Krasznahorkai László

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maidenhair

Guest
Re: Krasznahorkai L?szl?

Stewart said:
There's a short story by Krasznahorkai, called Something Is Burning Outside, on the Guardian website today.
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Eric said:
Interesting to see that the Guardian had a story translated from the Hungarian, and that there is a new translator on the block, i.e. Ottilie Mulzet, as opposed to George Shirts&Ties, whose name appears regularly.

The story appeared to be kind of magical realist. Where is it set? If in Hungary, you wonder why she chose to translated the names of places (e.g. Moss Lake). "Campground" strikes me as an odd way of describing a campsite.

I don't quite get the point of the story. Or if it is set in Hungary proper or the Hungarian-speaking part of Romania (Erd?ly). Because for it to be a meaningful 1989 story, set during the year the Soviet Bloc started to crumble, the reader will need to know about how Hungary and Romania were relating to one another at the time, if the story is to be more than one about a funny man liberating a horse made of soil. Were the borders open? Was it a miracle that he had managed to arrive at all? The symbolism may be lost on us mere Westerners.
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The funny man is Ion Grigorescu and is an artist existing in the real world, here is an interview with him. And I do not think that the meaning of the story is lost to mere Westerners, whatever you mean with this term exactly... neither do I think that magical realist fits it... and for the meaning of the term 'campground' I would like to refer you to wikipedia... It is one of the stories in Seiobo by the way...
 
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maidenhair

Guest
A very long interview with one of his English translators with a strong focus on yet unpublished books in English, in particular Seiobo:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-ottilie-mulzet-interview

[...] The long sentences are truly like curling tentacles, trying to wrap themselves around everything. Many of the smaller meaning-units within one sentence (which typically can be between two and eighteen pages in length) have a “nesting” structure, of subordinate clauses buried within subordinate clauses within further subordinate clauses. One senses something like an attempt to replicate a spiraling infinity within language.

At the same time, there is a deeply ambiguous, multidirectional quality to many of these subordinate clauses. Often, they can be seen as referring both to the phrase that follows as well as the phrase that directly precedes them. This gives the text, overall, a strange sense of endlessly moving somehow forward while always remaining in one place. It is, if you will, the linguistic equivalent of some of the most memorable shots in The Turin Horse, if you recall the scenes where the characters are seen to be struggling forward, searching for water, trying to get somewhere, and yet due to the way they are photographed, they are essentially moving in one place. On one level this makes the text rhizomatic—to use Gilles Deleuze’s terminology—as opposed to a “linear” text: it seems to be branching out in all directions at once. [...]
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Sounds absolutely awesome, if you ask me.
 
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Liam

Liam

Administrator
Satantango in paperback.

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nagisa

nagisa

Spiky member
Relations of Grace (Kegyelmi Viszonyok) came out recently in France. It's a collection of short stories written between Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance. Can't wait to get to it !

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EllisIsland

EllisIsland

Reader
The winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize is
‘Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful. The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango and Seiobo There Below are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence. Krasznahorkai, who writes in Hungarian, has been superbly served by his translators, George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet.’

‘In László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, a sinister circus has put a massive taxidermic specimen, a whole whale, Leviathan itself, on display in a country town. Violence soon erupts, and the book as a whole could be described as a vision, satirical and prophetic, of the dark historical province that goes by the name of Western Civilisation. Here, however, as throughout Krasznahorkai’s work, what strikes the reader above all are the extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way; epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and musical.’

Man Booker International prize 2015 won by 'visionary' László Krasznahorkai
Chair of judges Marina Warner, the academic and writer, compared Krasznahorkai’s work to Kafka – the author’s own personal literary hero – and Beckett. “I feel we’ve encountered here someone of that order,” she said. “That’s a trick that the best writers pull off; they give you the thrill of the strange … then after a while they imaginatively retune you. So now we say, ‘it’s just like being in a Kafka story’; I believe that soon we will say it’s like being in a Krasznahorkai story.”

But Krasznahorkai, she said, was “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful”. He has also, she added, “been superbly served by his translators”, George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, who will share the £15,000 translators’ prize.

“He has two different periods, the earlier one, from the 80s, when he wrote apocalyptic, dark, brooding novels about small towns, small people being destroyed. Then he moved into a luminously beautiful phase, from which we’ve got Seiobo in English. It’s really an extraordinary book.”

Warner called Krasznahorkai’s prose “absolutely stunning”, and a “thrilling” experience to read. “This extraordinary style he has, which people sometimes object to – if you think of it like music, the piece begins, and at first you don’t know where you are, it’s unfamiliar, and then it begins to feel natural, the rhythm keeps puling you along,” she said. “He’s difficult in the same way Beckett is difficult, or Dante is difficult. Kafka also has that quality.”
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
Wonderful, wonderful news. He's definitely one of my favorite writers and I wish him a long, prosperous literary career.
 
nagisa

nagisa

Spiky member
I can only second that. This made me very happy, and hopeful for the prospect of him getting translated more.

[2 day later edit]

Well, firstly I got my wish: one of Krasznahorkai's French editors has announced Seiobo There Below for 2016. I'm looking forward to discovering more of his post 00's "second period" (a classification I read about in one of the Man Booker articles about him, which I feel is not incorrect), of which I've read only From the North by a Hill From the South by a Lake From the West by Roads From the East by a River.

Second, I decided to celebrate the occasion and read Relations of Grace (Sous le coup de la grâce in French, slightly different title...). What can I say but that the man does not disappoint!
 
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Heteronym

Heteronym

Reader
Hm, I guess he'll finally be translated into Portuguese.

A few years ago I read Satantango and couldn't wait to get to the end of that tedious, poorly-written novel about nothing.
 
K

kpjayan

Reader
Heteronym said:
A few years ago I read Satantango and couldn't wait to get to the end of that tedious, poorly-written novel about nothing.
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...and did you later watch the Bela Tarr's adaptation ? At 7hr 40, reading the book takes less time than watching the movie.

People are divided in their opinion about LK. 50% adores him the the rest dislike him to the core. With the few I've read, I am currently with the first lot.
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
LK's short story The Last Wolf to be published in English this September. Translated from the Hungarian by his long-time friend George Szirtes.

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