the light of the early spring Mediterranean sunshine that has never been suspected in cloudy Paris.

At four o’clock in Saturday morning I cut across the promenade on my way to the fish market in the port. As a guest coming from a country without a sea, I am irresistibly attracted by the spectacle as the boats arriving from the night fishery sail in on the oily black water, the dripping cases are taken out on the quay, and in the building of the wholesale fish market the early rising commissaries of the restaurants and supermarkets survey the catch spread out, the greatest part of which has even no name in our language. The only bar of the city that is open at this time is the sailors’ pub in front of the fish market where the exhausted fishermen draw up the balance of the night while nursing a drink. Disciplined sailor dogs are lying at the feet of some of them, wiry creatures with weather-beaten skin like their masters.

The city is still sleeping, the statues stand solitarily on the promenade. Lampions have already been stretched out between the trees and stages have been erected at the two ends of the esplanade for the three days feast of Saint Sebastian, the saintly protector of the city. This night light softens the statues, their surface becomes oily and slippery like that of the sea and of the freshly caught fishes.

Sunday evening, at five o’clock the parade begins. The burghers of Mallorca who in the previous night lit a bonfire on the main square and roasted meat at the free braziers set up throughout the city, and kept eating, drinking and dancing until early morning while each square gave home to a different concert, have already had a rest in the morning, and now they gather with renewed strength for the continuation. The crowd swarms onto the square and is looking forward with excitement to the arrival of the flaming charriots.

From the whole Mallorca, but even from continental Catalonia several groups of dimoni who usually play the role of tempters at the feast of Saint Anthony of the various settlements have come together in Palma. Each of them marches with their fire-vomiting monster-charriots, drummers and dancers from the center of the city to the cathedral on the sea-front where they will launch the festive fireworks.

The nearly five thousand dimoni march for four and a half hours through the host of a hundred and thirty thousand spectators. The square illuminated in a ghostlike manner by the fires and torches is dominated by the dark marble obelisk topped by the bronze bat with outspread wings, the heraldic animal of King James I who had conquered this island from the Arabs. The Thinker – the figure of Dante looking in the gate of Hell and the 19th-century icon of rationality – is sitting sunken into himself in the middle of the crowd.

Agua

Querido Wang Wei, me permitirás ahora una nota algo pedante. Tiene que ver con el azar, que junta mundos lejanos: a la vez estaba oyendo el parte meteorológico y leyendo un libro (hoy en día pueden hacerse estas dos cosas simultáneamente, créeme). El parte meteorológico decía que en Cataluña la sequía empieza a ser grave y que no parece que se vaya a solucionar en el futuro próximo. En el mismo instante, el libro ponía ante mis ojos:

... Inde Tarraco oppidum
et Barcilonum amoena sedes ditium,
nam pandit illic tuta portus brachia,
uuetque semper dulcibus tellus aquis.

[... Después, la ciudad de Tárraco y la amena sede de los ricos habitantes de Bárcilo, pues un puerto abre allí sus brazos seguros y la tierra está siempre empapada de aguas dulces.]

Así es como describe Barcelona Rufus Festus Avienus en su Ora maritima (vv. 519-522), a fines del siglo IV d. C. Su riqueza deriva del agua del mar y el agua dulce. Como sabes, querido Wang Wei, en este mar hay cada vez menos peces y los pescadores multiplican cada año sus horas para conseguir unos pocos. Y el agua dulce que bajaba por el Rubricatum (Llobregat) y el Baetul (Besós) es un recuerdo que ya no tienen ni los hombres más ancianos. Es por todo esto y porque vivo cerca de allí, en una isla sin ríos donde ya nos bebemos el agua del mar filtrada a través unos caros y complicados ingenios llamados desaladoras, que pienso con frecuencia en los problemas obvios que se nos vienen encima. Solo era una reflexión al caer la tarde. Descansa ahora de la dura jornada que yo intentaré hacer lo mismo.

