Hungarian Studies

A skillful portrayal of the cruelty and emptiness of bourgeois life, Anna Édes was first published in 1926 and enthusiastically received by the intellectual coffee-house society through which it circulated. The novel was later acknowledged by authors such as Thomas Mann as a model of language and form, and in turn established Dezso Kosztolanyi as one of the most significant writers of Eastern European fiction. Anna is the hard-working and long-suffering heroine, the unhappy maid destroyed by her pitiless employers. Her tragic relationship with them is played out against the political turbulence in Budapest following the First World War. Yet her endurance and revenge are depicted with keen psychological as well as historical insight, becoming, in the words of the translator, "not merely an argument about social conditions but raised to genuine tragedy."

1916. Psychological novel.

The first translation into English of one of the classics of Hungarian literature, a forerunner of today's popular style of philosophical thriller, The Pendragon Legend (first published 1934) follows the success of the author's Journey by Moonlight.Steeped in alchemical philosophy and set in London and Wales, this gently ironical murder-mystery combines upper-class comedy with a compelling love interest, a mystical element and an increasingly complex plot.

Gyula Illyés' major novel, Puszták népe (1936; People of the Puszta), describes the misery suffered by the Hungarian peasantry.

Sixty-Four Poems by Endre Ady (1877-1919) is a captivating bilingual poetry collection featuring 64 works by one of Hungary's most celebrated poets, Endre Ady. This edition offers the original Hungarian poems alongside their English translations by Donal Gordon, enabling readers to experience Ady’s powerful, modernist voice in both languages. Donal Gordon's translations faithfully capture the emotional depth, vivid imagery, and lyrical intensity of Ady’s masterpieces.

The book includes an insightful introduction by Gordon, providing context to Ady’s life, literary contributions, and his influence on 20th-century Hungarian and European literature. Perfect for poetry lovers, students of literature, and anyone interested in Hungarian culture.

It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays--call them Mother and Father--live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives. Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it's true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father's night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark. Then, Skylark is back. Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life's creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi's crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the irredeemably ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical book.

THE TRAVELER (literally Traveler and the Moonlight) by Antal Szerb (1937), translated from the Hungarian by Peter Hargitai, recounts the misadventures of a sexually ambiguous intellectual forced to fit into a life of conventional morality and its notions of manhood. Thirty-six-year-old Mihály takes his new bride to Italy for their honeymoon, where he accidentally hops on the wrong rail car. As his wife continues on toward Rome, he heads in the opposite direction, on the run from his ill-starred honeymoon. What he longs for are the heydays of his youth when the sexes blurred in a state of blissful androgyny, and he and his eccentric friends, male and female, could take turns falling in and out of love with each other. Mihály was in love with his best friend Tamás and his sister Éva, a gothic femme fatale who delighted in egging them on to the death. Mihály misses their "games" in which sex and death combined to take center stage. Obsessed with these fantasies, he wanders from Perugia to Rome in pursuit of acting out in real time his fatally erotic destiny. Set in Europe during the rise of Fascism, Mihály's feverish mind amps up to visionary intensity that only now can we appreciate. As he teeters on the brink of his abyss, he is eerily prophetic of one of the darkest periods in human history, the world war, his own death, and our own emerging culture of hate that threatens to destroy people for who they are and how they express themselves. Because of his Jewish background, Antal Szerb had been banned from publishing in Hungary and from traveling to Italy. He was sent instead to a forced labor camp where Nazi guards beat him to death before tossing his body into a mass grave on January 27, 1945.

Translation of Utazás faremidóba and Capillária (1916-21).

A busy young writer struggling to cope with domestic chores, hires a housekeeper recommended by a friend. The housekeeper's reputation is one built on dependable efficiency, though she is something of an oddity. Stubborn, foul-mouthed and with a flagrant disregard for her employer's opinions she may even be crazy. She allows no-one to set foot inside her house; she masks herself with a veil and is equally guarded about her personal life. And yet Emerence is revered as much as she is feared. As the story progresses, her energy and passion to help becomes clear, extinguishing any doubts arising out of her bizarre behaviour. A stylishly told tale which recounts a strange relationship built up over 20 years between a writer and her housekeeper. After an unpromising and caustic start, benign feelings develop and ultimately the writer benefits from what becomes an inseparable relationship. Simultaneously we learn Emerence's tragic past which is revealed in snapshots throughout this book. Original Hungarian published 1987.

The rediscovery of a masterpiece of Central European literature originally published in Budapest in 1942 and un- known to modern readers until last year. An extraordinary novel about a triangular relationship, about love, friendship, and fidelity, about betrayal, pride, and true nobility. In a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an old aristocrat waits to greet the friend he has not seen for forty-one years. In the course of this one night, from dinner until dawn, the two men will fight a duel of words and silences, of stories, of accusations and evasions, that will encompass their entire lives and that of a third person, missing from the candlelit dining hall—the now dead chatelaine of the castle. The last time the three of them sat together was in this room, after a stag hunt in the forest. The year was 1900. No game was shot that day, but the reverberations were cataclysmic. And the time of reckoning has finally arrived. Already a great international best-seller, Embers is a magnificent addition to world literature in the English language.

What is it to be in love with a pathological liar and fantasist? Esther is, and has been for more than twenty years. Lajos, the liar, married her sister, and when she died, Lajos disappeared. Or did he? And Esther? She was left with her elderly cousin, the all-knowing Nunu, and a worn old house, living a life of the most modest comforts. All is well, but all is tired. Until a telegram arrives announcing that, after all these years, Lajos is returning with his children. The news brings both panic and excitement. While no longer young and thoroughly skeptical about Lajos and his lies, Esther still remembers how incredibly alive she felt when he was around. Lajos’s presence bewitches everyone, and the greatest part of his charm—and his danger—lies in the deftness with which he wields that delicate power. Nothing good can come of this: friends rally round, but Lajos’s arrival, complete with entourage, begins a day of high theater. Esther’s Inheritancehas the taut economy of Márai’sEmbers,and presents a remarkable narrator who delivers the story as both tragedy and comedy on an intimate scale that nevertheless has archetypal power.

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE From the author of The Door, selected as one of the New York Times "10 Best Books of 2015," this is a heartwrenching tale about a group of friends and lovers torn apart by the German occupation of Budapest during World War II. In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist. Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection. But the girl survives in a miasmal afterlife, and reappears at key moments as a mute witness to the inescapable power of past events. As in The Door and Iza's Ballad, Magda Szabó conducts a clear-eyed investigation into the ways in which we inflict suffering on those we love. Katalin Street, which won the 2007 Prix Cévennes for Best European novel, is a poignant, somber, at times harrowing book, but beautifully conceived and truly unforgettable. Original Hungarian published 1969.

Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr's six-hour masterpiece, Satantango (1985) is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that "the devil has all the good times." The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai's meat. "At the center of Satantango," George Szirtes has said, "is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death." "You know," Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, "dance is my one weakness."