Roy Keenoy's website called Babel Guides has information about many Hungarian books in English translation:
Babelguides: Hungarian Literature
Babelguides: Hungarian Literature
Hungarian Literature
- Thread starter Heteronym
- Start date
Have recently read Laszlo Krasznahorkai, War and War, and it made so strong an impression that I thought his name should be added here.
Don't think it's been mentioned that the Karinthy who wrote Metropole is the son of the Karinthy who wrote Journey Round My Skull. Geza Csath's diary is indeed available in English, or at least one of his diaries is: that written during a period when he was a doctor at a resort and set about busily violating Hippocratic oath and female patients. . .
Don't think it's been mentioned that the Karinthy who wrote Metropole is the son of the Karinthy who wrote Journey Round My Skull. Geza Csath's diary is indeed available in English, or at least one of his diaries is: that written during a period when he was a doctor at a resort and set about busily violating Hippocratic oath and female patients. . .
W
Worldeater
Guest
I was blown away by Antal Szerb's book "Journey by moonlight''.Also finally got my hands on Geza Csath's diary and stories,great stuff.There is a newish (2007) book by Ildiko Lovas called "Spanish bride" it should be really great,didnt had chance to read it yet...
http://www.hlo.hu/news/a_brief_demonology_of_marriage
http://www.hlo.hu/news/a_brief_demonology_of_marriage
N
nightwood
Guest
aaaargh, I have just today bookmarked "Journey To Moonlight" as to-be-read 
good to know that i dont waste my time then Maybe you care to give us your thoughts on the book?
Do you know Andras Palyi also? I have read this "Out of oneself" and re-read the first novella of the two "Beyond" today again and love it.... but it seems impossible to get any more knowledge about this guy - could only find the same two,three sentences all over again even I have tried it in English, German and Czech...
In the book is mentioned that he has published several novellas and novels but again no luck to get more infos. Might be that nothing is available in any other language than Hungarian (or I am simply to stupid to unearth them) but any information is appreciated
good to know that i dont waste my time then Maybe you care to give us your thoughts on the book?Do you know Andras Palyi also? I have read this "Out of oneself" and re-read the first novella of the two "Beyond" today again and love it.... but it seems impossible to get any more knowledge about this guy - could only find the same two,three sentences all over again even I have tried it in English, German and Czech...
In the book is mentioned that he has published several novellas and novels but again no luck to get more infos. Might be that nothing is available in any other language than Hungarian (or I am simply to stupid to unearth them) but any information is appreciated
W
Worldeater
Guest
"Journey by Moonlight" is really beautiful book.Its about young couple that go to honeymoon in Venice which wont end so well for them well i cant really get into details,its up to you to read it It kept my attention all the time,its easy read cause its interesting and awesome
Not really familiar with Andras Palyi,i should check out his books as well as Dezső Kosztolányi and Bela Hamvas.
well i cant really get into details,its up to you to read it It kept my attention all the time,its easy read cause its interesting and awesome Not really familiar with Andras Palyi,i should check out his books as well as Dezső Kosztolányi and Bela Hamvas.
adaorardor
Reader
Can you tell us more about Andras Palyi? Out of oneself looks good, how would you describe it? Where are the two novellas set and what is the style like, etc
liehtzu
Reader
I'll chip in another name for the lot: Milan Fust's (I'm not even going to try for the accent over the U, as there are enough ? marks on this page already) The Story of My Wife, which got a printing from Vintage International in the States once upon a time. Alas, I've yet to read it, but the back cover certainly makes some claims for it:
First published in 1942 [Fust, a Jew, somehow managed to isolate himself in his Budapest villa and waited out the war, not setting foot outside for years at a time, according to Konrad Gyorgy's introduction] the result of seven years of near-obsessive labor, THE STORY OF MY WIFE remains one of the most brilliant and unique novels of the century.
"So seductive and feverish that the act of surrendering to its spell threatens to reshape every other book one has read, not to mention one's sense of life itself." -Chicago Tribune
"Despite having to wait more than 30 years for its American audience, THE STORY OF MY WIFE has appeared, in some respects, not a minute too soon. Literary fashion has just caught up with it." -New York Times Book Review
First published in 1942 [Fust, a Jew, somehow managed to isolate himself in his Budapest villa and waited out the war, not setting foot outside for years at a time, according to Konrad Gyorgy's introduction] the result of seven years of near-obsessive labor, THE STORY OF MY WIFE remains one of the most brilliant and unique novels of the century.
