My untranslatable name

A political history

When my parents went to register my name after I was born, they carried out an especially elaborate plan. They acquired a chocolate bar (a rare and precious item in 1980s Romania) and used it to bribe the bureaucrat in charge of taking down the names of newborns. Attached to the chocolate bar was a piece of paper with the name of a ninth-century nomadic Magyar warlord — unpronounceable in most European languages — spelled out in outsized capital letters. My parents’ mission was to ensure the untranslatability and correct spelling of my future name. For better or worse, judging by my birth certificate, their operation was successful.

To make the untranslatability of one’s name into such a salient goal sounds bizarre in the current European context, where the translatability and transferability of ideas, goods and people is widely celebrated. And after all, aren’t Michael, Michel, Michiel, Michał, Mihai, Mihály technically the same name within a shared multilingual heritage? But I was born in Romania in 1987, as a member of the Hungarian minority. At the time, national minorities in Romania were aggressively targeted by the wide-ranging assimilation policies of the National Communist regime, led by dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. One feature of this assimilationist regime was the state-imposed spelling of an individual’s name. In that context, achieving the untranslatability of a name became a sign of minority strength, making the closed authoritarian world of 1980s Romania more malleable, heterogeneous, and endurable.

During that decade, more than ten percent of the population of 22,8 million belonged to a national minority. Hungarians, living mostly in the northwestern region known as Transylvania, and counting close to 1,6 million at that time, represented — and still do — one of the largest minority communities within Europe.¹

Romania had been a multi-ethnic state ever since its creation in 1859, and expressly so following World War I, when its territory was nearly doubled by annexed regions from the dissolved Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Through the interwar period, Romanian ethno-nationalism was deployed as the main tool of state-building, aiming to unify and centralize the heterogeneous new country. The communist regime, established in 1947, continued this reliance on nationalist policies, despite voicing an official Marxist-Leninist ideology. By the 1980s, Ceauşescu’s rule became increasingly severe and the standard of living declined. Besides the regime’s aggressive pro‑natalist policy (which outlawed abortion and contraception), and besides the terror inflicted on the population by the secret police (the Securitate), the decade saw the introduction of a harsh austerity policy, rationing food, gas, heating and electricity. In this context, state-led extreme ethno-nationalism — accompanied by Ceauşescu’s personality cult — was a blunt mechanism to legitimize an unpopular regime.

Intent on homogenizing Romania’s population and eliminating any pockets of cultural and linguistic difference, the regime grew more antagonistic towards the national minorities living in the country. This manifested in overt and covert measures brought against various educational, cultural and religious institutions of those minority communities, paired with disproportionate harassment by the Securitate. These measures aimed to eradicate the public use of minority languages and to diminish the cultural reproduction of minority communities. Ultimately, they induced a wave of legal and illegal emigration to neighboring Hungary, Western Europe, and Israel.³

I imagine the atmosphere of 1980s Romania through the claustrophobic metaphor of being under siege. I was born into a society besieged politically, socially and economically by its own government, but also into a minority community besieged by a chauvinistic nation-state. The names of non-majority citizens were distorted systematically at registration through imposed translation and careless misspelling. Hungarian family names like László or Szilágyi could end up in Romanian documents as Laslo or Silagi, losing their distinguishing form and diacritical marks. State bureaucrats would also wantonly translate Hungarian first names into Romanian versions. In countless cases, newborns for whom parents picked first names like János or Krisztina left the hospital with documents that said Ioan or Cristina. From the perspective of a besieged community, this meant a negation of their dignity and cultural belonging.

Romanian law under the communist regime actually did have a stipulation which called for the original version of names to be registered at birth — supposedly referring to the form used within minority languages. It was hardly the only piece of legislation that was not respected or enforced by the state apparatus: by the 1980s, the translation of minority names into Romanian had become a pronounced and systemic feature of state bureaucracy in the country.

Nonetheless, just as citizens found ways to circumvent restrictive rationing, so too did minorities find ways to outmaneuver assimilationist pressures. My parents’ generation of educated, white-collar Transylvanian Hungarians reacted to the state’s invasive measures by deliberately orchestrating untranslatability. They saw obstructing the translation of names as an act of collective self-defense.

My parents’ strategy to ensure I would be untranslatably named Szabolcs deployed a key survival mechanism of the period: bribing a state official with a scarce consumer good. They effectively broke one law (bribery) in the hope of upholding another (the stipulation that original names must be registered at birth).

