Magyarázni

Last update June 2020

Awards

Shortlisted for the 2019 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta

Reviews

“Magyarázni is a bicultural, bilingual, and bimedia compelling and beautifully conceived proof that an individual can bear the burden of postmemory and the reality of bicultural post-exile without losing him/herself.” —Bywords

“Hajnoczky is one of the country’s most impressive young writers, with astounding range and a sharp, controlled technique.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Magyarázni is . . . a stunning, lush and lively abecedarian” —rob mclennan

“Perhaps culture resides in the space between . . . in the shuttling back and forth, and Hajnoczky renders this familiar movement with aplomb.” —FreeFall

“Magyarázni is as surprising and thrilling as it is complex” —filling Station

Best of Lists

Knife Fork Books, rob mclennan, derek beaulieu, All Lit Up

From the Writing Process

Interviews: Touch the Donkey, Jacket 2

Chapbooks: False Friends from No Press; The Double Bind Dictionary from above/ground press

Purchase

From Coach House Books: https://chbooks.com/Books/M/Magyarazni

About

Magyarázni was published in 2016 by Coach House Books. This book brings together Hungarian folk-art visual poems with written poems, exploring the experience of growing up with my dad, who came to Canada as a refugee in 1956 after the thwarted Hungarian Revolution. This book is dedicated to my father, Steve (Pisti) Hajnoczky, and was heavily inspired by his own folk-art practice.

Ideas and origins

The word magyarázni means “to explain” in Hungarian, but if you translate it very literally, it means “to make it Hungarian.” The word popped out to me for the first time in my 20s. I’d finished a creative writing class at the university and had gone out wish my classmates for a pint or two, and my dad picked me up when we were ready to call it a night. The pint part is important because I suspect I was feeling a little looser than usual, and when my dad started saying something and used the word “magyarázni,” for the first time it sounded totally weird to me. I pointed out how odd a way to say “explain” it was, and my dad laughed and said it had never occurred to him either, how funny a way that was of saying "let me explain.”

That word, and that moment of realizing it’s strangeness, became the seed of this book.

In addition to being a poetic effort to “explain” what it’s like to be a first-generation Hungarian-Canadian, or to make that come across viscerally in the feeling of the work, I also kept wondering—what does it mean to be a Hungarian-Canadian? How much of my idea of what that means is really just my relationship with my dad, or with a small group of people I grew up with? The book is written entirely in direct address as a way of contemplating this—by constantly telling the reader you do X, you say Y, I hoped to put a fine point on the matter. Is the book a set of instructions for being the child of an immigrant or refugee? Or a first generation Canadian? Or a Hungarian-Canadian? Or a Hungarian-Canadian in Calgary? Or is it just instructions for being me? The “you” of the book slips around too, and I let it. Sometime I’m “you.” Sometimes the reader is “you.” Sometimes my dad is “you.” Sometimes his mother, my nagymama, is “you.” That fluidity was a big part of what I wanted to think about in this book. Where does you end and you begin?

I wrote the book while living in Montreal. Doing this made me realize more and more how much I associate Hungarian-ness not with Hungary at all, but with my hometown where I was taught Hungarian by my dad, where I lived with my family, attended cserkészet (scouts) and church in Hungarian, where we went to folk-dance performances and concerts, and so on. To me, driving down Bow Trail in the evening feels like a Hungarian thing to do, because that’s the route my dad would take when he took us to scouts on Monday nights. To me, camping at Pigeon Lake feels like the most Hungarian activity possible, because that’s where we went camping with scouts.

The visual poems came from a very long term fascination with Hungarian folk-art. My reading skills have improved over the years, but despite Hungarian’s phonetic alphabet, I used to find it totally opaque and nearly impossible to read. Pages of Hungarian text didn’t look like containers for plot or information the way pages of English text did to me. Instead they just looked Hungarian-y, like a beautifully embroidered dance costume or plate of paprikás csirke. The fusion of folk art with the letters seemed so natural to me I started doodling these in the margins of my notebooks long before I knew visual poetry was a thing. Learning about that poetic tradition gave me the drive to build my doodles out into a proper art project. I drew each one by hand, favouring the wobbly edges of my drawings and letters over the crisp lines of a piece design on a computer or the perfection of a proper font, because I wanted to meditate on that idea of the personal, individual relationship I have with my cultural background, that we each have with our cultural backgrounds, and with our history and each other.

Magyarázni Crafts

I keep returning to Hungarian folk art and contemplating what it means to me, and turning over the themes explored in Magyarázni, working these themes into new related projects.

Önarckép

Meaning “self-portrait” this project was originally created for Carl Watt’s book of literary criticism Oblique Identity: Form and Whiteness in Recent Canadian Poetry (Frog Hollow Press, 2019). Watts invited me and the other authors he discussed to include a new piece, and I created this one, drawing together ideas of self-portraiture as depicting the hand rather than the face—considering what one does and makes as the source of self-representation—and using the traditional folk art medium of embroidery as a way of considering heritage and identity through traditions of craft and the messiness of identity and cultural background.

Items are for sale in the store—the original embroidery for $150, or an artist print of the piece for $50.

Magyarázni 3rd Anniversary Art Package

May 2019 marked the third anniversary of the book’s publication—and the first passing of this date since my father passed. This was a challenging time for me, and I took some of the craft skills I’d learned through the Calgary Margyar Haz’s programs to create this collection of artistic pieces to mark the occasion. The decoupage I learned at a March 2019 workshop on creating Easter eggs, taught by Grimm Maria, and the embroidery through two workshops arranged by Nádihegedű in January and February 2019. The painting is based on works by my father and books he owned, while the embroidery pattern is from my grandmother’s book of folk patterns. The fabric came from a previous project begun in Montreal. The package contains a copy of the final book, but also chapbooks from No and above/ground presses, published while the book was a work in progress. The collection is for sale on this site for $275.

Magyarázni 4th Anniversary Driftwood Art

May 2020 was much easier than 2019, with the very painful first year of grief replaced with more contemplative reflection, and a feeling of gratefulness for being able to connect with my dad through art.

This year I created this artwork—with a folk art motif based on one of the books he owned, painted on a piece of dirftwood he had saved. I’m not sure what he might have intended for the driftwood, but using it as the basis of this painting made me feel like we were able to collaborate artistically together, on a surface connected to place. I painted it sitting outside in the yard, a welcome change from the endless time indoors during COVID-19 self-isolation, while enjoying a palinka gifted to us by some dear Hungarian friends—I’m sure my dad would have enjoyed a sip!

This piece is for sale in the store for $150.