Sándor Márai and Košice

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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.