"So seductive and feverish that the act of surrendering to its spell threatens to reshape every other book one has read, not to mention one's sense of life itself." -Chicago Tribune
"Despite having to wait more than 30 years for its American audience, THE STORY OF MY WIFE has appeared, in some respects, not a minute too soon. Literary fashion has just caught up with it." -New York Times Book Review
N
nightwood
Guest
I have started a thread a couple of minutes ago:
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/44793-András-Pályi?p=98187#post98187
Some great hungarian novelist and their books:
László Krasznahorkai: almost all of his works avaible in german. Some novels are avaible in english. His main novels: Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango(next year), War and war, Seiobo auf Erden(just german). + Animalinside, El ultimo lobo(spanish, and english(Last Wolf?)).
Attila Bartis: Tranquillity
Péter Nádas: Book of memories, Parrarel stories.
László Krasznahorkai: almost all of his works avaible in german. Some novels are avaible in english. His main novels: Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango(next year), War and war, Seiobo auf Erden(just german). + Animalinside, El ultimo lobo(spanish, and english(Last Wolf?)).
Attila Bartis: Tranquillity
Péter Nádas: Book of memories, Parrarel stories.
Daniel del Real
Moderator
I have Tranquility waiting in my shelf. Bought it really cheap last month. I've heard great things about it so we'll see.
Liam
Administrator
I thought that The Last Wolf was originally a short story which he later expanded into the much-longer novella AnimalInside. The "narrator" of AI, such as it is, is a wolf, describing some kind of apocalyptic afterworld.
adaorardor
Reader
The Last Wolf is a short piece, but it is different from AnimalInside.
"In the wake of his big, monumental books that have marked his crowning achievements to date, László Krasznahorkai has written a volume hardly seventy pages long. And yet this text is no less an existential and poetic undertaking, and what is stylistically most at stake—the sanctity of a single, endlessly articulated sentence that unfurls in an extraordinarily creative act of compulsion—evokes the author’s earlier works from the start.
Appropriately enough, the story’s premise might be summed up in a single, Krasznahorkai-esque sentence: A middle-aged male barfly who, once held to be a promising philosopher, is brooding away in a tavern in Berlin and chatting all day long with a muttering Hungarian bartender-without-a-bar, one day out of the blue gets a letter from an obscure foundation in Spain in which he is asked, for a stiff price, with the promise of travel and accommodations to boot, to write a work on the community of Extremadura in western Spain. (The Last Wolf was first published in a dual-language, Spanish-Hungarian edition with the support of Spain’s Fundación Ortega Muñoz, and in this respect the broad brushstrokes of Krasznahorkai’s story seem referential.)
The protagonist’s story unfolds through multiple layers of indirect speech marked by constant mediation and intermediation after he visits the scene. And, being a character worthy of Krasznahorkai, it should not come as a surprise that in the course of his research he is compelled to perceive the coexistence, the complementary and interdependent mutual strength, of the all and the none. After confronting the singularities of the place, he finds himself tracking the last wolf in the wild, a wolf that has in fact already been shot and killed. For our hero, this creature is more than a mere wolf, for he sees in its extinction a symbol both irretrievable and irrevocable. The barfly-cum-philosopher thus finds himself swept into the depths of the region’s oral history, into that natural history which essays to preserve the bona fide nature of a bygone age in the face of technology and civilization, and more broadly, its colonization by modernity.
As is generally the case in Krasznahorkai’s works, here too the narrative’s language conspires with its philosophical hinterland to overtake the story’s development. Somewhat unexpectedly, though, the author’s self-irony exerts itself more forcefully here on what might otherwise be the overwhelmingly monolithic conceptual framework of the single sentence. That is to say, at certain points along the way he lightens things up by injecting parody and through rhetorical maneuvers that likewise serve to decelerate the gathering pace of his narrative’s overall intensity. And so the work’s revelatory nature diminishes substantially, giving way to a comic tone that makes The Last Wolf not only a compelling story also a refreshing one indeed. "
(from http://www.hunlit.hu/krasznahorkailaszlo,en#ID928)
It was translated by Szirtes (under the title "El ultimo lobo") and published in Words Without Borders- link below...although now that I look at this it seems like it must have been printed with pretty wide margins and big type to reach 70 pages because it's only 15,000 words so I would've expected it to be more like 40 pages in a pined book:
http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/el-ultimo-lobo/
"In the wake of his big, monumental books that have marked his crowning achievements to date, László Krasznahorkai has written a volume hardly seventy pages long. And yet this text is no less an existential and poetic undertaking, and what is stylistically most at stake—the sanctity of a single, endlessly articulated sentence that unfurls in an extraordinarily creative act of compulsion—evokes the author’s earlier works from the start.
