George Szirtes
Foreign Laughter
...
The Melancholy of Resistance was published by Quartet at the beginning of
1999. Asked by Quartet as to who might provide a suitable endorsement of the
book, I gave the name of W.G. Sebald, then forgot to mention it to the man himself;
so when he rang up one day to announce he had received the typescript
I was full of apologies. He was not at all put out: he thought it was a marvellous
book and was pleased to provide a few sentences. From Quartet in the UK it
passed to New Directions in the USA. New Directions had already published one
of my earlier translations (Anna Édes by Dezső Kosztolányi, also first published
by Quartet). New Directions then passed the book to Susan Sontag, who had herself
written at length in praise of W.G. Sebald. She too was more than prepared
to provide enthusiastic copy for the book jacket. Though little reviewed in
England (that is to say it was reviewed briefly, albeit with intense pleasure)
Sontag and Sebald had put their imprimatura on The Melancholy of Resistance
and the critical response in America was henceforth considerably more powerful.
The worst that reviewers could find to say about Melancholy was that marvellous
as the book was it took a little determination to discover that fact. Personally
I was enormously relieved to be rid of it, but I found it grew in my head as time
went by. It lost its wilfulness, its association with headaches, exhaustion and fury
and, while I needed considerable persuasion to set out on a second book by
Krasznahorkai, I was certain that the pain would be worth it.
It was after I had begun that second book, War and War, that Knopf
approached me to translate Sándor Márai's novel about Casanova, Vendégjáték
Bolzanóban, literally, 'Guest Performance in Bolzano'. Márai was, by then, far
better known than Krasznahorkai, almost entirely on the basis of the worldwide
success of his novel A gyertyák csonkig égnek literally, 'The Candles Burn down
to Stumps', but published in English as Embers. Márai was born in 1900 and had
been a leading writer in Hungary between the wars. a virtuoso among virtuosos,
but had gone into exile in 1948 when the Communists took over, and his books
subsequently disappeared off the lists of Hungarian publishers. He was persona
non grata, a self-confessed bourgeois poet, playwright and novelist - not of the
political Right but not sufficiently of the Left for the new Soviet regime to allow
him to continue. He left, taking with him his magnificent diaries, and never
returned to Hungary, dying by suicide in San Diego in 1989, the very year of the
Communist collapse. His beloved wife was dead, their adopted son was dead -
everyone around him had died, and he lived in obscurity. Could he have waited a
year or so he would have seen the tide turn hugely in his favour. He became an
icon in his homeland, a touchstone, a banner, though it is not always clear who
should be waving that banner or what it might stand for.
Márai never wrote in English - Hungarian was his loved instrument. His tragic,
exemplary story is twisted at the core by exile. The discovery and publication of
Embers is part of that twisted story. This, briefly, is how it is said to have gone.
Roberto Calasso, the writer, publisher and translator, was browsing through a
French publisher's backlist when he found an obscure book by an obscure Hungarian
writer, took away a copy, read it, loved it, and decided it was a forgotten
masterpiece. He called a meeting of other major world publishers so that he could
sing its virtues, and published it himself in Italian, with enormous success. Other
languages followed. The English text, published by Knopf in 2001, however elegantly
rendered by the head of Knopf, Carol Brown Janeway, was translated from
the German version, with Janeway referring to the earlier French edition for support.
Janeway read no Hungarian and, as a publisher, trusted none of the available
translators. That was what she said in public at any rate. Some suspected she was
none too sure of who they were. Possibly there was no time to find one: the iron
needed striking while it was hot. There were fierce letters to The New York Times
and rumbles of protests in correspondence, but by then the book was a
triumph in English. Tragic and exemplary, Márai's Hungarian remained in the
shadows. The luminous triumph was the translation of a translation. The faithfulness
of the English version continues to be debated, but the name of Sándor Márai,
however mispronounced, was pronounced frequently and with great respect.
Janeway came to me by way of Barbara Epler of New Directions, who had,
I think, been praising my translation of Krasznahorkai to her. I assume Janeway
went on to read The Melancholy of Resistance and became convinced I was the
man for Márai too. In any case I had a message to meet her at Claridges Hotel in
London on 10 January 2003. The night before, I gave a reading near Liverpool.
The reading was fine, if a little desolate, but nowhere near as desolate as the
boarding house the organizers had found for me. Everything was broken: there
was flex hanging off the walls the door could not be locked the handle having
been smashed, there was no hot water the toilet bowl leaked, there was a plastic
incontinence sheet on the bed and a group of skinheads were partying down the
hall. I slept very little, couldn't shower or shave, and arrived at Claridges the next
day dirty, with rings under my eyes. Janeway was crisp, tidy and businesslike. She
quizzed me on Márai and other Hungarian novelists, checked me out, then asked
if I could undertake the next Márai novel as quickly as possible. Having started a
second Krasznahorkai for New Directions, it meant translating two novels at the
same time. I had no idea then that I would also be ushered into co-editing with
Miklós Vajda a 400-page anthology of Hungarian writing the next year for the
year-long festival of Hungarian culture in Britain. Eighteen months of productive
madness was about to begin. I left bedraggled, with a sympathetic smile from the
doorman. It had been a strange, exhausting, hallucinatory experience made all
the stranger by the fact that Janeway's glasses were distinctly askew during the
entire course of our meeting.
