Last night I wanted to be Hungarian. When Péter Esterházy took the podium at Town Hall for PEN World Voices “Public Lives/Private Lives” along side fellow literary giants Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, A.B. Yehoshua, Carol Bracho, Rian Malan, Evelyn Schlag, Ian McEwan, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie, he began by saying, “I don’t speak English, I speak Hungarian. You speak English, you don’t speak Hungarian. This is the problem.” Then he carefully removed his reading glasses from his pocket, and put them on, telling us, “I see either you or the text. This is the problem.” I laughed, my own reading glasses perched on the tip of my nose as I took notes in the semi-dark.
Hungarian (or Magyar, the Hungarian name for... |