Appropriately enough, the story’s premise might be summed up in a single, Krasznahorkai-esque sentence: A middle-aged male barfly who, once held to be a promising philosopher, is brooding away in a tavern in Berlin and chatting all day long with a muttering Hungarian bartender-without-a-bar, one day out of the blue gets a letter from an obscure foundation in Spain in which he is asked, for a stiff price, with the promise of travel and accommodations to boot, to write a work on the community of Extremadura in western Spain. (The Last Wolf was first published in a dual-language, Spanish-Hungarian edition with the support of Spain’s Fundación Ortega Muñoz, and in this respect the broad brushstrokes of Krasznahorkai’s story seem referential.)
The protagonist’s story unfolds through multiple layers of indirect speech marked by constant mediation and intermediation after he visits the scene. And, being a character worthy of Krasznahorkai, it should not come as a surprise that in the course of his research he is compelled to perceive the coexistence, the complementary and interdependent mutual strength, of the all and the none. After confronting the singularities of the place, he finds himself tracking the last wolf in the wild, a wolf that has in fact already been shot and killed. For our hero, this creature is more than a mere wolf, for he sees in its extinction a symbol both irretrievable and irrevocable. The barfly-cum-philosopher thus finds himself swept into the depths of the region’s oral history, into that natural history which essays to preserve the bona fide nature of a bygone age in the face of technology and civilization, and more broadly, its colonization by modernity.
As is generally the case in Krasznahorkai’s works, here too the narrative’s language conspires with its philosophical hinterland to overtake the story’s development. Somewhat unexpectedly, though, the author’s self-irony exerts itself more forcefully here on what might otherwise be the overwhelmingly monolithic conceptual framework of the single sentence. That is to say, at certain points along the way he lightens things up by injecting parody and through rhetorical maneuvers that likewise serve to decelerate the gathering pace of his narrative’s overall intensity. And so the work’s revelatory nature diminishes substantially, giving way to a comic tone that makes The Last Wolf not only a compelling story also a refreshing one indeed. "
(from http://www.hunlit.hu/krasznahorkailaszlo,en#ID928)
It was translated by Szirtes (under the title "El ultimo lobo") and published in Words Without Borders- link below...although now that I look at this it seems like it must have been printed with pretty wide margins and big type to reach 70 pages because it's only 15,000 words so I would've expected it to be more like 40 pages in a pined book:
http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/el-ultimo-lobo/
W
Worldeater
Guest
I should get Skylark by Dezso Kosztolányi soon,looks interesting.
It's not true. No connection between Animalinside and Last Wolf. Nothing. I've read both of them.
W
Worldeater
Guest
Did anyone read "The Pendragon Legend" by Antal Szerb,any thoughts?
I've not read Szerb, but here are some more reviews:
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/magyar/szerba2.htm
I wonder whether this is a truly great and forgotten author, or whether it is no coïncidence that the 70-year copyright date has passed and EU funding for smaller languages is plentiful?
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/magyar/szerba2.htm
I wonder whether this is a truly great and forgotten author, or whether it is no coïncidence that the 70-year copyright date has passed and EU funding for smaller languages is plentiful?
W
Worldeater
Guest
Just check out his books and you'll see
pesahson
Reader
"Journey by Moonlight" is really beautiful book.Its about young couple that go to honeymoon in Venice which wont end so well for them
Not really familiar with Andras Palyi,i should check out his books as well as Dezső Kosztolányi and Bela Hamvas.
You've certainly intrigued me. I've just checked out the online catalogue of my library and I see that there are two other book by him available. Do you recommend his other novels as well? I'll definately borrow the "Journey..." though.