Small is great: this was the title of an international conference held at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. Organized by the Departments of Dutch and Scandinavian Studies at ELTE and the Centre for Reception Studies at KU Leuven, the three-day conference focused on the translation of smaller European languages.

In this region, the eastern and southern parts of Europe, borders are very important, because history has always been equivalent here with the shift and change of borders; individual and family histories were always about how the movement of people related to borders. The border is a point where the impersonal fiction we call history overlaps the very personal fiction we call life, memory, or fate. (György Dragomán)

More than political speeches and formal acts, literature has an important role in sensitizing people to the suffering of others. Rather than doing that, however, the abundance of tear-jerker movies, streamlined teen lit, and often badly-written (and in some cases, forged) memoirs about the Holocaust have the opposite effect: creating what has been termed as “Holocaust fatigue”―being fed up with the topic without coming any closer to understanding it.

Published in English in 1989 by Macmillan, János Nyíri’s Battlefields and Playgrounds immediately became a success in the UK. However, this book is all but unknown in Hungary.

In 2004―that is, in ancient times, when online literary magazines were a relatively new phenomenon―I was working for the first Hungarian literary website, litera.hu. Litera pioneered a wholly new approach to the trends, works, and figures of Hungarian literature―an approach that made literature the concern of a wide audience, far beyond literati.