Sant Antoni

In the popular tradition Saint Anthony is the patron of domestic animals, but he also protects people from erysipelas accompanied by high fever, painful eruptions and in the Middle Ages also by death. This disease, also called “fire of Saint Anthony” was caused by the fungus infection of corn called “ergot,” and the religious order of the Anthonites founded in honor of the saint made great efforts throughout the Middle Ages to fight it off by producing seed-grain cleaned from the infection and distributing it among peasants. According to the custom, the order received from the grateful families bell-bearing pigs that had the right of grazing wherever they pleased and that were then roasted and distributed among the poor on the day of the saint, January 17th.

In the feast of Saint Anthony in Sa Pobla of Mallorca, besides the blessing of the animals, the fire, the pig-roasting and the common banquet the demons come on the scene as well who, while the saint lived a life of hermit in the desert,

appeared in the form of various beasts, and with their claws and corns were cruelly tearing him. And when he implored for the help of Our Lord Jesus, immediately a great light shone upon him, and all the demons ran away.

It is late evening when we arrive to the village. In the road-crossing we walk round about huge stacks of wood. The fire is already blazing in front of the church, the brass band has just finished the festive concert. The figures of giants and monsters of the procession are still waiting at the gate of the churchyard. The ceremony starts, the sermon and the several strophes long songs all praise the merits of Saint Anthony. The lecture is about the column of fire that led the people in the desert.

After the ceremony the column of fire indeed departs and leads the people to the main square in front of the town-hall. The demons appear too, with drums, clappers and torches. The singers of the village, accompanied by ximbomba, take turns at reciting the never ending song on the temptation of Saint Anthony that begins like this: Saint Anthony and the demons sat down to play cards.

Saint Anthony and the demons (4'35")

In the meantime the demons form a circle, pattering and clattering here and there on their stilts, and menacing Saint Anthony who is turning in the middle of the circle. The dance is gradually joined by the other monsters and a number of other grotesque figures as well, like the clown, the pharmacist, the Turk, the Saracen.

And then suddenly all hell breaks loose. The building of the town-hall starts rumbling, fire breaks out from the chimneys. The demons are raging with might and main, spending all their fury for having not been able to give a short shrift to Saint Anthony in this year either.

As the smoke is subsiding, the crowd begins to disperse, everyone is heading to their own bonfire. In each road-crossing another company of neighbors or friends are roasting their dinner. The flats and garages are transformed into occasional inns: wherever the long red flag with the blue cross is put out, there guests are welcome. The singers on the main square platform still continue reciting for long hours the song of Saint Anthony: the story takes more and more improbable and profane turns, interweaving the cuckolded husbands and nasty stories of the village. The amplified singing echoes in all the village, and at the bonfires new, local versions are improvised on it. The troops of humiliated demons ramble all over the streets with loud drumming and shouting. At the end of the village they give a last, furious concert and then they go to have a dinner, too. When we set to home from the village before dawn, we have to find our way by driving in zigzag among the fire-blocked road-crossings until we get to the road leading to Palma.

Satisfacción plena

La vida sonreía de oreja a oreja al autor de este dístico que se encuentra en la última página del ejemplar del Fasciculus temporum (1495) de la Biblioteca del Monasterio de la Real. En unas pocas semanas entregaremos el catálogo de los incunables de esa biblioteca, que hemos realizado junto con las imágenes digitalizadas de los libros.

Life was smiling from ear to ear on the author of this couplet that can be read on the last page of the Fasciculus temporum (1495) preserved in the Biblioteca del Monasterio de la Real. We will also feel like this within a few weeks, when we will deliver the digital catalog of the incunabula of the library, including the complete digitized images of the books.

Si la fortuna más tuviera: más me diera
Si más recibir pudiera: la fortuna más me diera

If Fortune had more, she would have given me more
If more I could receive, more would have Fortune given

¡Viva España!

This is how the proposed new text of the Spanish hymn begins, that was just rejected by the Spanish Olympic Committee when I arrived to Spain. Throughout its ephemeral life this text has caused much tempest that has even reached as far as to Hungary. Simultaneously, the leaders of the right-wing party decided not to enter in the approaching elections their last trustworthy face, the Mayor of Madrid Gallardón, but to nominate instead Manuel Pizarro, a businessman of a controversial past on the second place of their list. The web forum of readers of El País of which I also have the honor of being a member has immediately discovered, with a good nose, the subtle relationship between these changes and my travel to Spain. The East-European agent arrived to Spain for the subversion of the Right, and he has already hitched up to the job.


