Pécs Writers Program ::
22xPécs - Foreword
2010
All the authors who visited Pécs between 2007-2010 wrote a piece of diary about their stays. These texts were published at the end of 2010 in an anthology of more than 600 pages. The 22xPécs is an extraordinary document of the city in transition. The book includes all the original texts and their Hungarian translations.
My foreword:
Twenty-Two Pécs Months
It's good to be a writer in residence. He who denies this has either never been a writer in residence, or possibly never been a writer at all. Because to be able to leave behind one the hurly-burly of daily life and have nothing to do but write has a tremendous influence on one. This is what he has always dreamt of. I allow the “command” of limitless freedom can also have a paralysing effect: go on, my friend, now you can create!
Over the past decade and more, mainly in Austria, then Germany and in 2009 in Latvia I have had the occasion over and over again to experience what a difference it makes when instead of sitting in front of the machine in the late hours or stealing weekend time, you can write as if it were a job, or rather a vocation, when after the wash and the morning coffee you can put down what remains from the day before and what you have dreamed up in the night: you don't even have to dress; you can continue in your pyjamas, in nothing but a T-shirt and underpants.
And so I began to dream of a writing programme in Pécs that would entice writers here from the furthest corners of the continent. One that would be good for everyone. Interested individuals start by looking up Pécs on the map. They look forward to coming, they arrive, they are enchanted, familiarise themselves, become accustomed to and gain pleasure from the city, and then they go home, but in their hearts there will forever remain a piece of Pécs, and as it is customary these days to nicely embellish, they become ambassadors of the city and of the country, too. What could be more perfect marketing?
It was in around 2004 that I first sought out the great and the good of the city and Baranya county, who partly within a back-patting framework ensured their support according to the heat of their blood, saying what a splendid/great/bloody good idea it was, and then nothing happened. Whenever we ran into each other in the ensuing period, our fleeting dialogues would run thus: yes, yes, they hadn't forgotten, it was under control, but you know there are so many things... oh, yes, I knew.
Then when on 19 October, 2005, the government announced that Pécs had won the title of European Capital of Culture, 2010, I suspected that this was a never-to-be-repeated occasion for the matter of the writer in residence to be resurrected. And - unbelievable as it may seem - that is what happened.
The Writer in Residence Program was among the first to be accepted by the ECC machinery, and on a long-term basis. This had the advantage that the apartment serving as the project's base was provided by a private sponsor, an offer announced by the then City Mayor Péter Tasnádi, who thanked the gesture in a letter with a seal. The essence of the matter was that the apartment - situated in a brand-new housing park in the city centre - could be furnished immediately after it was gifted in July 2007, for through the mediation of Éva Karádi, the Hungarian Editor-in-Chief of Lettre International, we were awaiting our first guest that September, Florina Ilis.
My initial idea, you see, had been that each year we would invite a writer from each European Capital of Culture, which in 2007 were Sibiu and Luxembourg. As no-one was delegated from Sibiu the choice fell to Florina, who is from Cluj-Napoca, which happens to be Pécs's twinned city in Romania. (It has to be admitted that hardly a single writer has arrived from a ECC city. But recently the good news came that 15 applications have arrived from France alone!)
I worried, oh how I worried: would everything be ready inn time, could we provide the conditions for those arriving which I had experienced elsewhere? Luckily both Anita Bozóky and Andrea Kőhalmi, the directors of the House of Arts and Literature, the financial handler of the project, as well as Zsuzsanna Dallos who carried out the administration and payments, all took the writer in residence program to their hearts.
Because how interesting indeed it is when a distant writer “enters the picture”: we begin to correspond, come to an agreement, form a contract and make a formal invitation; we set a date that may be more than a year into the future. Meanwhile letters are exchanged, there are clarifications, questions arrive, requests and plaints. And then the day arrives and the individual turns up - so he or she really does exist, and we can enjoy the pleasure of meeting their acquaintance.
In the course of almost a year 22 writers have arrived in Pécs. How many times have I stood on the Pécs station platform, picking my person out with difficulty from the Budapest Intercity - sometimes ten minutes late, sometimes more than an hour. Then the journey to the house in Felsőmalom Street, the first chat in the car, each getting by as best they could, in good English, a little English, a little German, a lot of German, a little Russian, clumsy Italian, or in a hotch-potch of languages - this in itself ws an adventure! And then a tour of the apartment with its little tricks, an explanation of what they should know; further agreements on how and when they should pick up their grant.
