Poet
   Writer
Dramatist
TV interview - Rhetorics, the epic
Csaba Hegedűs

                             HEGEDŰS CSABA interviewed on MTV (Television Hungary)

INTERVIWER: Our next discussion won’t have an introductiory movie, I may as well say in medias res!, into the middle of things, since the young gentleman sitting in front of me, has just written not long ago an epic made of one thousand stansas in hexameter. Its commentadory says, that this is naturally not an easy reading and rather expects its readers to enchance their intellectual processes while reading it. What is the stimulus, why does a young man nowadays write an epic, especially in hexameter?
H.CS: This is the most suitable genre to describe and characterise society, and I had in mind the uniquity of this genre, because it offers more than the novel, for example it combines prose, lyre and drama, so this is why I used it for this goal.
INT: I’ve heard that you are majoring in English & German at the university, and that you love lietrature so much that you have written not only this epic, but other works as well.
H.CS.: Yes, I have numerous works, concerning lyre I have more than 250 poems, but talking about prose I tried out short stories, dramas and shorter novels.
INT: This epic, as you have mentioned, has to operate with very strict rules, what are its characteristics?, either of this epic or epics in general.
H.CS.: Yes, I relied on antique traditions, for example we have Odyssee, its metricality, hexameter, is the same like my epic’s. But I’ve also kept all the epical rhetoric tools, if we think about for example enumeration or invocation.
INT: At least we can remember on the constant epical attributes from school, does this epic have those?, could you mention some of them?
H.CS.: For example fox Hugonnai, which is the constant attribute of Vilma Hugonnai, on the one hand because of her red hair, and on the other becauses she is very smart.
INT: What is the most important to know about the story of this epic? Well, :) Who already had it in his hands knows it, because there is a short description in the book’s end.
H.CS.: Opposing its classical form and expectations it is very modern. Thes story is shortly the following: on a fictional planet two city states, so called polises fight each other and they have opposite politics. The work itself is divided into chapters and episodes, and while the chapters show us Atlas the protagonist, the episodes involve characters connected to him.
INT: So it is a very modern, almost sci-fi genre forced into classical frames.
H.CS: Yes, I’ve tried to elevate sci-fi into high literature.
INT: Could you help me by reading a small section to emphasize the hexameter?
H.CS.: Let’s see the first stanza ***
INT: Maybe not in this verse, but in other ones, as the author himself has told, had Hungarian language to be ,,raped”, what does this mean? : )
H.CS.: Yes, I often had to omit vowels, especially vowels easing pronunciation, from the near end of the words, for example before plural marking or before object marking. But occasionally, when I’ve put foreign words into the epic, they couldn’t have been placed correctly in their original forms, so I’ve modified them because of the hexameter, however, there are a lot of explanation next to the stanzas, so in a way I’ve created a critical version of this work.
INT: About how much time did it take to write it, and which level of precision did it require to make these hexameters, the rulebound change of short and long syllables? How much self discipline was necessary?
H.CS.: It took me two summers, 2005-2006, being at the age of 19-20. I have written about 12-18 stanzas daily, which took 4-8 hours.
INT: How was it received?, did someone controll it?, there was surely needed a patron-
H.CS.: I have shown it to my teachers at the university, from whom Dr Szőnyi György Endre helped me the most, but the other teachers have supported me as well in pointing out what I should keep or modify in the epic.
INT: One more question Csaba, as a German-English student, do you intend to translate it?
H.CS.: I might translate it sometime : )
INT: That would be as difficult as well : )
H.CS.: Yes, that would be much harder, because this task needs a man with a German/ English origin, but who knows Hungarian also very well.
INT: I thank you for being here and I wish you good luck with your further works!
H.CS.: Thank you!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDaAiDhqBZY

I have in plan to translate a few stanzas from the Rhetorics into English as soon as possible, please be patient, thank you!