ma, tegnap, holnap (2021)

Описание: ma, tegnap, holnap: today, yesterday, tomorrow

Poems by Magda Bognar, music by Phoebe Bognár

Performed by the álom ensemble: Maria Muñoz-Lopez (violin, performance), Leonel Quinta (Clarinets, performance), Katarina Leskovar (violoncello, performance), Rubén Eduardo Bañuelos Preciado (percussion, performance), Phoebe Bognár (performance).

Voice: Réka Regina Szabó

5 November 2021, International Festival BuchBasel, Jazz Campus.

Heartfelt gratitude to my aunts Judy Brandl, Rony Bognar and uncle George Bognar for enlightening me about the poems in Hungarian; Michael Kunkel, Ábel Fazekas, Julie Beauvais, Mike Svoboda and Andreas-Eduardo Optimaler-Klang Frank for their assistance and time in this project.

Video: Adrian King
Audio and sound design: Jonas Prina

About:

The poems of my late grandmother, Magda Bognár, are an integral part of understanding the experience and identity of my Hungarian-Jewish family and culture. These three poems, written between 1944 and 1945, on her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, express a multitude of emotions, most poignantly: memory, loss and hope. Since my first reading of these poems some years ago, the idea of these poems at the centre of a new composition came to fruition.

The key considerations in the fundamental stages of this idea were understanding the Hungarian text (phrasing, characteristics of the language), the connection with the English translation and what medium(s) would be most appropriate setting for the text. I met with my Aunt Judy, a native Hungarian speaker, and read through the poems in Hungarian, and then recorded her reciting them. I was aware of some obvious differences between the original Hungarian text and the English translation. For example, the poems in Hungarian had elements of rhyme. Understanding the differences in the texts and how to use them in a new work became an important focus point. I began to speculate further about how language, and particularly the medium of poetry, manifests in music.

The project is titled ‘ma, tegnap, holnap’ (today, yesterday, tomorrow) after one of Magda’s three poems. I thought that the title of this poem strongly encapsulated the idea I wanted to express, where ‘yesterday’ represents the time in which my grandmother wrote her poems, the ‘today’ being my interaction with the poems and ‘tomorrow’ is how we come to receive the poems and music together as an intergenerational discourse on humanity, culture, and memory.

‘ma, tegnap, holnap’ promises to bridge a dialogue between art music, theatre, literature and culture. The collaboration between literature and music is also an indirect collaboration between myself and my grandmother. It is an intergenerational work, that tells of the harrowing trauma of war, family, humanity, loss and hope. In its hybridity it conveys a full spectrum of senses– sonic symbolism, visual representation, and visceral impact. Her poems are an important part of Jewish history and also my family’s identity, but beyond this, her poems have pores, they are living, and so are we.

About Magda:

Magda Bognar (nee Lowinger) was 23-years-old during her incarceration in Altenburg, a sub camp of Ravensbruck concentration camp, from November 1944 – January 1945. Little is known of Magda’s Holocaust experiences, as she never spoke of them during her lifetime.

Her three poems in our collection, entitled Ma, tegnap, holmap (Today, yesterday, tomorrow), Me is megtiidtuk (We too found out) and Dream, are the only testimony of her experiences, her physical and emotional suffering, and a record of the daily harsh realities she endured.

In each of the poems, Magda chronicles the daily realities of her physical suffering.

Her poems were published for the first time in Hungarian in April 2022.
https://multesjovo.hu/kultur_cikk/low...