Miami Herald // 2 Hungarian Novels
Two vivid novels, minus the language barrier
A deft rags-to-britches tale and a literary marvel about a concentration camp both benefit from wonderful translations.
By Andrew Ervin
CASANOVA IN BALZANO.
Sándor Márai. Translated by George Szirtes. Knopf. 294 pages. $22.
LIQUIDATION.
Imre Kertész. Translated by Tim Wilkinson. Knopf. 112 pages. $22.
Hungarian author Sándor Márai is best known in this country for a book that by some definitions he didn't even write. A few years ago, American audiences discovered his masterpiece Embers, which appeared to rave reviews. Unfortunately, the edition wasn't translated from Márai's native Magyarul but via a German translation. Every translation is a bastardization, even albeit frequently a necessary one. A translation of a translation is an abomination, a disservice to the reader and author and, in the case of Hungarian literature, to a nation whose language may soon require some serious preservation efforts.
That's precisely why George Szirtes' direct rendering of another Márai novel comes as such an enormous joy. There is, however, one snag with this otherwise stellar translation. The title of the 1940 original was literally Guest Performance in Bolzano. Nowhere does Márai mention the name Casanova and thus invoke all of the romantic intrigue it implies, except in a brief author's note. It would be an entirely different reading experience if the hero didn't come saddled with so much historical baggage.
Márai describes the exploits of the 40-year-old Giacomo, both dandyish and rough-hewn, whose best days appear to be behind him. He manages to break out of jail and evade capture long enough to take a room in a squalid Italian inn. Just as he secures a letter of credit for the local moneylender and begins to resurrect his dashing lifestyle, his old nemesis, a wealthy duke, approaches him with a compelling assignment that will test his talents as a lady-killer.
Stylistically, Márai looks backward to the genius absurdity of Cervantes and forward to the kaleidoscopic vision of Don DeLillo. He tells the rags-to-britches tale in vivid enough detail that we feel Giacomo's transformation as much as witness it.
He also gives each character the responsibility to speak for himself. As in Embers, much of the action takes the form of vast sections of uninterrupted spoken parts. Szirtes handles every voice deftly, and with him at the helm Márai and his English-speaking readers have the translator they deserve.
The same can be said of Tim Wilkinson and his renditions of Imre Kertész's novels Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child and now Liquidation, all newly available in English thanks in part to the Swedes who saw fit to award Kertész the 2002 Nobel Prize.
The density of Liquidation makes it feel like a far weightier book than it is. Kertész accomplishes so much in a few pages. Generally speaking, the novel -- told alternatively in first, second and third person -- is about a writer, Bee (sometimes B.), who killed himself with a lethal injection. Bee had the ironic fate of being born in a concentration camp, and he never managed to emotionally free himself from that captivity: "Bee himself lived Auschwitz here, in Budapest, not of course an Auschwitz comparable to Auschwitz itself but a voluntarily accepted, domesticated Auschwitz, though one in which it was just as possible to perish as in the real one.''
Bee's former colleague Kingbitter hopes to find the manuscript of a novel among Bee's papers. He looks for clues to its whereabouts and its existence in a play Bee left behind called Liquidation that features characters with the names of his own friends and family, including Kingbitter. This brilliant nesting-doll structure gives the author the chance to toy with the otherwise concrete distinctions between fiction and reality -- Kertész was imprisoned in a concentration camp as a child -- and between Hungary's past and present. By holding it all together, Kertész has made Liquidation an awe-inspiring balancing act and a true literary marvel.
There's something intrinsically Hungarian about the ability to take the most depressing subject material possible and turn it into a wholly enjoyable reading experience. And these are wonderful days for fans of Magyar literature, with Nádas and Eszterházy and Zsolt and Krasznahorkai and Pályi also turning up over the past few years. In the spring, at long last, an American publisher will finally release a volume of short stories by the mid-20th century Hungarian master Tibor Déry. Apparently various translators will have their mitts on that collection, and we can only pray that Szirtes and Wilkinson are among them.
