Árpád Göncz
Encyclopedia
Árpád Göncz is a Hungarian
liberal
politician and former President of Hungary (May 2, 1990–August 4, 2000). Göncz played a role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also founding member and Vice Chairman of SZDSZ and Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary before becoming President.
He is currently a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
.
and has published several novel
s, plays
and essays, and also translated a great number of prose works from English
to Hungarian
.
In the Second World War he was conscripted and ordered to Germany; however, he deserted and joined the resistance movement.
After the war, in 1945 he joined the Independent Smallholders' Party and was the leader of the party's youth organization for Budapest as well as personal secretary to the general secretary. After the party was dissolved at the communist takeover, he worked as a manual labourer.
In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he worked in the newly recreated Hungarian Peasant Alliance. After the Soviet intervention on 4 November 1956, he participated in the writing of several memoranda and helped to transfer a manuscript of Imre Nagy
abroad. He was arrested in May 1957 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 2 August of the same year, without the possibility of appeal. In 1960 he participated in the hunger strike of Vác
. Along with more than 4,000 other revolutionaries and freedom fighters, he was released from prison under amnesty in 1963.
In the following decades, he worked as a specialized translator, translator of over a hundred literary works, and writer. Some of his notable translations include Mary Shelley
's Frankenstein
, Thomas Wolfe
's Of Time and the River
, William Faulkner
's Sartoris
, The Sound and the Fury
, Absalom, Absalom!
and A Fable, Ernest Hemingway
's Islands in the Streams, J. R. R. Tolkien
's The Lord of the Rings
, Malcolm Lowry
's Under the Volcano
, William Styron
's Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner
, John Ball's In the Heat of the Night
, Colleen McCullough
's The Thorn Birds
, Yasunari Kawabata
's The Lake
, John Updike
's Rabbit Redux
and Rabbit is Rich
, and The Inheritors
, Pincher Martin
, The Spire
, The Pyramid
and Rites of Passage by William Golding
. His own works include both novels and dramas; Sarusok (1974), Magyar Médeia (1976), Rácsok (1979) and Találkozások (1980) are worth mentioning.
(SZDSZ) in 1988. In 1989 became President of the Hungarian Human Rights League
. From 1989 to 1990 he was President and later Honorary President of the Hungarian Writers' Association. In May 1990 he was elected Member of Parliament
. Göncz served as Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary between May and August 1990, and subsequently was elected provisional President of the Republic
after Mátyás Szűrös
on May 2 and President of the Republic
on August 4 by the National Assembly. He was reelected in 1995 for another five-year term which he completed on August 4, 2000. In 2000, he was honored with the Vision for Europe Award
for his efforts in creating a unified Europe. In these periods he was very well-received by the public as he succeeded to remain free from politics which helped him gain a wide acceptance.
He is married to Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér and has four children. Kinga Göncz
, former foreign minister of Hungary, is his daughter.
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
politician and former President of Hungary (May 2, 1990–August 4, 2000). Göncz played a role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also founding member and Vice Chairman of SZDSZ and Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary before becoming President.
He is currently a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a non-profit educational organization in the United States, established as a result of an Act of Congress in 1993 with the purpose to commemorate "the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust"...
.
Early life
He graduated in law from the Budapest Pázmány Péter University of Arts and Sciences in 1944. He has also worked as a writerWriter
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and has published several novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s, plays
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
and essays, and also translated a great number of prose works from English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
to Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
.
In the Second World War he was conscripted and ordered to Germany; however, he deserted and joined the resistance movement.
After the war, in 1945 he joined the Independent Smallholders' Party and was the leader of the party's youth organization for Budapest as well as personal secretary to the general secretary. After the party was dissolved at the communist takeover, he worked as a manual labourer.
In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he worked in the newly recreated Hungarian Peasant Alliance. After the Soviet intervention on 4 November 1956, he participated in the writing of several memoranda and helped to transfer a manuscript of Imre Nagy
Imre Nagy
Imre Nagy was a Hungarian communist politician who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary on two occasions...
abroad. He was arrested in May 1957 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 2 August of the same year, without the possibility of appeal. In 1960 he participated in the hunger strike of Vác
Vác
Vác is a town in Pest county in Hungary with approximately 35,000 inhabitants. The archaic spellings of the name are Vacz and Vacs.-Location:...
. Along with more than 4,000 other revolutionaries and freedom fighters, he was released from prison under amnesty in 1963.
In the following decades, he worked as a specialized translator, translator of over a hundred literary works, and writer. Some of his notable translations include Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
's Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
, Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
's Of Time and the River
Of Time and the River
Of Time and the River is a 1935 novel by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. It is a fictionalized autobiography, using the name Eugene Gant for Wolfe's, detailing the protagonist's early and mid-twenties, during which time the character attends Harvard University, moves to New York City and teaches...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's Sartoris
Sartoris
Sartoris is a novel, first published in 1929, by the American author William Faulkner. It portrays the decay of the Mississippi aristocracy following the social upheaval of the American Civil War. The 1929 edition is an abridged version of Faulker's original work. The full text was published in...
, The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
, Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during, and after the Civil War, with the focus of the story on the life of Thomas Sutpen.-Plot...
and A Fable, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
's Islands in the Streams, J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
's The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
, Malcolm Lowry
Malcolm Lowry
Clarence Malcolm Lowry was an English poet and novelist who was best known for his novel Under the Volcano, which was voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.-Biography:...
's Under the Volcano
Under the Volcano
Under the Volcano is a 1947 semi-autobiographical novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry . The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac , on the Day of the Dead.Surrounded by the helpless presences of his ex-wife, his...
, William Styron
William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...
's Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner
The Confessions of Nat Turner
The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by U.S. writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831...
