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Heathen Master Filcsik

Cleveland Ohio
mdccccx




Heathen Master Filcsik,
From the Magyar of Kalman
Mikszath: Translated
by William N. Loew.

[Illustration]

Cleveland Ohio: Printed at The
Clerk's Private Press - mcmx




[Illustration]

_Introductory Note._


Through the kindness of William N. Loew, Esq., of the New York Bar, who
has generously placed the manuscript at our disposal, we are able to
offer a translation of one of the shorter stories by a living Hungarian
writer.

The Magyar literature offers a mine of gold to the translator, but on
account of the difficulties of the language very few have explored it.
With the exception of the great novelist, Maurus Jokai, the works of the
majority of the first class authors are unknown to the average American
reader.

The difficulties of the Magyar tongue have been referred to. It is the
one great literary language of Europe that is of non-Aryan origin. It is
syllabic agglutinative, that is, the word inflections are made up by
adding syllables to the root word that is never lost. The verb is
particularly flexible and many of the tenses cannot be rendered
adequately in English because they are constructed after a different
system. The fine distinctions possible for the Magyar verb can only be
felt, and not translated. This will explain the seeming inconsistency
of the tenses in our story, where presents, futures, and perfects appear
to be used indiscriminately, and yet the whole action has taken place in
the more or less remote past. In this way the translator has endeavored
to convey the vivid