An Incomprehensible Mother Tongue – Guest artist: Valère Novarina

Reading with musical accompaniment, performed by actress Anna Ráckevei and accordion player Lajos Pál.

“The Hungarian language (as seen by the child): a language that he cannot understand, but can see when it is sung. The island of the language, a language for one, an orphaned and embryonic language; never an echo, a body we bear, a corpse, a language freed from the burden of communication, which continuously reminds us, helps us sense, in the depths of each bitten-off, dead, masticated, drunk syllable what it was like when we first awoke to the wonder of speech. /.../ The Hungarian language did not resonate with any other language. As if it were a relic of Atlantis, this is how it sounded to me: like a huge chunk of earth that had sunk...”

(14 March 2016)