Gulliver's Fifth & Sixth Voyages 1732 Studios

Hungarian · Capillária

Hatodik fejezet

Chapter Six

69 sentences

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  1. 1

    The Author endeavors to make the Queen understand the higher calling of men.

    Szerzőthe Authorszerző · noun, nominative, singularsubject of igyekszik

    Surfaces mix capitalized 'Szerző' (used as the chapter-argument character label, rendered 'The Author') and lowercase 'szerző' (generic noun, rendered lowercase 'the author' — see cap-front-matter-s75: 'A szerző mentegetőzik' -> 'The author excuses himself,' not 'The Author'). The original note wrongly forced 'the Author' for both.

    igyekszikstrivesigyekszik · verb, present, indicative, indefinite, third-person, singularmain verb of the sentence
    megértetnito make understandmegértet · verb, infinitivecomplement of igyekszik
    athea · determinerdeterminer of királynővel
    királynővelwith the queenkirálynő · noun, instrumental, singularoblique complement of igyekszik
    athea · determinerdeterminer of férfiak
    férfiakmenférfi · noun, nominative, pluraldepends on hivatását
    magasabbhighermagas · adjective, nominative, singular, comparativedepends on hivatását

    Only 1 of 4 examples is literal physical height ('két méternél is magasabb' = 'taller even than two meters'); the other 3 ('magasabb fejlődést', 'magasabb hivatását', 'magasabb színvonalon') are the abstract/rank sense 'higher.' The flat gloss 'taller' with no senses would mistranslate the majority use.

    hivatásáthis callinghivatás · noun, accusative, singular, third-person singular possessordirect object of igyekszik
  2. 2

    Science and literature.

  3. 3

    A few words touching the buildings of Capillária.

  4. 4

    The garments of the oihas.

  5. 5

    Wherewith the oihas are nourished.

  6. 6

    The fattening of bulloks.

  7. 7

    The bold and ardent champions of women's suffrage, who throughout Europe contend against the lamentable oppression of the female sex, will surely marvel, and perhaps will not even believe me, that Opula, the queen of the oihas, who had spent her whole life in the pursuit of pleasures and delights, in play and the sucking of sweets, and who thus, according to our own understanding, led the lowest conceivable form of intellectual life, grasped with surprising quickness the whole sense and import of all those intricate questions which I set before her touching our life upon dry land: — the more marvelous is this, in that I have already mentioned the shameful and humiliating method to which I was obliged to have recourse, that I might approach her wholly indifferent understanding through her senses, by means of the oiha tongue's peculiar rapturous music, made up wholly of interjections, and apt rather to stir the senses than to awaken ideas.

  8. 8

    I myself was no less astonished, when, at one point in my exposition, she stopped me without warning, stretched her fairy-like body voluptuously, and, looking down at me from beneath her long lashes, gave me a sign that it was enough, that she understood everything, and that I might hope.

  9. 9

    This last I did not understand, nor what bearing it had upon my dispassionate discourse, but neither had I leisure to reflect upon it, for her majesty began to speak of other matters.

  10. 10

    She gave me to understand that I had spoken a great many superfluous things, and, to my very great consternation, declared that I held wholly false notions touching the relation between the two sexes of the human race.

  11. 11

    From all that I had set before her, she could by no means see in what respect our women were oppressed among us, nor did she in general understand what I meant by oppression.

  12. 12

    It was true, she said, that our women, as I had described them, did not live so well as the oihas — but on the other hand her impression was that our men lived a great deal worse, and stood upon a far lower footing — bearing to the women some such relation as servants bear to their masters.

  13. 13

    This surprising declaration, which asserted the very opposite of the truth, astonished me to such a degree that I fell to protesting hotly and with some anger.

  14. 14

    She heard me out, smiling, and asked me to explain how I came by it, and upon what I founded my conviction that our men stood upon a higher footing, that it was they who represented and stood for the race, that it was they who prepared the development of the race, and secured the future, in the direction of a higher and more perfect life.

  15. 15

    Happy to speak of the most illustrious spirits of my sex, I recited off-hand a number of names, the very embodiments of the most sublime and mightiest ideas, thoughts, designs, discoveries, and inventions, which serve to prepare, in part, the bodily advancement and comfort of the human race, and in part the aspirations of its soul toward higher reforms.

  16. 16

    I spoke of the geniuses of natural science, who, in the labyrinths of logic's immaterial kingdom, discovered such connections as, once reduced to practical use, enabled us, overcoming the resistance of dead matter upon land, in water, and in air, to travel more freely and more swiftly than any other living creature upon the earth.

  17. 17

    I related how, as the fruit of centuries of labor, man may today be regarded as the highest form of living life, uniting in his own possibilities all that life produces, severally, in a thousand other kinds: in one person, mammal and insect and fish and bird.

  18. 18

    And all this we owe to men, who through the centuries, with the industry of ants, gathered and laid the bricks to raise that mighty edifice from which the man of the future shall look down upon the very globe of the Earth on which he dwells, and lift his head into the neighborhood of the starry sky.

