“I was still a man, such that I could have called myself a poet in storytelling.”
Nearly eleven years have passed since I first read the tales of János Cifra, a gypsy storyteller from Transylvania (the village of Koronka). The experience was earthshattering and fatelike.
At that time, I was attending a course at the Hungarian Heritage House entitled “The Hungarian Folk Tale – Traditional Storytelling”, where we became acquainted with the old masters of Hungarian oral tradition and the traditional occasions of storytelling. An important part of this process was getting to know ethnographically authentic publications in which the tales were written down word for word, exactly the way a distinct narrator (informant) told them.
In the course, as homework we were asked to read the stories of a storyteller of our choice, observe his/her storytelling style, storytelling techniques, and collect the interesting and remarkable twists. While visiting my parents, in my childhood room I took a book off the shelf, which I had always found very alien: Olga Nagy’s “Tales of János Cifra” and started reading.
The 30-40-page fairy tales of János Cifra fundamentally changed my view of folktales. It was a strange, difficult and wonderful journey of discovery. In these tales, I did not find the soothing “drinking cocoa enchantedly in the warmth of an armchair” feeling that I had experienced while reading other fairy tales (I loved and devoured folktales throughout my childhood). These stories were stirring. The language was strange, and it contained some hard-to-digest rawness, some ancient, elemental force that captivated, exhausted, weakened, and attracted me over and over again. I felt like I was peeking behind the scenes: I gained a glimpse into the emotional world of characters who had previously seemed schematic to me, and more than ever, I began to understand and feel their motives, their relationships with other characters, as well as their experiences and delights.
In the tales of János Cifra “realism blends with the fantastic, suggesting the miraculous as well as the real at the same time. Which always shows a grandiose world.”[1]The peasant way of thinking, the realistically depicted difficulties of everyday life intertwine with the fantastical elements, with the free soaring of the imagination. Heroes are simultaneously the most ordinary figures and ‘consecrated princes’ representing the cosmic order.
As I immersed myself in the tales, I prayed along with the heroes before they wrestled with the dragon. Because here the heroes always prayed extensively before a fight. I got to know their deep fears, their doubts. When János Ruzsmarint watches over the fire and hears that ‘they sing in seven languages’, he does not yet know that the seven-headed dragon is approaching. He says to himself: “Come on, dam it! There’s seven of them. There is safety in numbers. Seven can surround me. If there were one or even two, I would spin the sword and fight. But seven, how?! And I took an oath, not to wake the others. Well, then we have to perish here!”[2] We also learn about the encounter with the dragon and get a detailed interpretation of the fight from the narrator. The triple repetition is not just a boring mechanical compulsion within the tale. There is always something else, some new element in the re-incarnations. The intensification is dramatic with a cathartic force. When the third dragon arrives, singing in twenty-four languages, “the crackling of his bones could be heard far and wide, as if a huge sack of walnuts was dropped from a twenty-story building. It rattled.” The fight against the greatest dragon is almost three pages. “So they started wrestling. And they wrestled and wrestled. And the sun goeth up three times, and cometh down three times. But still, they could not defeat one another. They made such a huge pit, as if an army of pigs had been digging the ground.”[3] They have long dialogues during the fight, and then when they can no longer wrestle with each other, the swords come out. When there is still no winner, they tumble over their heads and transform into a steel and a soft-iron wheel, and roll down the hill, and continue battling at the foot of the mountain. When that doesn’t decide the fight either, they turn into a blue and a red flame and scorch each other. Both the hero and the dragon are characterized by a series of mythical features – special powers and abilities – that evoke an archaic age, an ancient state of consciousness.
The way of narration by János Cifra shows the images of the tale with a special force. I could immerse myself in the richness of magic-tale parables and images I had never before encountered: Behold, a maternal blessing: “May your garbs grow just like you grow, my son!“. In the thorny forest: “The stallion’s leg was filled with stones and thorns. In vain, he held on to the stallion, but he no longer had the talent for it, for he couldn’t take a bigger step than a rooster.” The devilish old grandma: “Takes the broom, puts it between her legs, and goes off. Wherever she went, she burned everything, the flames streaming from her mouth.”
The well-developed, long dialogues and internal monologues show the motivation, internal struggles, mental attitudes and insights of the characters in a captivating way. His tales are not this long because the plot is extremely complicated and intricate, but because he tells the stories with narrative detail and captivating meticulousness. The realistic detail – permeated by the way of thinking and experiences of the peasantry- spins the events in front of us in a cinematic, real-time manner, and thus completely amazes us and draws us into the fairy tale world. What previously encountered fairy tale versions would edit and shorten down into two sentences, János Cifra describes with enchanting thoroughness.
What a rewritten or shortened fairy tale would express by saying ‘seeing the giant robbers sitting around the fire’, in the tale of János Ruzsmarint is described by narrator in the following way: ‘When he got there, the great ancient trees that were terribly thick, they were cut down to make the fire. And the charcoal logs were as thick as the waist of a buffalo. The men were so large that feet touched feet, heads touched heads and there was no space, no cavity in the whole of the sixty acres…. They set off. A single step was a thousand-sixhundred square meters.” [4]
János Cifra was discovered in the second half of the 1970’s by Olga Nagy, our renowned folk tale researcher. In this article, I could only give a brief taste of the distinctive richness that his storytelling represents.
Our 19th century predecessors, who searched for the remains of ancient myths and the origins and migration of tales, were interested in the structure of stories (motifs, episodes, plots). Because of their indifference to the narrative style – or indeed their prejudices-, they did not consider it important to write down the stories verbatim, and even developed the notion that fairy tales should be rewritten and “condensed into dramatic conciseness without digressions and descriptions.”[5]
The new direction that had unfolded from the beginning of the 20th century – and peaked in the Budapest School of Folktale Research founded by Gyula Ortutay – recognizes that the tale is a narrative genre in which the creative individual plays a decisive role. The rules of tradition and the freedom of individual poetry are intertwined, and in their dialect the artistic world of the storyteller, his/her experiences, conceptions of man and the world all come into view.
And this allows for the constant rejuvenation of the ancient and inherited tale. It is the ever-renewing act of narration that fills the frame of the story with the elements of reality that speak to us today. The old communal stories thus become, or can become valid and credible over and over again in a given narration, through the living word, even for today’s audience. We can learn the
art of this from the masters of the Hungarian oral tradition.
[1]Olga Nagy: The Tales of Cifra János, Akadémiai kiadó, 1991, p. 42.
[2] Olga Nagy: The Tales of Cifra János, Akadémiai kiadó, 1991, p. 124.
[3] Olga Nagy: The Tales of Cifra János, Akadémiai kiadó, 1991, p. 127.
[4] Nagy Olga: Cifra János meséi, Akadémiai kiadó, Budapest, 1991, 131. old.
[5] Nagy Olga: A táltos törvénye, Kriterion könyvkiadó, Bukarest, 1978
Maja Bumberák, December 2021, the article originally was published in Hungarian, in Mese folyóirat (Tale Magazine), Spring 2022
Maja mesél 