The latest Prae issue is timed to coincide with the anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Hungary and Japan, said Prae editor Dániel Levente Pál.
The teacher Judit Vihar has contributed a piece on haiku to the issue. In the study, she traces the roots of well-known form of Japanese poetry to a form that contained 31 syllables, in metrical phrases of 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables. Later poets started to write "chain verses", with each different contributor writing either three or two phrases. The three-phrase part of these poems became haiku, or three metrical phrases of 5, 7 and 5 syllables.
"Classical haiku was always about nature, tied to the seasons. Modern haiku...can be about anything that we want to hear," says Vihar. The form has been practised by some of Hungary's greatest poets too, among them Sándor Weöres, she adds.
The literary translator György Erdös has written a piece entitled Japanese Literature in Hungary from 1990 for the issue.
It was no easy task to bring Japanese literature to Hungary in the 90 because the image of the country's literary output was obscured by "a terrible dark shadow": manga and anime, according to Erdös. Since 1990, just 108 works of Japanese literature have been published in Hungarian translation.
Ildikó Farkas has collected memoirs of Hungarians who travelled to Hungary around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries for the issue. Emiko Kume has written a piece called Hungarian Literature in Japan.
Photo: Dániel Kováts