My first step is to look for an internet spot to receive my instructions. The members of the readers’ forum had promised me to compose a list of the bars I should unconditionally visit in Madrid in those few days while working in the National Library. I get in touch with them in the quarter of Carabanchel, in an Ecuadorian internet locutorio that has established an exemplary internationalist brotherhood with the proletariat of a large number of the countries of the world. Half of the room is occupied by a Columbian food store in which the wares are not arranged by sort, but by countries of origin. They line up on the shelves under handwritten shelf-marks like in a good library, in order the guest worker should not browse for long: Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Poland, Romania... The countries known by me are unequivocally represented by wares in lack of which the guest workers of that country are orphan kids: for example mineral water of Borsec and poteen of Braşov for the Romanian immigrants who are just illegally dismantling and selling as Francoist souvenir the iron grids of the once notorious, today abandoned prison of Carabanchel, thirty euros a piece of an ell. “Does it really sell?” I ask of the little round Columbian seller, with a hint to the water of Borsec. “Like hot cakes!” he answers with a large smile.


The first program item is the visit of the Rastro scheduled to realize on Sunday morning. However, this flea market spreading over the steep southern streets of Madrid has lost much of its glamor, today it is rather a tourist spot and a market of cheap Chinese commodities. Nevertheless, the seafood bars coming in quick succession on the Ribera de Curtidores offer a generous compensation to the observer who arrives from a country without sea.


In the evening we still go with Ana to the Bukowski Club run by their friend, the Argentinian writer Carlos Salem, but with this the thread is altogether broken. I will not get to the Cafe Comercial at the Bilbao metro station, neither to the antiquarian shop on Moyano, not even to the Pizzeria “El Trebol” at the Sol station, where I should greet Gerardo and Arturo in the name of Ariel. I come down with flu, and lay with fever throughout the two days I had dedicated for working in the library and exploring the city. Mission incomplete. It is a luck that with my last forces I had been able to drag myself to the National Library where I get to know that it has unexpectedly closed, because an Argentinian diplomat had been stealing books for several months and now as he’s got pinched they make inventory. Better so, at least I am not annoyed that much by the idleness forced upon me.

Ana and José, our friends whom we had known in Iran attend me with devotion. They cook tea for me, look for pills, and give me Orsón, the big plush St. Bernard dog as a bed-warmer. I ask them to bring me some Borsec mineral water from the Columbian shop, as this is also used as a medicine in the Carpathian Székely land from where it comes. With the poteen of Braşov I do not dare to make experiments.

On Wednesday morning I am roaming still dizzy with illness on Terminal 4 of the Madrid airport, looking for a plug for my notebook. On Spanish airports I always find a place where I can work some hours until departure. Here, however, I have no success with this either. In the cafés, the salad bars, and even in the always reliable McDonalds envious hands smoothed out the bottoms of the columns and the walls alongside the chairs.

I sit down at least for a coffee, with a book in the hand. In the meantime it is announced that the plane to Mallorca will leave with a delay of an hour. I am just reading about how hopelessly Kapuściński tries to find a plane in the middle of the revolution in Kongo, when someone next to me begins to hum a tune. I jerk up my head. A young woman is softly singing to herself at the next table above her coffee, still half sleeping, persistently. I cannot grasp the melody, the rhythm is also free. It sounds like flamenco, and then perhaps like a ballad. The throaty alto voice fills the café and makes it homely. Bienvenido a España.

