Untranslated Parent-Child Relationships

A young teacher in Republican Turkey discovers her father; Hungary's first social novel

Dear reader,

I’ve decided to utilize this infrequent Substack newsletter to promote some untranslated books I love. Covid-era restrictions sent me away from the archives and deeper into the library. The library includes mountains of fictional works that were never translated yet deserve our acknowledgment. Here is a first batch, focusing on parents and children.

András Fáy, A Bélteky-ház (‘The House of Bélteky’), 1832.

András Fáy was born to a well-to-do noble family and contributed quite a few influential books to the canon of Hungarian literature. He composed poetry, fables (that appeared in English translation in 1877), satire, and political stories, leaving 8 volumes of collected works behind.

A Bélteky-ház qualifies as Hungary’s first social novel or novel of manners. As the genre dictates, much of the book is dedicated to various sub-plots. It is sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees. But it is possible: Mátyás and Gyula Bélteky — a father and his son — stand in the center. The father is provincial who prefers to hunt and drink than to take care of his estates. A nobleman by birth, he fails to understand the importance of education. His son does. A love story left unrealized ignites an interest in learning, both for personal improvement and for the sake of his nation. The subplots feature various useless Hungarian men of the older generation, who can only become aware of social faults but never advance towards their solution.

While Fáy is not without some sympathy for these older nobles, his portrayal of the younger idealists is totally exaggerated. But the novel is long, and we do not really care: this novel can be read again and again for it holds so much. When read only for character descriptions, a panoramic view of Hungarian society through the eyes of a reform-minded author opens up before the reader. Ignoring the plot entirely, long digressions into anything and everything between the state of education and imprisonment to techniques of road-building and farming.

Contemporary critics were often less convinced than I was. I can understand them. They were born into the same world about which Fáy was writing at such length, stuffing into one volume a mishmash of various writing barely held together by its binding. Readers who were not critics read it voraciously. Perhaps for the same reason: Instead of leafing through nonfiction books and short stories, keeping up to date with the reform-minded authors of their time, Fáy gave them all in one, 727-page volume.

The cost they paid was in characterization, but this is perhaps all too common in this period of Hungarian literature. No need to dwell on the barely-existing women. Instead of characters, this novel has archetypes that the reader could immediately recognize. It was perhaps part of the fun: once recognized, they are drawn well enough to entertain, balancing between satire and measured empathy.

The novel’s second paragraph, for your enjoyment:

Közel a temetőhöz vitt el útja s betért búcsuját venni anyja sírjától. Nyugvó csendben szunnyadt körülte az élet, faluban és mezőben, ellenetben zajgó keblével. Egymást váltogató érzésekkel borult a sír harmatos hantjára s eltökélve költ fel arról: tisztán tartani meg szívét az élet zajlásaiban, miként hajdan jó anyja oktatgatta volt őt. Mulandóság sejtelme soha sem szál meg bennünket búsabban, mint midőn elhunyt kedveseink sírjait látogatjuk. Velek töltött örömeink lelkünk eleibe omlanak s elszorítják ezt azon eszméltetéssel, hogy ők s ezen örömek nincsenek többé! Azon szellő, mely sírjaik bogácsai közt susog, bús sejtést lenget reánk!

“He took the way leading to the cemetery and came to bid his farewell from his mother's grave. Life rested in a calm silence around him, in the village as well as the field, yet his bosom surged in opposition. He fell over the dewy grass that covered the grave with conflicting feelings and spoke with determination about keeping his heart clear throughout his life, as his good mother had once taught him. The mystery of transience never saddens us more than when we visit the graves of our deceased loved ones. The joys in which they partook now reach the forefront of our souls, squeezing it out with the realization that both they and the joys are no more! The breeze that rustles in the groves of their graves but adds a sad conjecture.”

Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Acımak (‘To Pity’), 1928.

Reşat Nuri Güntekin's only translated work was Çalıkuşu (‘The Wren’), which Sir Wyndham Deedes partially translated to English in 1949 as The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl. It is rather clear why that novel captured the hearts of readers in translation: Feride, its childish yet charming protagonist, is suddenly thrown from her position of privilege into the fraught world of the late Ottoman Empire and its collapse.

Zehra, the protagonist of Acımak, is a harsh teacher. She is the lead teacher of a new, Republican school; she feels no pity. Her success as a teacher is not conditioned on her cold-heartedness. That’s just who she is: a successful yet pitiless teacher who is called one day to return home at once. Her father is dying and asks to see her. She declines.

She has rejected her father since middle school. He is to blame, she believes, for her family’s catastrophes and thus does not deserve to have his death attended by the daughter he had bitterly disappointed. I couldn’t help but think about Jale Parla’s incisive remark about the marital contrast in the Tanzimat-era novel. Parla shows how writers (though at least a generation before Güntekin) paralleled the marital couple with Turkey's position between east and west: the man was Asia and his wife was Europe. Zehra is clearly a modern, independent woman.

She has reaped every possible reward, being appointed headteacher by the age of 25 and winning everyone’s respect. The school’s inspector, Tevfik Bey, finds her pitilessness, though, as her ultimate fault: "Bir insan için zaaftan mahrumiyet de büyük bir zaaf değil midir? Hatta zaafların en büyüğü..." ("Being deprived of weaknesses is also a weakness, isn’t it? Perhaps even the biggest weakness…"“)

Her father, seen through Zehra’s eyes, is definitely the Ottoman Empire as “Asia”. Just like the Tanzimat's limited attempts at reform, Mürşit Efendi is a weak and vulnerable character. Whatever bold steps he had planned to take as a young adult, he remains incapable of seeing them through. He is even worse than the empire as criticized by late imperial writers, for the empire kept getting embroiled in reform movements that spiraled it into collapse. Mürşit Efendi becomes an alcoholic.

So Zehra does not want to go see him. “Mürşit Efendi üzerimde babalık hakkını kaybetmiş bir... Bir biçaredir...” (“Mürşit Efendi is a miser… a miser who lost his parental rights over me…”) The novel really starts when she gives up, shows up too late (he died saying “Zehra… Zehra…”) and starts reading his diary. She, of course, changes her mind.

Even though the moralistic message seems to hover too heavy from this short summary of the plot — the merciless teacher who rediscovers her father and the anthropomorphic analogy between these father-daughter relations and the republican rejection of its Ottoman heritage — the narration is incredibly moving. Reşat Nuri Güntekin is anything but a cheap and didactic storyteller, and his novels are well worth a read. A preface for a translation, which I’d be happy to write, must avoid the moralistic traps to do justice for this novel.