Hungarian Literature

[Heteronym]

I'd recommend Géza Csáth: he is virtually unknown here in Portugal, where he's only recently been graced with a short-story collection translation. From what I understand, Csáth belongs to that delightful tradition of drug-addicted writers who write a handful of works and then commit suicide. He also predated William Burroughs in the whole kill-my-wife-with-a-revolver shtick. No one's original anymore.

His drug of choice was morphine, which he acquired easily in the asylums where he worked as a psychiatrist. His knowledge of mental illness and psychology helped him compose wonderfully dark stories. One of my favorites is 'The Matricide', the story of two fatherless brothers who grow detatched from their mother and entertain themselves torturing small animals before proceeding to people. Csáth mapped out with precision the pathology of psychopaths - cruelty to animals, objectifying people, juvenile delinquency - decades before forensics started studying serial killers.

His drug condition seems to have lead him to paranoia, which caused him to shoot his wife and commit suicide. He also left a diary and a novel based on his experience in asylums, both of which I'd love to read one day. I believe the diary is available in English.

[saliotthomas]

Last year i discovered Miklos Banffy and found They Were counted the best read of that year.I would recomend it to all Tolstoy lovers, i would put it right beside War and peace and it would not suffer the comparison.

[Bjorn]

I just bought Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies and its companion piece Revised Edition, which come highly recommended by a friend who usually knows his stuff. Saving them for summer, though; that's about 1000 pages, all in all. But the story behind them is fascinating: first, he wrote Celestial Harmonies, a huge family history in which his father plays a key role - and just as it comes back from the printer's, he learns that his father was actually an informant for the secret police during the communist dictatorship and he decides to rewrite the revelant bits and publish it as a separate volume...

[Heteronym]

I'm now haflway through Sándor Márai's Casanova in Bolzano: the novel takes some time to find a plot, but the prose has an elegance and rhytm that makes reading it enjoyable.

The author claims the novel is a complete fiction about Casanova's life, inventing a new story for the famous lover after he made a real-life escape from a Venetian prison. Thankfully the novel has been sparse in details about the protagonist's past, making it less impenetrable than most historical novels that deal with real people.

Although I've acquired this novel in English, I'm glad to see that he has several novels translated in Portuguese; depending on how the rest of the novel goes, Mr. Márai may be another name for me to add to my writers list

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Bjorn

I just bought Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies...that's about 1000 pages, all in all.

I spotted this book today. I salute your energy to get through something so large. Regardless of whether I'm engaged in the story, I've always got one eye on the next title...and the other on the book after that.

One book that's interesting me, although I've not seen it in the shops yet, is the new NYRB Classics edition of Karinthy Frigyes' A Journey Round My Skull (1939), his account of having been diagnosed with a brain tumour in his late forties, going through symptoms, the diagnosis and subsequent surgery. And like mostl NYRB books, it has a great cover:

And on the subject of Hungarian memoirs, I spotted a lovely book from Anthem Press today, by Zilahy Peter, called The Last Window-Giraffe. It comes in the style of one of those kids' encyclopaedias going the range of the Hungarian alphabet with musings, recollections, and the like, from across Soviet lines. Its pages have two columns and its peppered with the author's photographs. Glossy.

[Eric]

It's nice to see that Hungarian literature is making a bit of a breakthrough in translation. I'd never heard of the Anthem Press before, but I have now.

The idea of the Eszterházy is intriguing: rewriting a book after you've found out a key fact that changes everything.

[nnyhav]

Jonathan Derbyshire report from 7May:

Metropole

This review of a newly-translated novel by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Karinthy appears in the latest issue of New Humanist.

METROPOLE by Ferenc Karinthy (trans. George Szirtes)
Telegram Books £8.99

Metropole, the first of Hungarian novelist Ferenc Karinthy’s books to be translated into English, comes garlanded with the most extravagant praise. The dust jacket carries the prediction of the French writer G.O. Chateaureynaud that the novel will in due course find a place in the twentieth-century canon, alongside the The Trial and 1984.

more ...

(here rather than Blogosphere for topical interest)

[Stewart]

Thanks, nnyhav. I'd read that review before and I think that perhap alongs with my own, it's the only other one out there. At least it seemed that way toward the end of May, when it was officially released. I've made a duplicate copy of this post and placed it on the thread for the book.

[nnyhav]

Good call! Don't know how I'd missed your post (mea culpa).

Thread management has got to be a task of Ariadnean (or is it Arachnean?) proportions (world wide web indeed). (Your sticky index in Writers and Assorted Lits was another good call.) Perhaps it would help to encourage those who initiate single-book topics to link them in the relevant national literature thread. Likewise, we previously linked some Hungarian Lit resources here:
Translated literature - books, websites

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by nnyhav

Thread management has got to be a task of Ariadnean (or is it Arachnean?) proportions (world wide web indeed).

I suspect it will be harder as time goes by. Right now it's nice and slow, but still busy enough.

(Your sticky index in Writers and Assorted Lits was another good call.)