Alexander Csoma de Kőrös

In 2006, on the 222th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, the founder of Tibetan studies we have published on the internet in Hungarian, English and Spanish, in the collaboration of Studiolum and the Oriental Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the legacy of Csoma preserved in the Collection. This date is memorable in the history of Tibetan studies for another reason as well, since the Hungarian Ministry of Education in this year announced, with reference to the all-time high budget deficit, the suppression of several university departments, including that of Tibetan philology. Therefore on the frontispiece of our web publication we have also displayed, out of solidarity, together with the commemoration of Csoma’s anniversary that it was prepared “in memory of the Tibetan studies in Hungary, abolished in this year,” until the management of the collections made us cancel this reference in fear of retorsion. Accidentally, this happened in the weeks of the municipal elections in which the governing parties – the authors of the above deficit – led their campaign with the slogan “Budapest, the city of liberty and solidarity.”

This little East-European absurd is, however, absolutely not alien to the path of life of Csoma. It was already a miracle that this boy who was born in the Carpathian frontier zone of Transylvania obtained exemption from the life-long service of border-warden, compulsory there at that time, and could go to learn at the academies of Nagyenyed (Ajud) and Göttingen instead. But it is even more characteristic that when learning there about the tentative theories of affinity between the Hungarian and Uyghur languages, he decided to verify them on the spot, by reaching on foot from Hungary as far as Uyghuristan in China. At this time the “Great Game” was developing between the Russians and the British in Central Asia, inciting bloody wars between every people living along the fault line running from Turkey to China – but in the middle of the wars and epidemics Csoma safely reached the Indian-Tibetan border. And here another miracle followed. For, in spite of his astounding talents – he perfectly spoke twenty languages – Csoma arrived too early. Comparative linguistics in these decades was just in the first phase of the elaboration of the scientific methodology of linguistic affinity, so Csoma’s comparative research was foredoomed to failure. However, by a special grace of God, on the road leading to Tibet he met a commissary of the British government who was just in need of such a person for the exploration of the Tibetan language, completely unknown to Europeans at that time, but indispensable to the expansion of the British. In the thereafter following fifteen years Csoma has completely accomplished this task. Living in the austere monasteries of Tibet, he mastered both the language and the religion, composed the first Tibetan dictionary and grammar (1834), and gave such detailed description of the Buddhist religion – only obscurely known in Europe – and of the Tibetan literary canon that nothing essential has been added to it since then. And Buddhists from Tibet to Japan venerate him as the only European boddhisatva. He nevertheless only regarded this as a detour, or in the best case a preliminary study to the research of the Uyghur. However, he never reached the Uyghur.


The list of Zsolt Sütő from the Transylvanian Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş) is the most complete collection of the information to be found about Csoma on the internet. We are on the distinguished fourth place on it. Zsolt himself has followed through the path of Csoma in India and Tibet, from where he brought home wonderful photos like this one above. He published them on his page with the title „Himalaya Blue” accompanied with his diary notes. In one of these notes he describes how difficult it is to explain to others what Csoma means to people grown up in this world of the absurd.

Today I went to Thiksey with an American couple, Farkas, with some Hungarian roots. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recount the Csoma story in such a usual and superficial touristy conversation. I tell them that he had come here two hundred years ago, on foot. Ah, yeah, a traveler. Yes, but eventually he made the first good Tibetan-English Dictionay, among others. Ooh, yeah? I didn’t know that. And then still how far we are from his original purpose, from his Transylvanian and Göttingen years, from the Sanskrit-Tibetan-English dictionary... I’m more and more skeptical as far as it concerns the understanding of the essentials of the Hungarian raison d’être by foreigners. Not to speak about the Transylvanian raison d’être, which is not even understood by the Hungarians. The good God has imposed an interesting fable on our shoulders.

From a more fortunate place, let us say from America it is in fact difficult to understand what makes this story so remarkable. One accomplishes the respective academic studies, goes to a given place, and with the respective methodology and institutional support he composes the dictionary of the given language. A large number of American anthropologists are indeed doing so all over the world, and Franz Boas has even established a special school for this purpose. In our part of the world, however, in the eternal lack of background, institutions, network and support, and even accompanied by the suspicion, jealousy and hostility of the political and scientific potentates it is a must that a talent should either be lost or raise an outstanding achievement by a heroic effort and in solitude. Like Ryszard Kapuściński, Bohumil Hrabal and Csoma did – or even the clematis breeders mentioned in the previous two posts.