A deft rags-to-britches tale and a literary marvel about a concentration camp both benefit from wonderful translations.
By Andrew Ervin
CASANOVA IN BALZANO.
Sándor Márai. Translated by George Szirtes. Knopf. 294 pages. $22.
LIQUIDATION.
Imre Kertész. Translated by Tim Wilkinson. Knopf. 112 pages. $22.
Hungarian author Sándor Márai is best known in this country for a book that by some definitions he didn't even write. A few years ago, American audiences discovered his masterpiece Embers, which appeared to rave reviews. Unfortunately, the edition wasn't translated from Márai's native Magyarul but via a German translation. Every translation is a bastardization, even albeit frequently a necessary one. A translation of a translation is an abomination, a disservice to the reader and author and, in the case of Hungarian literature, to a nation whose language may soon require some serious preservation efforts.
That's precisely why George Szirtes' direct rendering of another Márai novel comes as such an enormous joy. There is, however, one snag with this otherwise stellar translation. The title of the 1940 original was literally Guest Performance in Bolzano. Nowhere does Márai mention the name Casanova and thus invoke all of the romantic intrigue it implies, except in a brief author's note. It would be an entirely different reading experience if the hero didn't come saddled with so much historical baggage.
Márai describes the exploits of the 40-year-old Giacomo, both dandyish and rough-hewn, whose best days appear to be behind him. He manages to break out of jail and evade capture long enough to take a room in a squalid Italian inn. Just as he secures a letter of credit for the local moneylender and begins to resurrect his dashing lifestyle, his old nemesis, a wealthy duke, approaches him with a compelling assignment that will test his talents as a lady-killer.
Stylistically, Márai looks backward to the genius absurdity of Cervantes and forward to the kaleidoscopic vision of Don DeLillo. He tells the rags-to-britches tale in vivid enough detail that we feel Giacomo's transformation as much as witness it.
He also gives each character the responsibility to speak for himself. As in Embers, much of the action takes the form of vast sections of uninterrupted spoken parts. Szirtes handles every voice deftly, and with him at the helm Márai and his English-speaking readers have the translator they deserve.
The same can be said of Tim Wilkinson and his renditions of Imre Kertész's novels Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child and now Liquidation, all newly available in English thanks in part to the Swedes who saw fit to award Kertész the 2002 Nobel Prize.
The density of Liquidation makes it feel like a far weightier book than it is. Kertész accomplishes so much in a few pages. Generally speaking, the novel -- told alternatively in first, second and third person -- is about a writer, Bee (sometimes B.), who killed himself with a lethal injection. Bee had the ironic fate of being born in a concentration camp, and he never managed to emotionally free himself from that captivity: "Bee himself lived Auschwitz here, in Budapest, not of course an Auschwitz comparable to Auschwitz itself but a voluntarily accepted, domesticated Auschwitz, though one in which it was just as possible to perish as in the real one.''
Bee's former colleague Kingbitter hopes to find the manuscript of a novel among Bee's papers. He looks for clues to its whereabouts and its existence in a play Bee left behind called Liquidation that features characters with the names of his own friends and family, including Kingbitter. This brilliant nesting-doll structure gives the author the chance to toy with the otherwise concrete distinctions between fiction and reality -- Kertész was imprisoned in a concentration camp as a child -- and between Hungary's past and present. By holding it all together, Kertész has made Liquidation an awe-inspiring balancing act and a true literary marvel.
There's something intrinsically Hungarian about the ability to take the most depressing subject material possible and turn it into a wholly enjoyable reading experience. And these are wonderful days for fans of Magyar literature, with Nádas and Eszterházy and Zsolt and Krasznahorkai and Pályi also turning up over the past few years. In the spring, at long last, an American publisher will finally release a volume of short stories by the mid-20th century Hungarian master Tibor Déry. Apparently various translators will have their mitts on that collection, and we can only pray that Szirtes and Wilkinson are among them.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
1/09/2005
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