, John Ball's In the Heat of the Night
In the Heat of the Night (novel)
In the Heat of the Night is a 1965 novel by John Ball set in the fictional community of Wells, North Carolina. The main character is a black police detective named Virgil Tibbs passing through the small town during a time of bigotry and the civil rights movement.The novel is the basis of the 1967...
, Colleen McCullough
Colleen McCullough
Colleen McCullough-Robinson, , is an internationally acclaimed Australian author.-Life:McCullough was born in Wellington, in outback central west New South Wales, in 1937 to James and Laurie McCullough. Her mother was a New Zealander of part-Māori descent. During her childhood, her family moved...
's The Thorn Birds
The Thorn Birds
The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Colleen McCullough, an Australian author.In 1983 it was adapted as a television mini-series that, during its television run 27–30 March, became the United States' second highest rated mini-series of all time behind Roots; both series were produced by...
, Yasunari Kawabata
Yasunari Kawabata
was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award...
's The Lake
The Lake
The Lake was a British play written by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald. It debuted on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on December 26, 1933 and was one of acting legend Katharine Hepburn's first major Broadway roles....
, John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
's Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Redux is a 1971 novel by John Updike. It is the second book in his "Rabbit" series, beginning with Rabbit, Run and followed by Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit At Rest, and the related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered.-Plot summary:...
and Rabbit is Rich
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit Is Rich is a 1981 novel by John Updike. It is the third novel of the four-part series which begins with Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and concludes with Rabbit At Rest. There is also a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered...
, and The Inheritors
The Inheritors
The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story is a quasi-science fiction novel on which Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad collaborated. It looks at society's mental evolution and what is gained and lost in the process. Written before the first World War, its themes of corruption and the effect of the 20th...
, Pincher Martin
Pincher Martin
Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin , is a survivalist novel by British writer William Golding, first published in 1956...
, The Spire
The Spire
The Spire is a 1964 novel by the English author William Golding. "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will", it deals with the construction of the 404-foot high spire of Salisbury Cathedral; the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin...
, The Pyramid
The Pyramid
The Pyramid is a small island south of Pitt Island in the Chatham Islands group of New Zealand....
and Rites of Passage by William Golding
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies...
. His own works include both novels and dramas; Sarusok (1974), Magyar Médeia (1976), Rácsok (1979) and Találkozások (1980) are worth mentioning.
Political Career and President of Hungary
He was a founding member of the Alliance of Free DemocratsAlliance of Free Democrats
The Alliance of Free Democrats – Hungarian Liberal Party is a liberal party in Hungary, led since July 2010 by Viktor Szabadai . The SZDSZ is a member of the ELDR and of Liberal International...
(SZDSZ) in 1988. In 1989 became President of the Hungarian Human Rights League
Human Rights League
Several organisations are named Human Rights League in English:* Registered with the International Federation of Human Rights, abbreviated from its name in French as FIDH, established in 1922 and having its headquarters in Paris...
. From 1989 to 1990 he was President and later Honorary President of the Hungarian Writers' Association. In May 1990 he was elected Member of Parliament
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...
. Göncz served as Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary between May and August 1990, and subsequently was elected provisional President of the Republic
President of the Republic
The President of the Republic is a title used for heads of government or heads of state in some republics:*President of Argentina, the Presidente de la República Argentina* President of Brazil, the Presidente da República Federativa do Brasil...
after Mátyás Szűrös
Mátyás Szurös
Mátyás Szűrös is a Hungarian politician. He served as provisional President of the Republic from October 18, 1989–May 2, 1990. His presidency occurred during Hungary's transition from communist to democratic government...
on May 2 and President of the Republic
President of the Republic
The President of the Republic is a title used for heads of government or heads of state in some republics:*President of Argentina, the Presidente de la República Argentina* President of Brazil, the Presidente da República Federativa do Brasil...
on August 4 by the National Assembly. He was reelected in 1995 for another five-year term which he completed on August 4, 2000. In 2000, he was honored with the Vision for Europe Award
Vision for Europe Award
The Vision for Europe Award is an honour that has been bestowed annually since 1995 by the non-profit Edmond Israel Foundation in "recognition of outstanding achievements in taking Europe into the future."...
for his efforts in creating a unified Europe. In these periods he was very well-received by the public as he succeeded to remain free from politics which helped him gain a wide acceptance.
He is married to Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér and has four children. Kinga Göncz
Kinga Göncz
Kinga Göncz is a former foreign minister of Hungary. She is the daughter of Árpád Göncz, former President of Hungary. She is fluent in English and German, is married being the mother of two adult children and the grandmother of two young boys...
, former foreign minister of Hungary, is his daughter.
Awards and honours
- 1991: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian RepublicOrder of Merit of the Italian RepublicThe Order of Merit of the Italian Republic was founded as the senior order of knighthood by the second President of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi in 1951...
- 1994: Order of the White Eagle (Poland, 1994)
- 2000: Special Class of the Grand Cross of the Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
- 2000: Order of the White Double Cross, First Class (Slovakia, 2000)
- 2003: Award of the Budapest Corvinus Europe Institute
- 2009: International Adalbert Prize for Peace, Freedom and Cooperation in Europe of Adalbert Foundation Krefeld
- Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra MarianaOrder of the Cross of Terra MarianaThe Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana was instituted in 1995 to honour the independence of the Estonian state. The Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana is bestowed upon the President of the Republic. Presidents of the Republic who have ceased to hold office shall keep the Order of the Cross of...
(Estonia) - Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav (Norway)
- Order of the White LionOrder of the White LionThe Order of the White Lion is the highest order of the Czech Republic. It continues a Czechoslovak order of the same name created in 1922 as an award for foreigners....
(Czech Republic)
External links
- His biography on the Office of the President of the Republic of Hungary site