This is why it is a special joy if someone nevertheless grasps something from this. On ‘flickr’ we have come across the photo gallery “chambre-noire” by summergreen from the UK who has published this photo montage with the portrait of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös and a leaf of his Tibetan manuscripts, referring to the English version of our biography of Csoma as a source of the original images. Our gratitude for it.

Clematis Sociology 2. Uno Kivistik, Estonia; Mihail Ivanovich Orlov, Ukraine

I continue.

Raymond J. Evison, one of the most renowned clematis breeders. This picture was shot on the 2005 Chelsea Flower Show. (Accidentally, I was also there.) The background is therefore just as kitschy as it can be expected. You should disregard it. (By the way Evison has beautiful plants. By that time he had already created his series ‘The Prairie,’ composed of four ethereal Clematis integrifolia.) This is how one imagines a world famous flower breeder.

And by no means like this. This picture below represents Uno and Aili Kivistik in 1992, when the International Clematis Society visited their farm.


Uno Kivistik was born in 1932 in Estonia, in a medium landowner family who run their farm renownedly well. After the Soviet occupation, in 1949 they, just like everyone else, were deprived of their estates which were turned into Soviet-type kolkhozes. Due to ignorance, inresponsability and conscious destruction, the kolkhozes in a few years destroyed the values accumulated in the course of several generations. The former peasants in a large number undertook even the most inhuman works in the cities – as a result of forced Socialist industrialization, there was plenty of such work – just in order to escape from the village. Uno Kivistik stayed at home, and after work – I cannot say that in his free time, for such a thing was only known to the neo-proletariat collected in the concrete housing projects of the cities and deprived of all their roots and traditions, while everyone else just started a “second shift” after work – he experimented with flower breeding in their garden. In such circumstances he achieved such results that even several complete institutions in more fortunate places cannot boast with. His name is connected with more than twenty new apple breeds and fifty rose hybrids. In 1974 he started clematis breeding together with his wife Aili. They wanted to produce plants that give a safe and rich crop even in the cold Estonian climate. As a result, they have created more than 140 such clematis hybrids. In 1990, when the country achieved its independence from the Soviet Union, they regained their estates. There they established the Roogoja Farm which is active even today. Uno Kivistik died in 1998, at the age of sixty-six.

I know well the faces like his one, too. These faces completely miss those signs of well-being, safety and consciousness that make immediately recognizable the face of a Western intellectual. On the contrary, they are marked by those signs of poverty, lack of safety and oppression that in the West can be only discovered on the faces of the poorest classes.

In the Soviet Union a considerable part of intellectuals had such a face. I will never forget the commotion and bewilderment that I felt when I saw this at the first time. At the end of the seventies I met a group of highly qualified intellectuals who were guided in Budapest by a friend of mine. The face of these people missed all those traces of education that were customary at us, while they were strongly marked by intimidation, poverty and humiliation.

This face of the Soviet intellectuals, thanks to God, did not exist to the west of the Soviet border. However, they had another face as well which was also typical at us.

Mihail Ivanovich Orlov. This face was my childhood. This picture could have been equally that of a village butcher (albeit with an obligatory small moustache – however, I guess that the twenties in the Soviet Union were not survivable with such a moustache) or of a little town shoemaker, of the president of the local industrial co-operative or of the chief accountant of the Red Star Kolkhoz, of the director of the town’s secondary school, of the leader of the district library, or of Dr. X., candidate in historical studies.

Mihail Ivanovich was born in 1918. He graduated at the Academy of Forestry in Leningrad, and obtained his doctoral degree in 1963. He worked in the Central Botanic Garden of Kiev on the breeding of clematis cultivars resistant to wilt. His name is connected with more than forty scientific publications and the same number of clematis hybrids. He died in 2000.

Shortly before going to pension he was visited in the Botanic Garden of Kiev by an Estonian colleague to whom he gave the clematis on this picture which was bred by him. The colleague successfully propagated the plant at home, and when Orlov returned his visit they agreed that it would bear the name of Kiev. And so it happened. Since then Kiev has become the star plant of the most exclusive Western nurseries.

