An English Teacher for the English ? ÁDÁM MAKKAI

You have written in English, German, Italian and Latin, and your research covers Greek, Sanskrit, Ancient Slavic and Indochinese languages and dialects. Where does your great knowledge of languages come from?

 

When I was a small child, my parents lived a very busy life and had no time to raise a child, so they hired an Austrian au-pair who would only speak to me in German from the age of three and a half. By the time I had to go to first class in primary school, I had a very poor knowledge of Hungarian. As a result, they were forced to send me to a German school, where I finished one year. One day, János Kodolányi called us, I picked up the phone and tried to explain him with my terrible accent that I am my mother?s son. Kodolányi broke out in a cold sweat and he immediately phoned my mother, giving her a hard time and telling her that the son of a Hungarian writer must not have such a poor level of Hungarian. My poor mum rushed to the city and picked up Elek Benedek?s Hungarian Tales and Legends, which she read to me every evening in her Szekler dialect for one hour. Six months later, when the postman came and I answered the door, I spoke to him in this archaic language. So I had fallen from one extreme to the other. Additionally, they discovered that I had a good ear, so they sent me to piano lessons. After that came Latin in school, plus later Italian, French and Russian.

I think during my whole career as a linguist, I was much assisted by the languages and dialects I learnt as a child, plus the fact that I had good musical skills.

 

 

If one gets into a good university, the fact that you are a foreigner is much less of a difficulty. I graduated from Harvard where hundreds of people apply for every single place, so people are very much filtered, especially if you also apply for a scholarship as I successfully did. After that, I acquired Master?s and Doctorate degrees at Yale. If you get such an education, you have a green light all the way. So I found my place easily.

 

 

Budapest has remained my favourite but I also like Cluj very much. Nowadays we live on Hawaii, in the village of Valamie, some sixty kilometres north of Honolulu, which has almost become my home. I used to enjoy Vienna and Paris a lot, but not as much as that unfortunate dirty city, Budapest, which was so full of dogs and their droppings that I wrote my poem Dogpest out of fury. I have a love-hate relationship with Budapest. And I also like my mother?s hometown, Covasna, a lot.

 

 

As a child, I used to know a great many Petőfi poems by heart and I would recite them at poetry competitions. Once I was on the way from Hong Kong to Budapest, we had a stopover in Chicago and the man that sold our ticket said that they had found Petőfi?s skeleton. I started thinking: why did Petőfi not leave behind at least one line? We know that he was a graphomaniac, and if he could have, he would have probably carved out a poem into a piece of wood with his pen knife, just to make sure that he leaves a trace. I started imagining what he would have written, if he had indeed survived the Battle of Segesvár and been taken to Siberia to live for another ten years. That stirred up my fantasy so much that I started writing it down. I had this idea that perhaps he was killed not only in Segesvár but also in Siberia, but he still lived on because the Petőfi spirit does not die as long as world peace is not achieved. As a result, he was accompanied by the spirits of Sándor Kőrösi Csoma and the Dalai Lama wandering from country to country and from one age to the next. Petőfi makes it difficult for everyone who harms his nation. The book was best received in Transylvania where Imola Szűcs Noémi wrote a long article about it in Helikon.

 

 

I received a very nice review in the Times Literary Supplement which stated that the volume filled a gap and all English native speakers should read it because Hungarian poetry was practically unknown in the English-speaking world. I was very pleased, even framed the article and kept it ever since. Various colleagues and literary critics have written about it. Robert Morris Davis also wrote an excellent review on both volumes.

 

 

Everybody is telling me that I should try to write an autobiography. I will be 75 in December and if God helps me to live a few more years, I will try to put it all in this book. It will cover linguistics, anthroposophy, poetry, looking back on the past, longing for the future, as well as being appalled by the past and the future. I will try to give it all I can.   

 

Interviewer: Melinda Varga