To find those untranslatable names, members of the Hungarian minority reached far back to a formative tradition of early nineteenth-century Hungarian nation-building. In the 1830s, when Hungary was a subordinated part of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, those wishing to boost national identity and support the Hungarian independence movement often did so by adopting what they considered to be quintessentially ancient Magyar names — like Árpád, Attila, Csaba for boys, or Csenge, Emese, Kincső for girls. Some of these ethno-national names came from the increased historical study of the seven nomadic tribes that settled in the Carpathian Basin in the ninth century, subsequently popularized through nineteenth-century nationalist literary works. Others were invented traditions, created by the Romantic writers of the period — like the poet Mihály Vörösmarty (1800-1855), who was responsible for creating and disseminating the still-popular female names of Enikő, Tünde and Dalma. Following the example of these early nation-builders, Transylvanian Hungarians in 1980s Romania picked for their children such strategically untranslatable « pagan » names that defied any equivalency in Romanian.

My own ancient Finno-Ugric first name, Szabolcs — perched on the boundary of scarce historical record and national myth — was well suited for the anti-assimilation effort, as it was and remains utterly untranslatable and unpronounceable in the Latin musicality of Romanian or — to my later regret — the Germanic soundscape of English. For my parents, my name upheld a well-defined particularism and difference in the face of uniformization. They saw transformation as leading to assimilation, and assimilation leading to disappearance.

Communists in Romania were not alone in targeting minorities with assimilating naming practices, nor were they the most radical. Between 1984-87, neighboring communist Bulgaria carried out a large-scale name-changing campaign against its Bulgarian Muslim community. Bulgarian Muslims had to acquire new identity documents with new Christian names drawn from a state-approved list, turning Hasan into Hristo, Osman into Veselin, and Yuksel into Yulian. Without this new ID, they could not apply for marriage certificates or access their bank accounts, salaries or pensions. Around 850.000 citizens had their names compulsorily changed.

Going back further in time, the same dynamic of forced assimilation and homogeneity in naming can be seen in nationalizing British, French or Russian empires. Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations shows how in the first half of the nineteenth century, Irish place-names were Anglicized, due to the standardization practices of the Ordnance Survey, eliminating the use of the native language. Under British rule, officials would systematically Anglicize Gaelic surnames, turning Ó Dálaigh into O’Daly, or Ó Draighneáin into Thornton.

The most striking historical echo for the anti-assimilation naming strategies of the 1980s, though, comes from much closer to home, namely the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century. Hungary had by then risen to the status of a partially sovereign partner state with the Austrian Empire, which meant that it was ruled by a Hungarian political elite. Yet the country was home to various and sizable national minority communities — with Romanians constituting one of the largest such groups.

The scripts for Hungarians and Romanians were flipped in the late nineteenth century. As the historian Ágoston Berecz shows, Hungarian elites engaged in assimilationist policies aimed to assert their political and cultural dominance over the minority communities.3⁴ Specifically, a law in 1894 decreed that all names within the official registries must be displayed in a Hungarian-sounding form. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences published a brochure which listed the supposed Hungarian equivalents of all the non-Hungarian names; local notaries were eager to implement the compulsory name changes.

Members of the Romanian minority community at the time — most of them living in Transylvania and the Banat, regions that became part of Romania after World War I — found a way to deflect Hungarian nationalist state policy by opting for names without Hungarian equivalents. As Berecz writes, many of these untranslatable Romanian names belonged to saints of the Eastern-rite calendar who were not venerated in the Western Church, and thus not adapted to the Hungarian tradition. More were taken from the pool of pre-Christian Latinate first names, originating in the world of Roman emperors and classical authors. Romanian Orthodox priests were in the habit, apparently, of circulating counter-lists of such untranslatable names within their circles, to have them available at baptisms. Choosing names like Romulus or Traian — like the Hungarian nationalists of the 1830s reaching back to Magyar names — conveyed a link to an ancestral realm upon which the myth of Romanian ethnogenesis was built, proudly expressing Romanian identity, and flying in the face of Hungarian state nationalism.

So, oblivious to this history of the Transylvanian Romanians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 1890s, Transylvanian Hungarians in 1980s Romania found themselves faced with a similar phenomenon of symbolic violence — and came up with a similar response.

Upon further reflection on the history of my own family, I realized that my parents’ preoccupation with the precise spelling of my name — and with viewing the entire affair through a political lens — was a markedly generational and class-specific phenomenon. My own grandparents and great-grandparents — all of them peasants, artisans, and factory workers living in a remote village in Eastern Transylvania, with only a sprinkling of formal education — did not share this emancipatory agenda. My grandparents were born in nationalist interwar Romania that had its own blunt assimilationist policies. According to a 1928 law, first names could only be registered in their Romanian version. On official documents, they became Irina instead of Irén, Albertin instead of Albert, Ana instead of Anna, and Dionisie instead of Dénes. Their parents, my great-grandparents — who spoke not a word of Romanian — lacked the resources and knowledge to even attempt to outmaneuver state policy and convince bureaucrats to bend the rules of naming for them.

