[Sca-cooks] Eastern European History Cooking with Bonzer. . .

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Noemi writes:

>My general feel of the passage from Rumpolt is that he says while he was born
>in Hungary  (Denn weil ich ein geborner Vnger/) he has had to leave for some
>reason.  He mentions the Turks at one point, but my German is not good enough
>to tell if that was his reason for leaving.   It seems like he may be living
>in Wallachia at the time he is writing.
>
>*sigh*  Another time I wish I'd worked a little harder on my German.

I know exactly how you feel. Ordinary German I can more or less
handle. Archaic German, filtered through various intolerant
text-handling software, converting umlauts into "ue" 's, not to
mention translation software that will only react to ordinary ASCII
"u"'s, make it all a bit thick, as Wodehouse used to say.

Here, here's what Thomas Gloning wrote me a while ago on this very subject:

At 9:49 PM +0100 2/10/02, gloning at Mailer.Uni-Marburg.DE wrote:
>He says that he is
>"ein geborner Vnger", he was born as an Hungarian/in Hungary. In
>addition, he says that _his ancestors ("meine Voreltern")_ were expelled
>from the "klein Walachey" ('small Walachei') by the Turcs and that the
>estate of his family (lit. 'what belongs to us being situated in the
>small Walachei', "das vnser/ so ... gelegen") was still in the dominion/
>in the possession/ under the control of the Turcs.

Okay, so he is Hungarian by birth, Wallachian by ancestry, and
perhaps living in some German-speaking land as of the time of
writing, assuming the original text is German. Okay, so this really
doesn't imply that Wallachia is in Hungary.

I still can't read the above passage without thinking of Dracula's
rant about his ancient, noble blood --"whose blood was ever so noble
as Atilla's, which now flows through these veins?", or words to that
effect, in the early pages of the novel... Rumpolt says something
like "my forebears were driven from their Land and People; what
belongs to us lies in little Wallachia..."

Nah, I'm not seeing Gary Oldman (pfeh!), and certainly not Lugosi
(boo!) nor Langella (ick!) in the role of Marx Rumpolt...

Adamantius (I kinda liked the aging Louis Jordan for it, though, but
then he is ten times the actor the others were...)