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