Two decades ago, Polish film and literature held real weight on Hungary's cultural scene. Today, that presence has all but disappeared, according to Viktória Kellermann, a Hungarian culture manager and longtime translator of Polish books, and neither Olga Tokarczuk's 2018 Nobel Prize nor the Polish state's cultural institutes have managed to reverse the slide.
The numbers illustrate the drop: Hungarian publishers put out roughly 30 Polish titles a year in the early 2000s; that figure has since fallen to five or 10, many of them children's books, in a market flooded with tens of thousands of new releases annually.
In an interview with Polish Press Agency (PAP), Kellermann said the shortage of promotional muscle behind those books, not a Nobel-sized name, determines whether Polish writing is even noticed.
"Polish culture has essentially disappeared from Hungary's cultural map, and that has had a negative effect on the country's image", she said, arguing that Tokarczuk's prize failed to move the needle partly because the author skipped Budapest for political reasons under Viktor Orban's government. "Translations are one thing, but author meetings with leading writers are very important", Kellermann added.
Generational turnover compounds the problem, she said. Hungarian readers who once devoured Bolesław Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz or Sławomir Mrożek are now in their 60s and 70s and have little interest in contemporary Polish writing, while younger readers never picked up the habit.
Kellermann pointed instead to genre fiction as an underused asset. Andrzej Sapkowski's "Witcher" novels, she said, became a Hungarian publishing hit once readers realized — after years of the franchise being known mainly through video games — that the saga was a Slavic creation rather than a Western one.
As Sapkowski's Hungarian translator, she said she spent years convincing fans it was "not 'The Witcher', but the Slavic 'Wiedźmin'", and that the reveal of its Central European roots noticeably lifted Poland's standing among readers.
Institutional support, in her view, is the core failure. The Polish Institute in Budapest, she said, is understaffed and underfunded, and channels much of its limited budget into jazz concerts that draw only a few dozen people — not the national reach the country needs. Theater faces a similar collapse: Polish plays once ran in venues across Hungary, including outside the capital, but have nearly vanished from Hungarian stages.
Money, or the lack of it, runs through nearly every example Kellermann gave. Inviting a Polish comic book artist to Hungary costs about EUR 1,000 — "nothing" in a ministry budget, she said, but a meaningful sum for promoting Polish comics. When she helped bring Polish bands to a rock festival in Pecs, Hungary, and one in Wrocław, Poland, funding requests to several sources, including the Polish Institute, yielded only enough money to cover fuel. Her team spent a year and a half organizing the exchange without pay.
It still paid off, she said: the Pecs concerts drew roughly 1,000 fans, some chanting the Polish-Hungarian friendship phrase "Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki" ("Pole, Hungarian, two kinsmen"), Kellermann said funding many similarly small projects, rather than one large campaign, could promote Polish culture nationally.
She reserved her strongest argument for music. Polish jazz and heavy metal both have real followings in Hungary, she said, but bands like USO 9001 and Błoto need bookings in the small clubs young audiences frequent — venues that currently see no state support.
"Why don't the Polish Institutes promote this kind of music? Why couldn't metal be one of Poland's recognizable symbols?" she asked, noting Polish metal's global reputation makes it a natural piece of the country's soft power.
As proof of the genre's pull, she recalled meeting a young Hungarian man in Budapest wearing a shirt for the Polish black metal band Mgła, which has toured Hungary several times. He had become a fan, she said, and had even learned to pronounce the band's name — no small feat for a Hungarian speaker.
(jh)
Source: PAP