Description:
Square light yellow non-sticky tear off note. On the soot stained front in blue ink and rather large letters, considering my father wrote it, “Hol volt, hol nem volt, volt egyszer…” On the back in my own tiny hand “where there was, where there was not, there once was”
Story:
Some point in high school, probably my junior or senior year, when I really started to get along with my dad, we had a conversation about fairy stories and the Hungarian language. Somewhere I have a note with the Hungarian alphabet and a phonetic key that Dad wrote out for me. Dad explained that in English we start all fairy tails with “Once upon a time.” In Hungary child stories of fancy also all start with the same opening phrase. He said it quick in Hungarian and then translated it for me and then wrote it down for me. He made a point of telling me that in the final “there once was” or "volt egyszer…” the "there" should be emphasized similar to (and this is how he explained it to me, mind you, a lot of cracking the ice in our relationship came from watching science fiction together) the way that Kahn in Star Trek the Wrath of Kahn points at the Enterprise, when they are playing hide and seek in the nebula and says, “There she is.”
This was during my “I'm-going-to-be-a-famous-and-amazing-author phase and I kept the note wanting to come up with a list of how other languages start their fairy tales and write a collection of original fairy tails that use those translated beginnings. My ambition for that project was short lived, but the note has survived.
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