  19. 19

    This edifice grows ever greater, ever mightier, and must in the end reach the vault of heaven itself, the throne of that Unnameable Power which Kant calls the categorical imperative, the throne of the Supreme Power which the human race is destined to fill and to occupy.

  20. 20

    That I might render sensible so very abstract a picture, I described an observatory tower, set upon the summit of a desolate high mountain, far from the petty and bustling life below, in the highest strata of the pure ocean of air.

  21. 21

    Its glass dome, like an eye turned toward heaven, stares fixedly upon the stars: and out of the pupil of that eye looks a spiritualized human countenance: the face of a gray-haired scholar, who is already beyond the wretched appetites and necessities of the animal body, whose vital force, rather than throb and writhe through the manifold pulses of the flesh, has run together into a single point: a divine, well-nigh abstract point, like the focus of his telescope's lens, which, the smaller it grows, the stronger it becomes, and the more it magnifies and draws nearer the Unattainable.

  22. 22

    And I described this scholar, the true Man, the Knight of the Future, the Lover of the Unknown, who, beyond the narrow prison of petty personal life and the instinct of self-preservation, stands for the whole Race, fights for the whole Race, and consumes himself, that he might be more and greater than that for which he was born.

  23. 23

    At this sentence my mistress broke in upon me, and, in that manner of hers, commonly plain and well-nigh rustic in its bluntness, yet undeniably clear and intelligible, asked me what this more and greater, of which I spoke, looked like.

  24. 24

    With cautious words, and somewhat abashed, I endeavored to explain that That Man himself did not yet know this, but held it his sacred calling to draw nearer to it and come to know it.

  25. 25

    He spends his nights and his days at this labor, reads and studies, gathers together all that his dead companions, in the depths of the past, have hitherto collected — with a burning faith that one day, if not he, then some later fellow spirit of his, will nonetheless attain it.

  26. 26

    I spoke of the books which the ancients wrote, gathering into them everything that they could observe and experience within their short lives.

  27. 27

    This ever-growing pyramid of books, from whose rising surface the dead builders fall away, every newly born man climbs anew, that at the evening of his life, when he comes at last to the summit, he may venture to build it one thought higher.

  28. 28

    And so, stone upon stone, the pyramid of Knowledge and Understanding is built, until at last it reaches that Unknown of which we have spoken.

  29. 29

    Here my mistress stopped me, and made an observation which, in its comically literal-minded reading of my figure, betrayed, I must own, no small share of practical mathematical sense.

  30. 30

    She said that this pyramid of which I spoke would not, in this fashion, rise very high for very long.

  31. 31

    For human life, whether of man or of woman, was never longer than fifty or sixty years, nay, it seemed rather to grow shorter.

  32. 32

    Now, if this pyramid went on growing, we should soon come to the point at which the newly born masons, by the time they reached the top, would find their fifty or sixty years just spent, and would have neither strength nor time left to build it higher.

  33. 33

    They might then begin the whole thing over again from the bottom.

  34. 34

    She would rather counsel that, before we set about building any pyramid, we should first perhaps see to it, with all that science and talent of which I had boasted, that man, with the ever-growing and thickening cleverness and wisdom which he heaps up within himself through a lifetime, should not keel over and drop dead like a brute beast at fifty or sixty years of age, dragging down into nothingness with him all his experience, the gathering of which the newborn must then begin all over again.

  35. 35

    For the rest, she said, there was not much in all that I had told her which interested her.

  36. 36

    (For "I understand" and "it interests me" are, in the oiha tongue, denoted by one and the same word.)

  37. 37

    One image alone had seized upon her attention, and this chiefly because it put her in mind of something she knew very well indeed.

  38. 38

    This image was the observatory tower — not, however, its shining glass dome, but its foundation, which she pictured as a spacious hall resting upon columns.

  39. 39

    And my mistress, in a few short and pithy words, connected with our conversation, at last made me understand what hitherto I had only dimly suspected: whence came the rich and lavish furnishing of Capillária — the splendid palaces of heavy stone, with their strange unfinished roofs — the monumental halls set out with small and delicate trinkets — the flimsy garments — the whole careless luxury: the fruit of an immense labor — though of labor, of toil, of exertion, I had not discovered so much as a trace in the society of the oihas.

  40. 40

    Now, all this marvel is built by the bulloks, those dreadful little monsters, upon whom I can scarcely bear to think without a qualm of nausea.

  41. 41

    To what end they do it, the oihas neither know nor care — they have never in their lives concerned themselves with causal natural science, but attend only to the phenomenon itself, and even that only in so far as it enters into some relation with their own personal comfort.

  42. 42

    So much, however, is certain: that the bulloks, the stunted and dwarfed males of oiha society, or rather its domestic animals, have for centuries put forth some dreadful exertion of unknown purpose, which has nothing whatever to do with their wretched, pitiable bodily lives, since they sacrifice for this exertion not only themselves but their offspring as well.

