An exhibition
was opened on the 4 December in the European Parliament to honour Sándor Márai,
the great Twentieth Century Hungarian writer in connection with his city of
birth, Košice-Kassa-Kaschau, becoming the European City of Culture in 2013
(together with Marseille). This is a slightly edited version of my remarks.
I’m delighted to hear that Košice will be the European
City of Culture next year, together with Marseille, and I’m looking forward to
eating bouillabaisse in Košice and sztrapacska in Marseille.
Sándor Márai was a friend of my father’s. I never met
him personally, but I was aware of his status as a major Hungarian writer from
an early age. By common consent, he was an extremely proud man, even an
obstinate man. Certainly, to judge from his correspondence with my father, he
absolutely refused to believe that anything had changed in communist Hungary,
which he left in 1948, by the 1980s.
He is best known as a novelist, though his writings,
which were under complete ban in Hungary until the end of communism, include
plays, poetry, essays, journalism and his diaries. One volume of his diaries,
the one dealing with the last year of the war and the first few years
thereafter, provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of the time, and they are
available in English. And his Verse Cycle is a testament to Budapest after the
siege of 1944-1945.
His novel Embers
– a rather inadequate translation of the Hungarian title – turned out to be a
major success. Hereby hangs a tale. Some time in the late 1990s, the Italian
writer and publisher, Roberto Callasto, rediscovered “Embers” in a French
translation from the early 1950s that had attracted no attention at the time,
and was entranced by it. He draw the attention of the English-language
publishing world to it and the editor in charge, Carole Brown (whom I know a
little) read it and was also determined to bring it out. Carole looked around,
but could find no translator, so decided to translate it herself from the
German, using the French as a parallel text. You can judge the result for
yourselves, but to my mind, while serviceable, the English is a rather anaemic
and certainly fails to render the beauty of Márai’s style.
Still, it’s better than what happened to “Casanova in
Bolzano” (Vendégjáték Bolzanóban),
which in the English begins with the words, “In Mestre I left thought behind”.
In the original, Casanova only left his gondola. George Szirtes, the leftwing
poet, is responsible. Ah, the pitfalls of the Hungarian language – the
distinction between gondolat and gondola clearly proved too much for this
translator.
A final anecdote. Some time around 2000 or after, I
was sitting in Amsterdam airport rereading Embers
in Hungarian. I noticed that the woman next to me was reading the same book in
Dutch. Quite a coincidence, you might say. So I decided to try and start a
conversation with her and asked her as an opener, showing her the Hungarian,
“Please tell me, is the Dutch version translated from the original?” She looked
it up, said “Yes”, then got up, walked away and sat down somewhere else. One of
the shortest conversations on record. Márai could well have written a short
story or a novella about it. The woman in question indubitably behaved like one
of Márai’s laconic female characters.
Sch. Gy.
