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Notes
It is very fortunate that Somhegyi by no means limits his scope of activity to university and academic work in the narrow sense; it is not that teaching on the international standard and quality would not be highly commendable in itself.
In addition to the books hallmarking his academic career, Somhegyi is engaged in the art business as a critique and a manager – he has been producing plenty of articles, reviews, critiques, art criticism, catalogues, etc. It is hardly surprising that he is a regular lecturer, organizer and curator of national and international conferences, workshops, panel discussions, and exhibitions; and he was the manager and now is a consultant of the Art Market Budapest, a prominent event which is the most dynamic and interesting one among the international art fairs held in Hungary.
His area of academic interest is (also) wide-ranging, but the main focuses are manifest: aesthetics of ruins, landscape, romanticism, and contemporary art. His works are characterized by diligence, thoroughness, a high level of professional competence, and – something that is far from evident in contemporary art criticism, let alone aesthetic papers – comprehensibility.
Nádasdy’s critical edition of the text (Nádasdy, 1998), containing an arresting accompanying essay by him, reveals in detail that the Yiddish-Hungarian text of erstwhile cultic status was written in the first quarter or third of the twentieth century. Today, its potential readership lost, it appears as a uchronic surreal textual ruin or a deeply encased linguistic geode.
A very exciting period in Buber’s oeuvre was a kind of (re)visitation, nodulation, uchronia, or a quest to find time portals through which he could seize or even realize forgotten/missed opportunities. This can be seen in his Tanakh re-translations as well; and this is a context that sheds light on how intricate ways the romanticizing–mythicizing use of language can lead to.
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Nádasdy, Á. (1998). A Walesi bárdok tréfás jiddis fordítása [The humorous Yiddish translation of The bards of Wales]. 2000, 9(10), 46–60.
Somhegyi, Z. (2015). Az el(−nem-)választás művészete [Art (out) of separation]. 2000, 26(8), 20–25. Retrieved December 13, 2021, from http://ketezer.hu/2016/01/az-el-nem-valasztas-muveszete/
Somhegyi, Z. (2020). Reviewing the Past. The Presence of Ruins. Rowman & Littlefield.
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Czeglédi, A. Becoming their Own Monuments. Philosophia 50, 1523–1527 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00477-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00477-0