More importantly, though, neither of these two generations perceived the transformation of their names to be an issue worth considering. As mid-twentieth century villagers living in an underdeveloped region of an underdeveloped country, they had enough to grapple with before worrying about how their names were written on identity documents. And: their true names and identities were firmly grounded in village life, etched into local memory, regardless of what state-issued papers said. For my grandparents, unlike my urbanized, intellectual parents, the recognition of the local community was enough. The Transylvanian village microcosmos, detached from the official sphere of the Romanian state (at least in this socio-linguistic sense), was so ingrained that my grandparents did not bother to change their names even after the fall of communism in 1989, when the procedure became risk-free and cheap. When I asked my grandmother, she was surprised by the question itself. For her, the need to gain control over the form and the spelling of one’s name in state documents — so vital and symbolic for my parents’ generation — was simply a non-existent problem.

I am in a remarkably privileged position compared to my parents and grandparents. Growing up after the collapse of the hypernationalist Ceauşescu regime, I find that within the transnational sphere where I now operate as an academic, the spelling, order or pronunciation of my name is of little personal and professional consequence.

This is not to say that my parents’ agenda did not bring a set of — considerably lighter — challenges. Unfailingly, the Romanian speakers around me — who have no contact with the Hungarian language, either in school or in popular culture — regularly butcher my name, making me feel alien in my homeland. Ironically, the Romanian renderings that I’ve seen of the name Szabolcs, written down by random secretaries or acquaintances, were eerily close to the name’s very first appearances in twelfth-century Latin manuscripts (« sobolci » or « zobolchu »). The unwillingness of those belonging to majority nationalities to learn the bare fundamentals of the minority languages of their neighbors always struck me as rather unfair. I, after all, spent the better part of my first school year trying to understand the various uses of the Romanian ă, â, and î sounds. Mastering the use of the Hungarian cs, gy, ny, sz, and ty sounds, I imagine, would have been equally challenging for my peers — had they ever tried.

When globalization gripped previously isolated Romania in the 1990s, my name refused to travel — standing out in this new world order like a sore thumb. Romanian media and pop culture were quickly saturated with American English. Most foreign films and TV shows were subtitled instead of dubbed, so my generation generally learned English fluently, happily chatting away amid confused parents and teachers. I often cringed at how my name got stuck on the smooth surface of English sentences. Other names, like Antal or Tamás — considered by Transylvanian Hungarian parents during the Ceaușescu years to be too vulnerable to assimilationist policies — could now be easily transformed into Anthony and Thomas. As a teenager, I longed to be part of this homogenized global linguistic world.

Having lived in the United States and traveled around Europe as an academic nomad for the past few years, my name has been mispronounced and misspelled countless times, with the occasional apologetic caveats and corrective follow-ups. Institutional websites and digital bureaucratic forms of prestigious Western universities do not allow the use of special characters and diacritical marks. In conference programs I sometimes become Sabolcz or Laslo, participating under versions of my name that my parents invested much effort to avoid seeing printed. I find that with time, it troubles me less and less. These distortions are the unfortunate consequence of a navel-gazing global monoculture — and of my entrance into it from the periphery. My parents opposed an authoritarian state by ensuring the correct spelling and untranslatability of my Hungarian name. From my own position, I can simply ask for a correction, which I often readily receive — accompanied, occasionally, with the gift of a conversation, in which I can tell them about my parents bribing a bureaucrat with a chocolate bar to get my name right.

1. This data is based on the 1992 census. According to the 2021 census, the number of Hungarians in Romania is around one million, representing six percent of the national population (which since the 1980s has shrunk to nineteen million). See Valentina Vasile and Ana Maria Dobre, « Overview of Demographic Evolution in Romania », Romanian Statistical Review, 63:4 (2015). 27-45. ↩︎
2. This data is based on the 1992 census. According to the 2021 census, the number of Hungarians in Romania is around one million, representing six percent of the national population (which since the 1980s has shrunk to nineteen million). See Valentina Vasile and Ana Maria Dobre, « Overview of Demographic Evolution in Romania », Romanian Statistical Review, 63:4 (2015). 27-45. ↩︎
3. During communism, more than 200.000 Jews emigrated from Romania to Israel as part of a classified agreement between the two governments. From 1968 to 1989, between 210.000 and 236.000 ethnic Germans left Romania in exchange for payments made by the Federal Republic of Germany. ↩︎
4. Ágoston Berecz, Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland (Berghahn Books, 2020). ↩︎