Murnane - Hungarian Review

The Angel’s Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life

Gerald Murnane

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.

Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.

The first such persons that I was aware of were the Catholic priests who celebrated the mass and other services in the churches that I attended in the 1940s. As a child, I considered the Latin spoken by the priest to be the verbal equivalent of the vestments that he wore. I have always been much taken by rich fabrics and by colours, emblems, and motifs. Long before I understood a word of Latin, I responded to the sounds of its syllables as to so many arrangements of white lambs or red blood-drops or gold sunbursts on silk chasubles of the so-called liturgical colours. I had the usual child’s image of the deity as an old man of stern appearance, and I could never imagine either of us feeling warmly towards, let alone loving, the other, but I was moved by the ceremonies that I supposed he himself had prescribed for his worshippers, and I was not at all surprised that he had to be addressed on solemn occasions in a language known only to his priests.

I was only seven when I resolved to learn the sonorous Latin language. I found in my father’s missal pages with parallel Latin and English texts. I imagined I could learn the language simply by finding which word in the Latin text was the equivalent of one or another word in the English text and so accumulating a Latin vocabulary to be drawn on as required. I was brought up short when I found that the Latin for God might be Deum, Deus, Dei, or Deo. This and other problems made Latin seem to me perverse and arbitrary by comparison with my native English but only increased my desire eventually to master Latin. In the meanwhile, I derived unexpected pleasures from hearing or, more often, mishearing the language.

Nem a való hát: annak égi mása
Lesz, amitől függ az ének varázsa... 

The song itself is not what matters most; it has a heavenly other
from which the magic descends.

JÁNOS ARANY (1817–82)

  

Nem a való hát: annak égi mássa
Lesz, amitől függ az ének varázsa...

The song itself is not what matters most; it has a heavenly other
from which the magic descends.

JÁNOS ARANY (1817–82)

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it...link