And then the month in Pécs could begin, crossing each other's paths, taking lunch together, going to events, now and then a phone call, and “Károli” this and that has happened, could you help....
How could I not remember Esad Babačić's panicky call when he couldn't close the door because I'd forgotten to show him that the handle first had to be yanked upwards once; or of Ostap Nozhak, the Ukrainian from Czernowitz recommended by the representative of the Robert Bosch Foundation: at the age of twenty-five Pécs was his first trip abroad, which made him so enthusiastic he virtually learnt how to speak Hungarian in a month, and even sent a text message in Hungarian from the train; I listened disbelievingly to Ottó Tolnai as he related how he would sit for hours in front of the Baalbek painting in the Csontváry Gallery, each time looking only at a detail, but thoroughly; of Neslihan Acu, the authoress from Istanbul who, tasting a doner kebab from the Arab in Király Street merely shook her head and said she would teach them how it should be cooked; or the Greek Chrissopoulos who went jogging every morning, properly equipped with a stopwatch, and who partly got to know Pécs in this manner.
I could go on into the night with anecdotes like these.
Because this is just as if I were setting off on a journey in my own city, peeping into strange places through a visitor's eyes: sauntering the streets of Tartu through the tales of Mihkel Mutt, learning about a Dutch conservation area and the vicissitudes of the Dutch communists from Donald Niedekker, or laughing a lot with Milena Oda, who while she was here participated in the Pécs Film Review.
Not to mention the works. In the course of one February, the shortest month, the Luxembourgian Raoul Biltgen wrote a complete drama, finished another, corrected a novel and bashed together a few essays. In the same way the Estonian swore that he'd never written so much as when in Pécs, so much had its spirit affected him. Yet luckily this is not all about turning everyone into graphomaniacs, and success is not measured per character. Babačić hardly worked at all, spending most of the day soaking himself in the Szigetvár baths and mostly conversing about basketball and Canada. But then he sent a two-page text that was worth more than many a long novel.
For beyond their own creative work there was only one condition attached to the writers in residence, and that was to keep a Pécs Diary from which this anthology is compiled. Twenty-two works and twenty-two memories of Pécs: at the risk of punning, a mental monument of “Pécs pages”. Some are precise, sensitive constats, others an adventure packed into a short story, the few poems placid and floating. But in all events to read them produces a special feeling, for after all they are about us, a city in which we live, which we think we know, and time and time again are amazed to discover that we do not. That's the most special thing of all!
Károly Méhes
writer, curator
My foreword:
Twenty-Two Pécs Months
It's good to be a writer in residence. He who denies this has either never been a writer in residence, or possibly never been a writer at all. Because to be able to leave behind one the hurly-burly of daily life and have nothing to do but write has a tremendous influence on one. This is what he has always dreamt of. I allow the “command” of limitless freedom can also have a paralysing effect: go on, my friend, now you can create!
Over the past decade and more, mainly in Austria, then Germany and in 2009 in Latvia I have had the occasion over and over again to experience what a difference it makes when instead of sitting in front of the machine in the late hours or stealing weekend time, you can write as if it were a job, or rather a vocation, when after the wash and the morning coffee you can put down what remains from the day before and what you have dreamed up in the night: you don't even have to dress; you can continue in your pyjamas, in nothing but a T-shirt and underpants.
And so I began to dream of a writing programme in Pécs that would entice writers here from the furthest corners of the continent. One that would be good for everyone. Interested individuals start by looking up Pécs on the map. They look forward to coming, they arrive, they are enchanted, familiarise themselves, become accustomed to and gain pleasure from the city, and then they go home, but in their hearts there will forever remain a piece of Pécs, and as it is customary these days to nicely embellish, they become ambassadors of the city and of the country, too. What could be more perfect marketing?
It was in around 2004 that I first sought out the great and the good of the city and Baranya county, who partly within a back-patting framework ensured their support according to the heat of their blood, saying what a splendid/great/bloody good idea it was, and then nothing happened. Whenever we ran into each other in the ensuing period, our fleeting dialogues would run thus: yes, yes, they hadn't forgotten, it was under control, but you know there are so many things... oh, yes, I knew.
Then when on 19 October, 2005, the government announced that Pécs had won the title of European Capital of Culture, 2010, I suspected that this was a never-to-be-repeated occasion for the matter of the writer in residence to be resurrected. And - unbelievable as it may seem - that is what happened.