The face and the clematis do not match. It is possible that the face was only a mask. And it is also possible that the faces of all the other people were masks as well. That in spite of every appearance, all the others too kept such a flower hidden in their garden or in their heart. And that they wore that mask in order the barbarians and scoundrels in power for the moment would not trample their flower underfoot.

Clematis Sociology 1. Stefan Franczak S.J., Poland

In memoriam László Lukács S.J.

Today I finally made my order of clematis. An order like this is always preceded by a huge work. As the plants I order usually can be seen live the nearest five hundred kilometers to here, I try to get to establish via internet how they might look in the reality. The data of the same plant are often surprisingly different on the pages of different nurseries, thus one has to work usually quite much to have a realistic image.

Search and you shall find. Although not necessarily what you were looking for. In the eighties, on a traineeship in a small village in Western Hungary as an undergraduate of sociology I and a friend received the task to find out what and how was produced there at the beginning of the forties. The people we questioned started to count back, that before the war... but before which war... when the militiamen came... or when Anti was taken away... or else... And then they started to tell us about the militiamen and about who and how took away Anti and the rest. We never got to know what had been produced there, but in two days we knew everything about the past decades.

Later I made a lot of other interviews as well, and I experienced that at this part of the world any question you put, within five minutes you’ll be at the point of before which war... or when he was taken away...

I’m browsing among the clematis. One is more beautiful than the other.


After a while I discover that the most beautiful ones usually come from Poland, Estonia or Ukraine. And then I find the breeders as well.

Stefan Franczak S. J. from Poland.

How well I know this kind of face. This is the face of my Communist grandfather who, while we lived crowded in seven in a tiny flat of one room and one kitchen, refused the building land offered to him for an extremely low price, saying that “a Communist owns no land.”

The face of our neighbor Uncle Jani who, with his foot smashed to pieces at the Don river (of the two hundred thousand men sent there well if a tenth came back) even at the age of ninety cultivated their one hectare large garden in a way that there was not a single weed left in it.

The face of Lukács. In the Jesuit convent of Rome he galloped ahead on the long corridor like a big kangaroo, while I was following him at a brisk pace like a little rabbit to the lift, to go up to the fathers’ cafeteria on the fifth floor where he provided me and Tamás with coffee as a reward for the good job done in the library on that day. The Jesuit fathers – who either never knew or in the Roman comfort already forgot what was poverty like, that there is such a thing that one does not have money either for a coffee – did not cease to murmur. Lukács, however, was unperturbed. He was a conscious Socialist. Before the war — which one... the one in which the foot of Uncle Jani was smashed — his duty was to minister the small ranches on the plain around Szeged. He did know what poverty was.

After the war, at the command of his superiors, he escaped over the border. He was placed in the Historical Institute of the Jesuit order in Rome. In the morning he sat at his table, and there he worked until late night – apart from prayer and some afternoon nap he got accustomed to in Rome. Each day. For fifty years. He did not walk around in the city, he lived no social life. Although he could have done so. Others did so. He, however, only wanted to serve God by keeping alive the memory of the ancient Hungarian Jesuits. He collected every data about each Hungarian Jesuit from the 1500’s on. His results published in book mounted up to almost one running meter.

Then the times changed in Hungary, he was awarded several prizes, they wanted to make an idol out of him. But he was not touched by this. Before we left, we went up to his room. I was shocked to see the poverty in which he lived. A bed, a chair, a table with a computer on it – above eighty he learned how to use it, because with the help of it he could work quicker, on the greater glory of God –, a bookshelf and nothing else. By some miracle he nevertheless found a little medal so that he could give me a gift.

Before his death he came back home to Budapest for a short visit. He still could come out to see us in the garden.

Stefan Franczak is an internationally renowned clematis breeder. His name is connected with more than eighty breeds of clematis, many of which are awarded with international prizes. He published in several American, Canadian, British and Swiss reviews, and since the eighties there is no textbook that would not mention his work.

He was born in 1917. After studying and then teaching in various schools of agriculture, in 1948 he entered the Jesuit order as a simple helping brother. In Warsaw he was entrusted with the care of the one and half hectares large garden of the Jesuit college. As in the fifties the Communists preferred to expropriate the estates of the church upon the pretext of turning them for communitarian purposes, the Jesuits, in order to prevent this, converted their vegetable garden in a park and opened it to the public. This task was entrusted to him, too.

