Gulliver's Fifth & Sixth Voyages 1732 Studios

Hungarian · Capillária

Ötödik fejezet

Chapter Five

39 sentences

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  1. 1

    The strange language of the oihas.

    Aztheaz · determinerdeterminer of oihák
    oihákthe oihasoiha · noun, nominative, singular, third-person plural possessordepends on nyelve
    különösstrangekülönös · adjective, nominative, singulardepends on nyelve
    nyelveits languagenyelv · noun, nominative, singular, third-person singular possessorhead of the phrase
  2. 2

    The original meaning of the word oiha.

  3. 3

    Opula, queen of the oihas, honors the Author with her confidence.

  4. 4

    A few words on the oppression of European women.

  5. 5

    If I nevertheless contrived to gather together some particulars of moment, to which I could attain only by word of mouth — and if, moreover, through the instruction of my hosts, I was enabled to draw certain comparisons between the public and social usages of Capillária and of Europe — this was assuredly no fault of their readiness to oblige me, and was oftentimes rendered possible only by confusion, and by stratagems not wholly free of guile.

  6. 6

    In the first weeks, when I had occasion to acquaint myself with the spirit and substance of the oihas' tongue, I had very nearly come to believe that we should never understand one another.

  7. 7

    For this language is one of the most singular it has ever been my fortune to study.

  8. 8

    Words and circumlocutions touching upon abstract notions occur in it not at all; they have words only for such objects as may be perceived and touched — and even these (a thing I find no easy matter to express) do not denote the object itself with any precision, but rather only the feeling, the passion, that the object in question awakens in the temper of the oihas, and this with its own peculiar coloring of feeling — so that, to speak briefly, the oiha tongue consists of little else but interjections.

  9. 9

    Variety is furnished to this tongue by the circumstance that one and the same word, pronounced with a different stress or inflection, yields a different sense, exactly as in the vocabulary of infants a syllable such as "ah" or "vah," according to the manner of its utterance by the little one, signifies joy, or vexation, or the desiring of some object, or its refusal.

  10. 10

    The word "oiha" itself is, properly speaking, an interjection, and were I to employ it with exactness, I should be obliged, after our own manner of writing, to append an exclamation mark upon every occasion of its use — it is the cry of joy and rapture that a child of Capillária feels at the fact of her living and breathing, and that, by the aid of her beauty and her joy of life, it lies within her power to taste and to relish all that delight and intoxication which she herself, and the world besides, pour forth for her in such abundance.

  11. 11

    For — and I seize upon this point to remark it — the whole life of the oihas passes in the perpetual exercise of pleasures and of enjoyments refined and chosen with the nicest art.

  12. 12

    Just as their tongue aims at nothing but the expression of passions and the swaying of moods, so likewise their deeds, and all their doings, tend to this single end: to keep ever wakeful in the nerves and in the soul that heightened tension which, to the so-called artist in living, stands for the purpose and meaning of life itself.

  13. 13

    Everything is made to serve the pleasure of their senses, and every one of their senses is sensitive to agreeable stimuli in so heightened a degree as a European is able to display only through some one particular organ of sense, and this but under the influence of the fitting stimulus.

  14. 14

    Thus, for instance, I once beheld a lady of rank among the oihas fall into a very ecstasy of voluptuousness, and break into panting tears, upon catching sight of the red hue of a fine fabric — this color working upon her the same effect as the warmest and most palpable declaration of love that ever turned giddy the head of some fashionable lady of London or of Paris.

  15. 15

    The self-same intoxicated rapture is called forth in them by the music of certain instruments, or yet more by the tasting of certain well-prepared dishes and sweetmeats — so that their meals wear, upon every occasion, the true coloring of an orgy.

  16. 16

    And if we consider further that the ceaseless flowing and contact of water, an element denser than air, tickles and thrills without cessation every particle of their touch, over the whole surface of a skin infinitely tender and sensitive: we may boldly declare that the oiha, from her birth to her final moment, is at no instant wanting in that rare and concentrated condition which we are wont to signify by that word denoting the utmost degree of bodily well-being, namely, delight.

  17. 17

    As touching the amorous life of the oihas, for the present, without dwelling at greater length upon that mysterious manner by which, among them, life propagates itself, I shall set down only this much: that love, with them, has nothing whatever to do with the notion of the preservation of the species — it is an art and a pleasure existing for its own sake, which spends itself wholly in the rapture and devotion that one oiha feels toward another, without aiming at, or bringing about, the coming into being of a third creature — a child.

  18. 18

    In this, as in all else, it is the sensual pleasure, refined and heightened into a sensation of the soul, that alone engages the oihas.

  19. 19

    Were I to venture upon particulars, it would prove a very hard matter, rendered into a European tongue, so to express the substance of their love-making that it should not seem the forbidden description of lawless and lewd dealings — although, set forth in their own tongue, and our putting ourselves into their feelings and their notions, all this signifies the cult of the purest and noblest pleasures, such as among us are music and poetry, which the leaders of nations not merely do not forbid, but rather countenance and encourage.

  20. 20

    Living as I did in Capillária, it never once occurred to me that what I heard and beheld about me was, in point of fact, an offense to modesty and an immoral license — in a certain peculiar condition resembling a magnetic trance, I regarded all of it, precisely as they intended and enjoyed it, as the most sublime and most exalted manifestation of the soul that inhabits the body.

