Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "hungarian"
Three Generations of East European Writers
Some of the most interesting novels are coming today from Eastern Europe. Three such recent books have caught my eye: Kornél Esti (New Directions, 2011, trans. by Bernard Adams) by the Hungarian writer Dezsö Kosztolányi (1885-1936), Coming from an Off-Key Time (Northwestern University Press, 2011, trans. by Alistair Ian Blyth) by the Romanian writer Bogdan Suceava (b. 1969), and All This Belongs to Me (Northwestern University Press, 2009, trans. by Alex Zucker) by the Czech writer Petra Hulová (b. 1979).
Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.
Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!
Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.
Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!
Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy (NYRB, trans. from the Hungarian by John Bátki, introduction by John Lukacs)
Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”
As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.
And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.
Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.
Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”
As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.
And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.
Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.
War and War by László Krasznahorkai
War and War by László Krasznahorkai (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New Directions, 2006)
László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.
I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.
The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).
The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.
But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.
I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.
The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).
The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.
But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
Dezsö Kosztolányi, The Plaster Angel--short stories
Dezsö Kosztolányi, The Plaster Angel (Noran Libro Kiadó, 2010. Trans. from the Hungarian by Eszter Molnár. Ed. by Peter Doherty)
Some of the best books I ever read are books I discovered on my own, either in a library or a bookstore. In fact, half of the pleasure of reading comes, as far as I am concerned, from the surprise of the discovery, which is why I hate the Internet-based paradigm of “if you liked X, then you might like Y”). Venturing into a bookstore is one of the greatest pleasures of travel for me, even if the books are in languages I don’t read.
This summer I entered a small bookstore in Budapest, and discovered a bilingual edition of Dezsö Kosztolányi’s The Plaster Angel, which includes twenty short stories written as early as 1908. I had read two novels of his translated into English, Skylark and Kornél Esti, plus a novella in French, and he already was on my list of great unknown 20th century European writers, so it was with great joy that I grabbed the book off the shelf, and with even greater joy that I took in its French covers and, after a brief inspection, decided that the translation was professionally done.
A few stories about handicapped people—such as the one in which a “poor little invalid” tortures everyone around him with his demands—bring to mind the complex psychology of Stefan Zweig; others, like “The Fat Judge,” “Feri” and “The Swim” have the quiet soulfulness of Chekhov’s stories; others, like “Heart,” in which the demand of a rich widow to have her heart stabbed with a knife after her death, or “Order” about a man who is so obsessed with order that when his wife changes the position of his armchair, he takes the pistol and shoots her, and later, in the ambulance, he is so disturbed by the esthetic asymmetry that he asks the doctor “to sit parallel with him”!—these stories display typical Eastern European dark humor and an absurdist wit reminiscent of Gogol. And then, there are stories with a hint of postmodern wit avant la lettre, such as “The Wondrous Visitation of KH,” in which a young man who wishes to see again his deceased lover has his wish granted, but realizes that they have nothing to tell each other; or “A Robber,” in which a young man who decides to commit his first robbery ends up applying first aid to the woman he had intended to rob: “All in all he was a very untalented robber.” In “The Liars,” a family of creative and imaginative people transforms reality (in which the father is a charming crook) into a magic world reminding us of Steven Millhauser.
I'd like to end with a quote from Kosztolányi’s fellow writer, Sándor Márai. Márai, who had enormous admiration for Kosztolányi, had met him in Budapest, and wrote about him and the world they shared and which disappeared after WWII:
“Kosztolányi and his contemporaries still perceived something different under the entry-word “Literature” than do those writing today. For them literature was simultaneously play and ritual, conspiracy and craft, Eleusinian rite and complicitous pact sealed with blood.” (Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 19441948. Trans. by Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina Books and Central European University Press, 1996)
Some of the best books I ever read are books I discovered on my own, either in a library or a bookstore. In fact, half of the pleasure of reading comes, as far as I am concerned, from the surprise of the discovery, which is why I hate the Internet-based paradigm of “if you liked X, then you might like Y”). Venturing into a bookstore is one of the greatest pleasures of travel for me, even if the books are in languages I don’t read.
This summer I entered a small bookstore in Budapest, and discovered a bilingual edition of Dezsö Kosztolányi’s The Plaster Angel, which includes twenty short stories written as early as 1908. I had read two novels of his translated into English, Skylark and Kornél Esti, plus a novella in French, and he already was on my list of great unknown 20th century European writers, so it was with great joy that I grabbed the book off the shelf, and with even greater joy that I took in its French covers and, after a brief inspection, decided that the translation was professionally done.
A few stories about handicapped people—such as the one in which a “poor little invalid” tortures everyone around him with his demands—bring to mind the complex psychology of Stefan Zweig; others, like “The Fat Judge,” “Feri” and “The Swim” have the quiet soulfulness of Chekhov’s stories; others, like “Heart,” in which the demand of a rich widow to have her heart stabbed with a knife after her death, or “Order” about a man who is so obsessed with order that when his wife changes the position of his armchair, he takes the pistol and shoots her, and later, in the ambulance, he is so disturbed by the esthetic asymmetry that he asks the doctor “to sit parallel with him”!—these stories display typical Eastern European dark humor and an absurdist wit reminiscent of Gogol. And then, there are stories with a hint of postmodern wit avant la lettre, such as “The Wondrous Visitation of KH,” in which a young man who wishes to see again his deceased lover has his wish granted, but realizes that they have nothing to tell each other; or “A Robber,” in which a young man who decides to commit his first robbery ends up applying first aid to the woman he had intended to rob: “All in all he was a very untalented robber.” In “The Liars,” a family of creative and imaginative people transforms reality (in which the father is a charming crook) into a magic world reminding us of Steven Millhauser.
I'd like to end with a quote from Kosztolányi’s fellow writer, Sándor Márai. Márai, who had enormous admiration for Kosztolányi, had met him in Budapest, and wrote about him and the world they shared and which disappeared after WWII:
“Kosztolányi and his contemporaries still perceived something different under the entry-word “Literature” than do those writing today. For them literature was simultaneously play and ritual, conspiracy and craft, Eleusinian rite and complicitous pact sealed with blood.” (Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 19441948. Trans. by Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina Books and Central European University Press, 1996)
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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