Thanks. I'll be away for a couple of days this weekend and, at sometime soon, hopefully this month, I'll be implementing a URL rewriter, so instead of:

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...ead.php?p=2194

we'll get:

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...iterature.html

That should make the place even more discoverable via the search engines.

Perhaps it would help to encourage those who initiate single-book topics to link them in the relevant national literature thread.

Maybe. At the top of this thread there is a link that says Hungarian Literature and that should take the user to every piece tagged hungarian literature. I've been making efforts to ensure that every book thread is at least tagged by nationality, language, author, *insert country* literature, and translator(s). That way, like a translator, click their name and everything they've done, that has a thread here, is available to them.

[Eric]

The Dutch daily Trouw drew readers' attention this morning to two newly translated (into Dutch, that is) Hungarian novels by authors:

László Darvasi:

| hlo - Hungarian Literature Online

Laszlo Darvasi

György Dragomán:

Dragomán György honlapja Welcome

PEN American Center - György Dragomán on Public Lives/Private Lives

Both books are evidently magical realist in style.

It looks as if the Dragomán novel, The White King is available in English. It is set in the Hungarian area of Romania where Dragomán was born in 1973 and involves a string of stories or anecdotes from Ceausescu's Romania, seen through the eyes of an eleven-year old boy, involving football, Chernobyl and other matters.

The Dutch reviewer, however, preferred the Darvasi book (translates as: The Tear Showmen) which is set in the late 17th century when Budapest is being liberated from Turkish imperial oppression and a strange band of showmen travel round the country weeping various substances and helping people in cases of murder and rape. I couldn't work out whether the Darvasi has been translated into that language.

[obooki]

Here are some Hungarian short stories by classic writers, though really badly formatted if you're actually intending to read them.

The Hungarian Quarterly has a large number of Hungarian stories, excerpts of novels, and articles available.

George Szirtes, translator of many Hungarian novels into English, has an often very entertaining and enlightening blog.

And you can find a pretty in-depth history of Hungarian literature here.

[Eric]

Thanks for that, Obooki. I'm now found a Dragomán story, at:

The Hungarian Quarterly, VOLUME XLVIII * No. 188 * Winter 2007

And a chapter from one of his novels:

The Hungarian Quarterly, VOLUME XLVII * No. 182 * Summer 2006

There's also plenty by or about Péter Nádas, but I can't yet find any Darvasi.

[Stewart]

I've just found a number of names on the Hungarian Foundation's site of books subventioned for English translation. I have no idea over what time it spans and what some of the books may have been translated as, but it lists the authors and publishers. Either way, it's more names to look out for.

Magyar költői antológia II. (Makkai Á.) Atlantis Centaur, (Chicago)
Fiatal magyar költők antológiája (Gyukics)Neshui (St.Louis, USA)
Baka István: versek Abbey Press (Jordanstown)
Bánffy Miklós: .. és híjával találtattál Arcadia Books (London)
Bánffy Miklós: … darabokra szaggattatol Arcadia Books (London)
Bartis Attila: A nyugalom Archipelago (New York)
Borbély Szilárd: Berlin-Hamlet Agite/Fra (Praha)
Dalos György: Körülmetélés Brandl and Schles. (Rose Bay,AUS)
Dragomán György. A fehér király Houghton &Mifflin (London)
Eörsi László: Mítoszok helyett.. Center fr Hung.Stud.(Wayne,USA)
Ferenczi A. (szerk): Genetika-génetika Handsel Press (Millford, Scotl.)
Gömöri György: versek Shoestring press (London)
Jankovics Marcell: Napkönyv Center.Hung.Stud.(Wayne, USA)
József Attila: versek Green Integer (Los Angeles)
Karinthy Ferenc: Epepe Telegram (London)
Kemény János önéletírása Kegan Paul (london)
Krasznahorkai L.: Háború és háború New Directions (New York)
Mikes Kelemen: Törökországi levelek Kegan Paul Int. (London )
Nádas Péter: A tűzről és a tudásról FarrarStraus &Giroux (N.Y.)
Nagy Attila: Shakespeare 1000x Sh. Kingdom H. (Sepsisztgy.)
Nagy Attila: Sh. bűvöletében Sh.Kingdom House (Sepsisztgy.)
Pap Károly: Azarel Steerforth Press (Royalton,USA)
Radnóti Miklós: versek Enitharmon Press (London)
Romsics Ignác: A trianoni békekonf. Cent.for Hung.Stud.(Wayne,USA)
Szabó Magda: Az ajtó Harvill Press (London)
Szerb Antal: Pendragon legenda Pushkin Press (London)
Zilahy Péter: Az utolsó… Anthem Press (London)

[Eric]

Don't you see, Stewart, why I get fed up of lists? If you have a list, the name of the translator, publisher and the date of publication are vital.

Also, whether the book is published by a respectable publisher in the USA or Britain, or by some quasi-vanity set-up. Arcadia, Kegan Paul, Pushkin, Enitharmion mean something (though I remember the days of Routledge, Kegan, Paul).

But what has to be established is what realistic chance there is of finding these books on Amazon or elsewhere. Otherwise it remains an impressive list which doesn't actually produce the goods.

The fact that they don't even give the English titles is a bit of a laugh.