Vyhľadávanie
Miroslav Demák: During your last two visits to Bratislava, you were awarded the Hviezdoslav prize for translation and you introduced your book Zápas o identitu (Struggle for Identity). Your work with literary criticism and theory is relatively well-known in Slovakia. Less known, however, is your translation work, which has been prolific in recent years, and which resulted in the Hviezdoslav Prize you received. You are the first Slovak expatriate that has been awarded this prize. How do you feel about that?
Michal Harpáň: I consider my translation activities part of my overall work. I am not a literary critic today and a translator tomorrow. In the 60s, when I decided to focus on Slovak literature in the environment I was born and I grew up in, it meant that translation of Slovak literature into Serb language became part of my profession. I began to translate immediately, even as a student in the 60s. Maybe I could have done more, but I was not working only as a translator. My main occupation was as a university instructor, and at that time it demanded being active in other spheres closely related to Slovak literature (criticism, theory, comparison). When I translated, I always tried to chose works that stirred interest in Yugoslavia. Obviously, I see the Hviezdoslav Prize not only as great praise, but as an obligation as well.
MD: Let’s return ‘ad fontes’ to your roots. You studied Yugoslavian literature in Novy Sad and did post-graduate work in Belgrade, where you defended your master’s dissertation. You were very active in literature even as a student, but more so in the Serb environment – in the late 60s you worked as a reporter at the very popular literature magazine Polja, based in Novy Sad. Since you live in Novy Sad, contacts with the Serb environment are completely natural for you. You also keep contact with Belgrade, according to books published there. How then did you come to publishing works of Slovak literature in Yugoslavia, where a majority of people live in poverty?
Michal Harpáň: Yes, I studied Yugoslavian literature at the Philosophical Faculty in Novy Sad and there, in that town, where I live today, were also the beginnings of my literary activity. During that time, Novy Sad was a town and cultural centre of young people. The faculty I went to was also young (founded in 1954) and one felt youth everywhere – in the huge amount of magazines and newspapers in all languages, and on public stages – and I spontaneously joined that lively cultural air. I started to write literary criticism in the Serb language (at that time: Serbia-Croatian) but I quickly moved to Slovak literature. On the one hand, for me, as a Slovak, this shift was demanded by a personal interest in a multicultural environment, and on the other hand, out of an inner need to systematically get familiar with Slovak literature. Interest about other cultures not only in Novy Sad but also in Belgrade always existed and has not been extinguished even in the last decade of general crisis. Thanks to that, translations, including translations from the Slovak, are still being done today.
MD: Compared with average salaries, prices of books in Yugoslavia are high. At the Belgrade book fair (where books are sold at a 20 or even 50 % discount), I noticed that Vilikovský’s book Krutý Strojvodca (The Cruel Engine Driver) cost around 13 % of the average salary (in Slovakia it would be around 1,000 Sk). According to my knowledge, there is a demand for such books. How is that possible?
Michal Harpáň: I have checked in one book store for copies of Pavel Vilikovský’s Krutý strojvodca, which I translated into Serbian for the renowned Belgrade publisher Stubovi kulture. One copy costs 225 dinars, which is around 150 Sk. For sure, 225 dinars is far more for a Yugoslavian citizen than 150 Sk for a Slovak citizen (not to mention citizens of western countries). I am not going to check your counting, but books in Yugoslavia are being bought at almost the same rate as in Slovakia: there is not any extra demand. Obviously, sociological researches would have to be more exact to come to more reliable conclusions about the role of literature and books in times, as you say, when more than half of Yugoslavia citizens live in poverty.
MD: The situation in Belgrade was at centre of the whole world’s attention in late September and early October. We are, however, more interested in the situation of literary life. Concerning your more than 30 years of experience with Serb culture, how do you view today’s situation and its future development?