The Writer in Residence Program was among the first to be accepted by the ECC machinery, and on a long-term basis. This had the advantage that the apartment serving as the project's base was provided by a private sponsor, an offer announced by the then City Mayor Péter Tasnádi, who thanked the gesture in a letter with a seal. The essence of the matter was that the apartment - situated in a brand-new housing park in the city centre - could be furnished immediately after it was gifted in July 2007, for through the mediation of Éva Karádi, the Hungarian Editor-in-Chief of Lettre International, we were awaiting our first guest that September, Florina Ilis.
My initial idea, you see, had been that each year we would invite a writer from each European Capital of Culture, which in 2007 were Sibiu and Luxembourg. As no-one was delegated from Sibiu the choice fell to Florina, who is from Cluj-Napoca, which happens to be Pécs's twinned city in Romania. (It has to be admitted that hardly a single writer has arrived from a ECC city. But recently the good news came that 15 applications have arrived from France alone!)
I worried, oh how I worried: would everything be ready inn time, could we provide the conditions for those arriving which I had experienced elsewhere? Luckily both Anita Bozóky and Andrea Kőhalmi, the directors of the House of Arts and Literature, the financial handler of the project, as well as Zsuzsanna Dallos who carried out the administration and payments, all took the writer in residence program to their hearts.
Because how interesting indeed it is when a distant writer “enters the picture”: we begin to correspond, come to an agreement, form a contract and make a formal invitation; we set a date that may be more than a year into the future. Meanwhile letters are exchanged, there are clarifications, questions arrive, requests and plaints. And then the day arrives and the individual turns up - so he or she really does exist, and we can enjoy the pleasure of meeting their acquaintance.
In the course of almost a year 22 writers have arrived in Pécs. How many times have I stood on the Pécs station platform, picking my person out with difficulty from the Budapest Intercity - sometimes ten minutes late, sometimes more than an hour. Then the journey to the house in Felsőmalom Street, the first chat in the car, each getting by as best they could, in good English, a little English, a little German, a lot of German, a little Russian, clumsy Italian, or in a hotch-potch of languages - this in itself ws an adventure! And then a tour of the apartment with its little tricks, an explanation of what they should know; further agreements on how and when they should pick up their grant.
And then the month in Pécs could begin, crossing each other's paths, taking lunch together, going to events, now and then a phone call, and “Károli” this and that has happened, could you help....
How could I not remember Esad Babačić's panicky call when he couldn't close the door because I'd forgotten to show him that the handle first had to be yanked upwards once; or of Ostap Nozhak, the Ukrainian from Czernowitz recommended by the representative of the Robert Bosch Foundation: at the age of twenty-five Pécs was his first trip abroad, which made him so enthusiastic he virtually learnt how to speak Hungarian in a month, and even sent a text message in Hungarian from the train; I listened disbelievingly to Ottó Tolnai as he related how he would sit for hours in front of the Baalbek painting in the Csontváry Gallery, each time looking only at a detail, but thoroughly; of Neslihan Acu, the authoress from Istanbul who, tasting a doner kebab from the Arab in Király Street merely shook her head and said she would teach them how it should be cooked; or the Greek Chrissopoulos who went jogging every morning, properly equipped with a stopwatch, and who partly got to know Pécs in this manner.
I could go on into the night with anecdotes like these.
Because this is just as if I were setting off on a journey in my own city, peeping into strange places through a visitor's eyes: sauntering the streets of Tartu through the tales of Mihkel Mutt, learning about a Dutch conservation area and the vicissitudes of the Dutch communists from Donald Niedekker, or laughing a lot with Milena Oda, who while she was here participated in the Pécs Film Review.
Not to mention the works. In the course of one February, the shortest month, the Luxembourgian Raoul Biltgen wrote a complete drama, finished another, corrected a novel and bashed together a few essays. In the same way the Estonian swore that he'd never written so much as when in Pécs, so much had its spirit affected him. Yet luckily this is not all about turning everyone into graphomaniacs, and success is not measured per character. Babačić hardly worked at all, spending most of the day soaking himself in the Szigetvár baths and mostly conversing about basketball and Canada. But then he sent a two-page text that was worth more than many a long novel.
For beyond their own creative work there was only one condition attached to the writers in residence, and that was to keep a Pécs Diary from which this anthology is compiled. Twenty-two works and twenty-two memories of Pécs: at the risk of punning, a mental monument of “Pécs pages”. Some are precise, sensitive constats, others an adventure packed into a short story, the few poems placid and floating. But in all events to read them produces a special feeling, for after all they are about us, a city in which we live, which we think we know, and time and time again are amazed to discover that we do not. That's the most special thing of all!
Károly Méhes
writer, curator