  21. 21

    I have been obliged to set down these particulars beforehand, that the reader might understand for what cause I stood in need of certain stratagems — of which I am now not a little ashamed — in order that I might secure to myself, against all manner of outward inquiry, an attention otherwise given wholly to indifference.

  22. 22

    I have perhaps already mentioned that Opula, queen of the oihas, distinguished me with her confidence and her friendship, that is to say, permitted me to remain near her person, and to divert her as best I was able.

  23. 23

    The diverting of so exalted and so fastidious an oiha lady is not so easy a matter as one might suppose, when we consider that everything which interests us in Europe is to them a thing of entire indifference.

  24. 24

    I soon perceived that her majesty was disposed to occupy herself with any thought or related communication only upon the condition that it stood in some connection with a sensual stimulus — I therefore endeavored, while speaking, to bring my mouth so near to her small ear, perfectly transparent and of a delicate, pale rose color, that my outgoing breath might continually set that tender member trembling.

  25. 25

    Later I discovered that I attained a yet surer effect by employing, not her little ears for this purpose, but a certain point upon her supple and yielding hip — it is a marvel that through this point she understood the whole of my meaning far better than by the aid of that organ appointed for the reception of words.

  26. 26

    I was astonished to find with what perfection this imperfect tongue, made up wholly of interjections, could contrive to make itself understood by this road — all that I wished to convey, her majesty apprehended by this method sooner and more completely than had I set forth the very same matter in English to the estimable Mrs. Pankhurst, let us say, or to Mrs. Ellen Key, ladies who, in the course of their labors touching the emancipation of women, had acquired no small skill in the arts of argument and of oratory.

  27. 27

    In this manner, briefly and in sum, I acquainted her majesty with those principal doctrines which, according to the teaching of the social sciences, afford a picture of woman's condition in Europe, throughout the course of historical development.

  28. 28

    Openly, and without any manner of concealment, I spoke of that lamentable oppression, to the magnitude and consequences of which only the researches of the most recent age have opened our eyes.

  29. 29

    For centuries together, the men withheld from the women that whole right whose exercise is the most sacred duty of the civilized citizen.

  30. 30

    The men kept for themselves all those advantages which even at this day they jealously guard, and this they accomplished simply by appeal to the right of the stronger, to whom, against the weaker, all things are permitted.

  31. 31

    To the women, quite simply, nothing was permitted which the men might do without ceasing.

  32. 32

    Women could neither labor nor cultivate their minds — only the man possessed the right to wear himself out the whole day long in frantic and superhuman toil, a labor that dulls the sensibility of the body and the receptiveness of the soul.

  33. 33

    The men had the right to marry, to beget children, and to maintain them — the women had no such right.

  34. 34

    But the injustice that cries loudest to heaven, whose shameful iniquity the humbled and oppressed women groan under anew in these very days, is this — a thing I am almost ashamed to own to her majesty — that women may not bear arms as soldiers, being deprived of that sacred and exalted right in which, at this time, the men of every nation of Europe, without exception, are permitted to share: namely, that the male members of each several nation may defend, nation against nation, the border of their homeland, unworthily assailed, against the wicked and infamous foreign enemy, who unlawfully attacked them and forced the war upon them.

  35. 35

    Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, Serbians — every one of them has the right to defend, from one another, a homeland attacked by one another; only the women, nowhere, have any right whatsoever.

  36. 36

    In consequence of this oppression, the women, according to the guidance of those laws of historical materialism and of the doctrine of evolution discovered by learned men, naturally fell backward and behind, degenerating in spirit and sinking into baseness, precisely as several mighty pessimistic minds — Strindberg, Ibsen, Weininger, and others — have emphatically demonstrated.

  37. 37

    During the long centuries of this oppression, while the men labored on behalf of the women, the women, deprived of any opportunity to labor and toil for others, were compelled to occupy themselves with themselves alone — the consequence of which was that they grew, in body, more refined and more beautiful than the men, so that, in their desperate case, nothing was left to them but to enjoy the pleasures of life, without taking upon themselves any share of its labors.

  38. 38

    Whereas the men were furnished, at every season, with purpose and calling and the whole content of their lives by this necessity: that they should not occupy themselves with that which a man would forever wish to occupy himself with, namely his own body and his own life, but should rack their brains instead over all manner of other matters serviceable to others, who, in exchange for the benefit thus conferred, permit him, for so long as he is able to labor on their behalf, to remain alive himself — the women, meanwhile, were compelled to live upon that very thing for which they lived, namely, that they are loved and cherished, and that endeavor is made to afford them the greatest possible measure of joy.

  39. 39

    Upon her majesty's inquiring what then those occupations might be which secure for men their higher development, I enumerated for her several wealthy and well-reputed acquaintances of mine, and, summarizing briefly the history of their lives, related how, as physicians, lawyers, schoolmasters, merchants, men of enterprise, and artists, they had, by the strained labor of a lifetime, won that respect and general esteem which common opinion secures unto all such worthy men as have, by means of their gathered wealth, procured for themselves a fine wife of good family and a household of their own, and have been able to bestow upon their daughters a decent dowry, before betaking themselves to rest their labors at last in the beneficent lap of death.

The particulars

The text
Utazás Faremidóba / Capillária, Frigyes Karinthy. Capillária.
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Public-domain Hungarian (Karinthy, d. 1938; published 1916 and 1921). English translation © 2026 1732 Studios, LLC.
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Digital narration, directed by 1732 Studios.
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Two whoopie pies and a pine. An inside joke.