Michal Harpáň: We witnessed during the last decade, Serb literature, together with the country’s regime, was demonised. In my opinion it was unjustified. When some of society decided to promote nationalism and the regime, that did not mean that all of Serb culture and literature followed. Serb literature, even during socialism, was a vanguard and idol for other Eastern Bloc countries. Not even in the recent crises period were the specific and non-traditional features of Serb literature suppressed. However, it is difficult to predict any development in Yugoslavian literature. I do not believe that any collective guilt, either national or literary, exists, and that means that collective penance does not exist either. It is completely an individual issue, in the first as well as the second case. But I firmly hope, and do not want to be disappointed, that better conditions will appear for creative activities in the future, conditions which were cruelly taken from young people in the past. A lack of young people, who are now scattered all around the world, is apparent here at every step.
MD: You were the first who to start writing about the ‘three contexts’ of Slovak literature in Yugoslavia. Now, you apply this method practically to all of Slovak lower-land literature. Maybe it is best if you present your theory yourself. How did it start, specifically in your case?
Michal Harpáň: It came spontaneously. Every minority citizen is, more or less, ‘three contexted’, no matter whether he realises it or not. I work with Slovak literature, and live in a Slovak minority environment in Yugoslavia, so it was natural for me to focus my research on the literary work of Slovaks living in Yugoslavia. I have written many times about the developing ‘three-contexting’ of Slovak literature. Briefly it can be defined as the overlap of the mother literary context with the literary context of the social environment or state, which is then formed into a specific, minority literary context. The Slovak lower-land literature context is superior to this minority context, since Slovak enclaves in Hungary and Romania have the same ethnic, historical and cultural basis as the Slovak enclave in Yugoslavia. You say that I am the best presenter of my own theory. That means that I am at home in literature happening in Slovakia, in Yugoslavia, and in literary events in enclaves of Slovaks living in the former Lower land, which is not only ‘former’ because it is strongly embedded in the historical mind of Slovak citizens living in the Panonian area.
MD: You are head of the Slovak Language and Literature Institute, one of the few institutions outside Slovakia where the Slovak language is taught as a mother tongue. You started to teach there in 1969. In addition, you teach Slovak literature at the Philological Faculty in Belgrade, and before the bombing you taught at the Pedagogic University in Seged. What are your plans for the future?
Michal Harpáň: My permanent job is at the Slovak Language and Literature Institute of the Philosophical Faculty at Novy Sad. For more than ten years, I have given lectures on Slovak literature at the Philological Faculty in Belgrade (where Slovak is taught as a mother tongue) and two years ago I started to teach theory of literature and Slovak literature at the Teachers’ Faculty based in Sombor, which has a subsidiary department in Báčsky Petrovec. This number of lecturing responsibilities is enormous, but I do not consider it a burden since it is my main occupation. At the same time, I realise that I will never have enough time to accomplish everything I would like to do, and so I try to use my time economically.
MD: Slovak scholars remember you as the author of Theory of Literature. It was the first college companion written after World War II. Recently your book of studies Struggle for Identity was published. The first book was the result of your teaching activities. The second is marked by your active efforts (you are the editor-in-chief of Lowerland Slovak magazine) in concert with Yugoslavian, Romanian and Hungarian writers, to become a member of a unified corpus of Slovak culture.
Michal Harpáň: To write and publish a book under the title Theory of Literature was a matter of courage. It was first published in Novy Sad in 1986 and its second edition was published in Bratislava in 1994. Why a matter of courage? In a field such as literary theory, nothing can be dragged to the very end; there is always the danger of incompleteness. During several years of lecturing, however, I have monitored the level of understanding among students, and I found certain borders of theory interpretation. And the reason there was not such a book written in Slovakia can also be considered a matter of courage. I do not intend to talk about these reasons, since I am sure that a similar book could have been written by at least twenty of my colleagues from Slovakia. My book is based on Slovak literary science, the science I have always highly appreciated and which I have tried to advocate in my translations into the Serb language. On the other side, the book Struggle for Identity is a testimony to my interests in the 90s, only mine. (I am not afraid to say they are also the interests and efforts of a large number of the Slovak Lowerland literature writers.) A significant portion of the texts in this book written in the 90s stresses its unique, emotional character, which can be seen, I think, in vivid emotional amplitudes: from scepticism to hope, from sadness to joy and vice versa. In harmony with those ideas, the book was dedicated to my late mother, and in the book I tried to express symbolically the coherence of life and death, joy and sadness.
Interviewed by Miroslav Demák
