{"id":254316,"date":"2007-08-13T18:20:50","date_gmt":"2007-08-13T18:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2007\/08\/13\/peter-esterhazy-at-the-lucerne-festival\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:38:51","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:38:51","slug":"peter-esterhazy-at-the-lucerne-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2007\/08\/13\/peter-esterhazy-at-the-lucerne-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Esterhazy at the Lucerne Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lucerne Festival<\/a> started over the weekend, and Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy gave the opening speech<\/a>. (Warning—link is to a pdf document.)<\/p>\n

Like Esterhazy’s books, the speech is playful and intelligent, and engaged with ideas of History. Here’s a sample of an interesting bit from the end:<\/p>\n

\n

Europe is the land of variety \u2013 of various people, various languages, various traditions. Today\u2019s individual sees a lot of the world, and when he does, he sees that his domestic customs, habits, ideals and myths are not necessarily superior to the others. As Henry James said, a person turns into a citizen of the world when all manner of customs appear equally shallow in his eyes. On the other hand, a tourist \u2013 and most of us are tourists \u2013 is not suited for getting to know things; a tourist is a man wedded to superficiality; a tourist sees only clich\u00e9s: the Italians are loud and eat cats, the French are arrogant and eat snails, the Germans are fat and eat cabbage, and the Hungarians\u2026 but let\u2019s not go into that, plus they eat guly\u00e1s. As for the Swiss, they don\u2019t even exist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The one thing that definitely exists is fiction. Only the implausible is real. A novel, words. A world made up of words says more about ourselves and others than all the accurate information gathered by a conscientious tourist. The real accuracy is the novel\u2019s accuracy; it is knowledge that can be put to good use, the knowledge of the Dutch horsts and the knowledge of the Swiss plains. Writing a Hungarian novel about these things this could be the so-called Lucerne Plan, to look at the world with this lack of constraint, this freedom, and with this constraint and boundary. \u2013 with this beautiful European complexity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lucerne Festival started over the weekend, and Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy gave the opening speech. (Warning—link is to a pdf document.) Like Esterhazy’s books, the speech is playful and intelligent, and engaged with ideas of History. Here’s a sample of an interesting bit from the end: Europe is the land of variety \u2013 of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,3996,4006,3986],"class_list":["post-254316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-hungarian-literature","tag-lucerne-festival","tag-peter-esterhazy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363446,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254316\/revisions\/363446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}