Elek Benedek
1859–1929
Biography
Elek Benedek worked as a journalist and writer in Hungary, and he lived from 1859 to 1929. He was born in Kisbacon, in Transylvania, which was then part of the Austrian Empire, and he studied at Székelyudvarhely before continuing in Budapest. He began as a journalist for the Budapest Hírlap and other newspapers, and from 1887 to 1892 he sat in the Hungarian Parliament, where he spoke for children's literature, folk poetry and public education.
He is remembered above all as a collector and reteller of folk tales from the Székely region of Transylvania. Early in his career he travelled with the folklorist Jób Sebesi to gather local tales, and the collection that came out of this work won him such wide praise that he cut short his studies. In 1889 he founded, with Lajos Pósa, Az Én Újságom, a pioneering Hungarian magazine of literature for young readers, and he later edited youth periodicals and series of books for them. His five-volume gathering of Hungarian folk stories and legends, issued in 1894–1896, is among his largest undertakings.
After the 1920 peace settlement gave Transylvania to Romania, he returned to Kisbacon and kept editing Cimbora, a magazine for young readers, until his death in 1929. He was also the father of the author and translator Marcell Benedek. The site holds his A csudafa, whose Hungarian title means roughly 'the wonder tree', so readers can meet one of his works in the Hungarian he wrote in, alongside the folk-tale collections that made his name.
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Books
A csudafa
by Elek Benedek
Mirkó, king of seven countries, has every treasure but a child, until a day lost in a strangely changed forest brings him one. Elek Benedek's fairy-tale novel follows the story through fairyland, a spark, the spirit of the earth and a wondrous tree to a happy ending.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.