In 1926 Bánffy retired from public life in Budapest and went back to live at Bonczhida. From then until his death he devoted himself to literature and the arts, partly as a prolific writer whose major work was the now classic trilogy about life in Hungary from 1904 to 1914, and partly in being one of the leading spirits in founding a publishing house to encourage young Transylvanian writers in Hungarian to become better known and so retain their identity in the face of Romanian domination. Bánffy’s published works also included novels, short stories, plays and two volumes of autobiography.
On returning to Transylvania he acquired dual Romanian and Hungarian citizenship and, trusted by both sides though holding no official position with either, worked hard to reconcile the mutually suspicious governments in Budapest and Bucharest. His work was made easier for him as, unlike a some of the other Hungarian landowners, he spoke Romanian fluently. Despite the huge success of the Trilogy and widespread public appreciation of Bánffy’s cultural work in Transylvania, it is saddening to note that his political aims were not always understood by some of his fellow aristocrats who misinterpreted his efforts at rapprochement with Romania as acts of disloyalty to an afflicted and deprived Hungary. Ironically enough the (unpublished) letters of the distinguished Romanian diplomat Virgil Tilea, reveal that he too was subjected to similar criticism from his peers in Bucharest because of his friendship with Bánffy.
The proof of the right-mindedness of both these clearsighted patriots was finally proved in 1943. Early in the war what the Hungarians considered to have been an historic injustice to their country was in part rectified when the so-called Vienna Award restored to Hungary the northern part of Transylvania which included Kolozsvár, the castle and lands of Bonczhida, and the Bánffy forest holdings in the mountains. Romania did not take the same view. On 9 June 1943, Bánffy went to Bucharest to meet the Romanian Foreign Minister, Georges Mironescu, in order to try to persuade the Romanians to sign a separate peace with the Allies and thereby forestall a Russian invasion and the destruction and the Soviet-imposed political revolution this would inevitably bring about. Despite warnings from Hitler that he knew very well what was going on, both sides did agree to abandon the Axis, but there the agreement stopped. Romania, whose claim to historic rights over the whole region had brought about the transfer of sovereignty after the First World War, wanted the immediate return of Northern Transylvania while Bánffy argued that it would be better to leave this question in abeyance until the war was over when the great powers would make a final decision.
Bánffy’s private dream, and that of many other Transylvanians at that time, was that this was the opportunity for Transylvania once again to become semi-autonomous as it had been in the seventeenth century. The return to Hungarian rule of the northern part of the province by the 1940 Vienna award had not been greeted by many Transylvanians with quite the same joy that it had been in Budapest. What Bánffy and his friends really wanted was a measure of independence for their beloved country; and though he and the Hungarian Foreign Ministry both wished to postpone a decision on the future of Transylvania, it was not entirely for the same reasons. Neither wanted to offer such a hostage to Fortune as would be a preliminary pledge to return those disputed lands to Romania. It was an agonizing choice, for Bánffy realized that unless both Hungary and Romania agreed to abandon the Axis, this dream would be for ever unobtainable. Nevertheless the negotiations were continued, and there was a further meeting between him and a Romanian delegation, this time headed by Iuliu Maniu. Once again the stumbling block proved to be the Transylvanian question and negotiations were broken off on 23 June 1943. Nevertheless these secret negotiations had one remarkable success. Bánffy was able to arrange that Kolozsvár was declared an open city and so its historic centre was spared the ferocious bombing that devastated much of the surrounding country.
In 1944, as the Russians advanced towards Kolozsvár, the German army looted the castle of Bonczhida, and set it on fire as a spiteful revenge for Bánffy’s part in trying to persuade the Romanians to sign a separate peace. The contents of Bonczhida were loaded onto 17 trucks to be taken to Germany and were bombed to smithereens by the allied air forces. The once beautiful medieval and baroque castle is now a largely roofless, windowless, floorless ruin with most of its baroque decoration destroyed. Bánffy himself lived until 1950, dying at the age of 77 in Budapest after staying as long as he could in Kolozsvár (Cluj) trying desperately to save what still remained of his family inheritance. He did not succeed.
A prolific writer, his great work the trilogy A Transylvanian Tale, was described in 1980 by Professor István Nemeskurty, one of the speakers at the 1994 symposium, as essential reading for all Hungarians who wished to understand the history and character of their own country. It had been Nemeskurty’s article, published in a Budapest literary review when the Communist régime was still in power, that had led to the re-publication in 1982 of the first volume (Megszámláltattál — They Were Counted). The English titles of the second and third books are They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided. On the fly-leaves of each of the three books is printed a quotation from the Book of Daniel describing Belshazzar’s Feast. These are taken from a Hungarian Protestant version of the Old Testament. In December 1993 the whole trilogy was republished in Budapest in one de luxe volume, and it was again critically acclaimed.
As we were getting into our stride trying to make a viable English language version of this extraordinary book I reluctantly became only too aware of the leisurely pace of the trilogy, whose first volume — though it can stand on its own as a complete work of art — is much the same length as Anna Karenina. I estimated that if we were not careful the full text of our translation of the trilogy would be nearly as long as all four volumes of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. This meant that, as English needed more words than Hungarian to achieve the same effect, we would have to eliminate all textual repetitions (some used for emphasis in the original) and probably sacrifice some inessential details in the many subplots as well as some political detail that would be meaningless to anyone not a dedicated scholar of Hungarian political history: that is if any publisher were to look at it twice; and this despite the fact that the recent complete republication in one weighty tome — the original three volumes came out in 1934, 1937 and 1940 — and the symposium held in April 1994, had transformed a dead writer into one very much alive — at least in Hungary.
A Transylvanian Tale is a remarkable work, compulsive and romantic, filled with love and sorrow and bewilderment and sex and action and splendid set-pieces of grand shooting parties, balls in country-houses, gambling for vertiginous stakes, and dramatic scenes in Parliament; as well as benign social comment, which can erupt into indignant condemnation of social folly. It is written by a man of amazingly clear sight, a patriot who loved his country — and women — and who understood, even if he could not wholly forgive, the follies and the political blindness which finally led to its dismemberment and humiliation after the First World War. Bánffy himself was an eye-witness to many of the historical scenes he describes in the book; and his detailed description of the last Habsburg coronation (published as his Emlékeimböl — From My Memories, an early book of memoirs now out of print-though we have started doing it into English) forms a sad footnote to the Habsburg domination which had so preoccupied Hungarian politicians from 1848 to the fall of the dynasty in 1918. As the struggle with the Habsburgs was the background theme to the trilogy, my conviction grew that this was a book which, if published in the West, would lead to a far greater understanding not only of present-day Hungary but also of the conflicts now erupting all over the Balkans.