  43. 43

    I myself saw a great deal of them at their labor: they set about heaping together vast edifices, with foundation-works so heavy and so deep as to suggest that they reckon upon some dreadful mass of matter that must come to rest upon those foundations.

  44. 44

    I understand somewhat of architecture, and I ascertained that everything about me, everything in which the oihas dwelt, was, tower by tower, some vast unfinished work, some mighty undertaking that had been left off.

  45. 45

    Opula now explained to me that my reasoning was entirely correct: the bulloks do not, of their own free will, leave off building, nor do they, for their own part, ever consider it finished at that point at which, from the standpoint of the oihas, it has already become quite suitable for habitation.

  46. 46

    To what height the bulloks would build their tower, were they but let alone, has never yet been ascertained, for this is a matter that has never interested the oihas in the least.

  47. 47

    The oihas simply wait until the building has reached a certain height, and is comfortably habitable — whereupon they smoke out the whole place with a strong spirit (whose odor, as I have had occasion to observe, bears a close resemblance to that of certain perfumes which our own fashionable ladies employ): the building bulloks drop dead, they are swept out, and the oihas take possession of the palace.

  48. 48

    The bulloks who remain alive at once set about building a new tower, and this has gone on in this fashion for centuries, so that today many thousands of splendid and habitable palaces stand at the disposal of the oihas.

  49. 49

    To my eager questions upon this subject, my mistress related, indifferently and with a shrug, that there had once lived a sick and unfortunate oiha whose mania it was that she could speak with the bulloks, and understood their tongue.

  50. 50

    This unfortunate woman, whom her fellows afterward put to death on account of her unclean intercourse with the filthy and degenerate bulloks, maintained that the bulloks had once explained to her what significance these towers held for them.

  51. 51

    Among these wretched vermin there had taken root the fixed idea that above the dense and flowing medium (that is to say, the waters that press down upon the sea floor) in which they live, there follows a thinner, brighter, infinitely greater and freer world, could one but somehow attain the surface of this medium.

  52. 52

    They had therefore banded together to build a tower that should reach up to it — this tower would carry them up to the surface of the sea, where they might at last unite with those divine beings who dwell in the region of those distant spheres. Only — as we have seen — they can never finish the tower, for the oihas seize it from them halfway, and they must begin the whole thing over again as often as before.

  53. 53

    This put me in mind of what we know concerning bees, and I inquired no further.

  54. 54

    It came out, moreover, that the bulloks, who are themselves deprived of any dwelling, furnish to the oihas, in like manner, not only clothing, but even — as I have already mentioned, and must yet speak of, however much the matter disgusts and humiliates me — their very food.

  55. 55

    That infinitely fine and airy silken fabric in which the oihas swathe their transparent bodies is a peculiar product of the fully mature, aged bulloks, of a kind not unlike our own silk thread.

  56. 56

    The aged, fully grown bullok, under ordinary circumstances (should he not first be eaten or smoked out), spins himself a cocoon: for this purpose he emits from his brain, through his mouth, a very thin, long, black thread, that the cocoon may be dense and impervious to sight.

  57. 57

    The bullok-cocoon the oihas throw — precisely as we do with the silk cocoon — into boiling water; the bullok-pupa drops dead, and the thread may thereupon be unwound and made into cloth.

  58. 58

    One such thread once came into my hands; I even brought some of it away with me, and upon chemical analysis it turned out, to my astonishment, to be made of the very same substance of which our own ink is made.

  59. 59

    But comparatively few bulloks attain this advanced age, at which their brain, the most important raw material of the oiha economy, turns into an ink-like substance.

  60. 60

    As a rule the oihas catch them up before this — for bullok-brain is, in fact, one of the chief foods of this country's natives, their principal food and their delicacy, and besides this it has yet another important office, as a foodstuff, which — reluctantly though it be — I must here touch upon.

  61. 61

    Here I shall mention only one peculiar feature of the preparation of this food.

  62. 62

    The reader will still recall, from the description of my first banquet, which I took together with the oihas, in what manner this brain is pressed out of the boiled bullok-head.

  63. 63

    It was only later, however, that I learned that bullok-marrow, as a delicacy, comes in several grades of quality.

  64. 64

    Her majesty informed me that, raw and unfattened, bullok-brain is not of so fine a quality, but that there is a certain food of the bulloks, with which, if they gorge themselves upon it, their brain turns into a delicacy of the first quality, delicate and pleasant to the taste.

  65. 65

    This food does not grow upon the sea floor: on certain occasions it is wont to come drifting down from above, in the shape of thin, many-layered sheets, full of small black specks.

  66. 66

    She showed me one specimen of this plant.

  67. 67

    I cried out in astonishment: it was a scholarly book, if I remember rightly, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra," in a condition altogether sodden and disintegrated.

  68. 68

    It appeared to have come down here from some sunken ship, along with other books.

  69. 69

    Her majesty told me that the bullok destined for roasting and eating is commonly fattened for some weeks upon this plant, that his brain may become pleasant to the taste and easily digestible.

The particulars

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