In a very short time he created an extensive ornamental garden composed of more than nine hundred plants, mostly breeds of clematis, iris and daylilies. Soon the whole country came to admire it, and specialists from all the world regularly made pilgrimage to it.

This picture, displaying a detail from the garden as it was in the seventies, could be published even today in any English garden review. But what it meant at that time is only understood by those who remember that, when crossing the border eastward, immediately everything was filthy, ugly, colorless and abandoned – deliberately and on purpose. The beauty of this garden, created in the middle of state-supported destruction, was a constant protest against the barbarism of the regime.

But barbarians are everywhere. With the change of regime the Jesuits received permission to build a new church, and by 1996 they erected one, by thus reducing their garden to a third of its size. And this was not enough. In 2003 the rector of the Jesuit college decided to transfer the 86 years old Brother Stefan to another convent and to liquidate the garden, the result of the whole life of an internationally renowned flower breeder. He received more than sixty protest letters from all over the world. They did not count much. Albeit he has not transfered the old Jesuit, nevertheless by remaining there, he has to observe while the rector continuously and systematically destroys the rest of his garden.

Saint Teresa of Avila in 1572 or 1573 made the pledge below in a playful form, but with a very serious content. She presumably made it to the benefit of Jerónimo Gracián, who at that time accomplished his novitiate in Pastrana. After the death of Teresa and John of the Cross this very talented and devout priest was the only one who faithfully represented Teresa’s line of direction. And within some years those very superiors mentioned by Teresa below expelled him from the order, by employing even the most disgusting means. I do not know where these people are now, although we know the circumstances of the death of the biggest scoundrel – the superior general of the order of that time –, and those do not promise anything good. The canonization of Gracián, however, was recently begun by the Church. And Teresa already a long time ago stepped over to there where there are no barbarians and no scoundrels, where there is no pain and no destruction. And I think that by this her pledge too has turned timeless.

“Teresa de Jesús dice que da a cualquier cavallero de la Virgen que hiciere un acto solo cada día muy determinado a sufrir toda su vida un perlado muy necio y vicioso y comedor y mal acondicionado, el día que le hiciere la da la mitad de lo que mereciere aquel día, ansí en la comunión como en hartos dolores, que trai; en fin, en todo, que será harto poco, ha de considerar la humildad con que estuvo el Señor delante de los jueces y cómo fue obediente hasta muerte de cruz.”

(“Teresa of Jesus makes the pledge that to any knight of the Virgin who each day renews his intention to suffer throughout his whole life the power of a wicked, stupid, voracious and rude prelate, I hand over half of what I have merited on that day either in the community with God or in the hard sufferances taken by me. And in all this he has to consider that humility with which the Lord stood in front of his judges and how He was obedient until His death on the cross.”)

Amor

Las posesiones europeas de Wang Wei son extensas. Van desde el Mediterráneo Occidental, tocando las costas de la península de Hispania, hasta las colinas de Transilvania, en las estribaciones de los Cárpatos. Es natural que las gentes que pueblan un territorio así sean muchas y diversas. Las hay tímidas y extrovertidas, holgazanas y laboriosas, malhechoras y santas, y algunas tienen la emotividad impulsiva y vehemente, cosa que hace concebir esperanzas sobre el futuro.

Es el caso que, durante una inspección rutinaria del barrio de Nuestra Señora del Carmen, en la zona occidental de los terrenos europeos de Wang Wei, el primer día de 2008 vimos que alguien había tendido, de lado a lado de la calle principal, esta felicitación de cumpleaños que es a la vez una declaración de amor y un grito de añoranza. Como no nos pareció conveniente empezar a preguntar para salir de dudas, nos quedamos con el interrogante de si Flor es el nombre de la mujer deseada o bien la firma de la autora de la pancarta. En cualquiera de los dos casos, les deseamos a ambos un próspero año 2008 en el que acaben consolidando un feliz reencuentro.