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(still from what I was all typing in the sun, yesterday)
The day after they were all herded off on an excursion, but I caught up with them Saturday afternoon when Jowi was signing her books at the Book Festival. In a convention centre somewhere in Buda - man! - a thing you'd never see in Holland I dont think, a huge, bustling place, three floors of stands of all publishing houses, signings and readings everywhere, the place crawling with visitors, bottlenecks of people, such attention!
I found a beautiful, three-part atlas about Hungarian election results from 1920 to 1996, that I'd read about on Internet, and that at the festival was sold at half price, 25 euros. The debut writers were goofing around, not much of a line for their signing, we played soccer outside. And then there was the weirdest literary presentation I've ever seen, it deserves a paragraph of its own - but first, another Hitchhikers' guide-degree coincidence. I saw an acquaintance sitting in the hall, a friend of a friend of mine, met him out drinking coupla times. He's a teacher of literature but I've never heard him say anything about either teaching or literature; he is dive bars, drinking and strong stories. He called me over, and well - there was this festival publication with fragments from each debut writer in Hungarian and English translation - and he had done the translation of my friend Jowi's fragment, from the Hungarian translation into an English one!
Small world..
OK, so now all the debutants had been commandeered into a collective presentation, two round of seven writers each. It was
bizarre. They'd hired an actor and actress to recite a fragment from each novel in Hungarian translation - with suitable pathos or animation. The presentation started with a flutist - a flamboyant woman with an expanse of blonde-dyed hair and a deeply cut dress, who delivered a bafflingly over-the-top bit of kitsch, and then played for a minute after every second reading or so. I joked to homeboy, oh god, the only thing worse would be if she started playing, like, in the background to the actor reading or something, and that was a mistake because of course, thats what she did next.
The authors were by now in a visible state of shock on the platform, and their quandary was not lessened by the moderator, an equally flamboyant would-be Hungarian Letterman, whose jovial introductions became the bluntest tools through his hapless English. With much pretenseful gesturing, he would turn to a writer and say: "So - your book - I loved your book, I have to say. I think - I would say - the title! Protection. I think - this one word - it says everything about your book, doesn't it? It sort of ... summarizes what it is about! Is that right??" Uhm, yes... I mean, it
is the friggin' title.. (she didn't actually say that). "You are from ... <looks> ... Spain! Is that correct?" Uhm, yeah. "You are not just a writer - you are - a biologist as well! Butterflies, you study butterflies. Have you - what I wanted to ask - did you see any butterflies in Budapest?" Eh, yes, I saw one.. "Inside or outside?" Err, outside. "Hungarian butterflies - are they different from Italian ones?!" And so on, and so forth - about three of such inane questions per writer, "Your book! Is it ... about yourself?", "How does it end?". He took the biscuit when, with one writer, he said, your book begins with, a man, who - insert lengthy recounting ending in a question mark; at which, the writer, drily: eh no, thats how it
ends actually.. it's literally on the last page. "And now we are going to listen to a fragment of your work!" Cue flutist.
Hahahaha! Absolutely the weirdest bit of dog-and-pony show I ever saw! The writers turned rebelliously flippant, regressed into monosyllabic answers or, nonplussed, tried to accomodate. My translator friend and I speculated that it was all a plot to strengthen the notion, so beloved among Hungarians, of their being a special, different-than-everyone-else, magically-weird nation; here, they had 14 multipliers who would
guaranteed go home and write more about just how weird those strange Hungarians were. ;-)
And so on. I introduced Jowi to her translator, and there was a friend of his, and a Hungarian woman who taught Dutch at the other university, and we herded the group of writers into taxis downtown. I was in the one with the writer who studied butterflies, we talked about Tirana and Edi Rama, because one of the seven languages she spoke was Albanian; she'd been there many times, from 1991 on, even lived there - to study butterflies! The woman from the university was funny too, probably going to go round to one of her classes some time, talk with the students.
Next was a reception at the Austrian Cultural Forum on the stately Andrassy Boulevard. A scruffy, dilapitated courtyard building, hid, inside, a splendour of classical elegance. A huge painting of Sissi, beautiful parquet floors, small orange and lemon trees in the bay window, waiters walking round with platters of food and wine, champagne. For the first time my acquaintance talked at length about teaching, the character of Hungarian students and the historical background of mentality. There was also a Latvian girl poet/novelist/sculptor/libretto-writer who looked like a cloud, softly cut layers of skirt, coat, scarf, and who seemed painfully shy, functioning only in symbiotic union with her friend who had come along to Hungary as her translator, an almost Swedish, bold, girl. But her shyness turned out to be language-related, she didnt speak English, hardly German, but I saw her looking up keenly, smiling almost mischievously, and when I tried talking with her directly she opened up in eager charm. So I ended desperately trying to retrieve five, ten words in Russian - not having said a word in Russian in ten years - but when ten came, another ten came - and although that was pretty much it (;-)), it was fun, she was charming.
Jowi had fallen completely in love with a small group of her fellow-writers during the excursion, they were talking about meeting again in ten years' time exactly, an anthology, one guy hugging another and saying, now, when I come back home, I wont feel so alone anymore, and others chiming in, "exactly! yes!", while sharing a stolen bottle of wine around on a bench in between the now-closing tourist terraces of Liszt Ferenc Ter. About that time I retreated, not part of their magical finding of each other, but endeared by it, hugged Jowi, went home. Thought that would be it but she sent a text this morning asking, "coffee?", so i found her back downtown, like a good tourist guide took her to Gerbeaud, and talked some more about - psychology, one's way in life, things I normally, nowadays, if anything, shirk way back from (tell me a good joke or anecdote instead) - but it was cool.
Yeah, pretty cool, all in all! She's off in a cab to the airport, I've walked down the Danube embankment in the sun taking photos, and now I've been sitting on this terrace under this huge tree overlooking a road and Gellert Hill - Erzsebet-hid Eszpresszo, plastic chairs, plastic tables with green cloth, lots of Hungarians drinking beer and water - and typing. But I gotta go home in a sec, Cs will be over, we're going for dinner in some fancy restaurant, got a voucher.
So - summer and life can be pretty cool - thats all really - in between lonely evenings, weekend days like this, I'll sign up for plenty more thank you very much
Musta been a dozen too many people drunkenly trying to walk straight through it, or fumbling trying to pull it open. 
