 |
The volume, which is the first modern translation of Ballasi's life works in Russian as well as in any of the world's major languages, was unveiled at Moscow's Rudomino Foreign Languages Library on April 10, Poets' Day. Before the presentation of the book, guests laid wreathes at a statue of Attila József, another famous Hungarian poet, in the library's Park of World Cultures. The statue was erected as part of the recent Hungarian Cultural Season in Russia.
On April 11, the Hungarian Cultural, Scientific and Information Centre in Moscow will host an international conference on Balassi and the Renaissance. The conference, which serves as an introduction to next year's Renaissance Year, will be opened by Professor Marie-Lucie Demonet, director of the Renaissance Institute in Tours, and Iván Horváth, faculty head at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Other speakers will include József Jankovics, deputy director of the Hungarian Academy of Science's Literary Studies Institute, and his Hungarian colleague, the literary historian Géza Szentmártoni Szabó. The conference will focus on three main topics: Renaissance culture from the codex to the internet, the union of poetry and song in Renaissance literature and the problem of making modern translations of Renaissance works. A number of well known Russian translators will participate at a forum on the last topic. Among them will be Yuri Gusev, who translated the Balassi volume, as well as Balassi's Italian translator Armando Nuzzo.
On April 12, the Nizhniy Novgorod Library will celebrate a Balassi Evening. The library held a number of priceless old volumes - among them works by Balassi - taken from the Sárospatak Reformed College library in Hungary during World War II. The books were returned to Hungary in the spring of 2006, some personally by President Vladimir Putin.
Yekaterina Geniyeva, director of the Rudomino Library, called the return of the books to Hungary a model for Russian-European cultural cooperation.