The success of Embers still puzzles me: the degree of its success, that is. Márai
was declared a rediscovered master of world literature on a par with... well,
anyone you care to think of. It couldn't all be put down to marketing, nostalgia
and romance, though these played their part. But nostalgia for what? Written in
1944, the book is set in the long dead ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire:
aristocrats, hunting lodges, cadet schools, wet nurses, concepts of honour. Few
readers would have known the world to which they were subscribing in their
imaginations, nor would they have wanted it back. They wouldn't vote for it. The
nostalgia, I imagined, was less to do with location than with pace, reassurance
and stable values, any stable values at all. There was, I felt, a touch of Ruritania
and Anthony Hope about Embers. But, that couldn't be all.
Nor is it. Embers is a fascinating mixture of luxuriant writing, razor-sharp
psychological perception, theatrical tricks and one vast dramatic twist. Underlying
the mechanics of plot and prose there is an intense, unremitting curiosity
about the way the conditions of life play themselves out in action and imagination.
In the book it is about 1940. A long-retired army officer is waiting for his old
friend to reappear after decades of absence. The officer's childhood wet-nurse is
still with him, otherwise he is alone. The wife whom he had loved is dead. He tells
the nurse, now the maidservant, that he has many vital questions to ask the
returning friend, but when the friend appears it is the officer himself who does all
the talking. That is the twist. The major theme is the honour code: the conflict
between friendship and desire. Most of the book could be a stage play (and has
been a stage play in France and Germany, shortly to be so in England, too, adapted
by Christopher Hampton), with some flashbacks and one vivid piece of action
set years earlier in the nearby forest.
The key to the book is not so much the plot, the theatrical tricks, the characters
or the location: it is the way in which luxuriant writing is put at the service
of a fiercely enquiring philosophical mind that peels away layer after layer of
human consciousness until, however perfectly uniformed the body, the soul is
revealed to be naked and lost in forests of its own.
The key to Embers is also the key to the Bolzano book, published in 2004 in
Britain as Conversations in Bolzano, in the USA as Casanova in Bolzano. It is the
story of an episode in the life of Casanova following his escape from the Leads
prison in Venice. Casanova arrives in Bolzano accompanied by Balbi, a defrocked
friar, and hangs about in a hotel doing this or that until the arrival of the Duke of
Parma, who has married Francesca, the only woman Casanova has ever really
been in love with, and for whose hand he fought a losing duel with the much
older Duke. It is only once the Duke appears, well over halfway through the book,
that the story leaps into action, and eventually a confrontation with Francesca
takes place, concluding the book. I was aware that some people regarded the
book as a masterpiece ("Ah, Bolzano," a Hungarian friend had said. "My favourite!")
but I wasn't always sure this was the case from the point of view of shape or narrative
device, but, maybe because I am a poet rather than a novelist, the book
held me throughout, much in the manner of an ancient mariner, through sheer
eye and voice. As with Embers, the mechanics and occasional melodramatics of
the plot are mostly a magnificent excuse for the exercise of Márai's desperate
curiosity. The book is an enquiry conducted chiefly through monologues.
I first thought of these monologues as the equivalent of the musical cadenza,
but a speaker at a Márai conference put it better: he referred to them as arias.
A cadenza is a kind of decorative excess in which the souls of the instrument and
instrumentalist are driven through a gap in the music. To compare them to
cadenzas would suggest that Márai's monologues, however rich and dense, were
interruptions to the fabric of the narrative. That is not the case. Márai's monologues
are structural: in fact they are the structure. In an aria the very spirit of the
character becomes a central element in the architecture of the work. In Márai's
novel it does not matter very much whether the monologue-aria is spoken by the
character or the narrator, for the essence of the work is the single project of
enquiry. It is Márai we hear all the way through: that luxuriant, ironic and
yearning prose is his way of framing the question the book is there to answer.
In Embers the question is primarily about an ethos of friendship and loyalty
under the stress of desire. In Bolzano it is about spirit and gender: what, asks
the book, is physical and psychological desire, and what has that desire to do
with love and sacrifice?
The first and most vital task of the translator of Márai is to render that
luxuriant but sharp prose into English, to take stock of whatever flourishes
(cadenzas within arias?) are lodged in the text and to find a natural place for
them. These flourishes might include stock characters: there is a Jewish money lender and a gay barber in Bolzano, not to mention a range of landlords and
Shakespearian mechanicals - the sidekick corrupt priest, market women, traders,
policemen, a queue of lovesick gullible types - who comprise the operetta
element of the book. Although the book has received handsome reviews in both
Britain and the US, no one has dealt with the operetta aspect of the structure.
Translating those operetta characters, the moneylender and the barber, is a tricky
and delicate task. One step too far and they become hostile parodies; one step
too short and they become timid wastes of space.
The hairdresser is "a pretty, rosy-cheeked, blond, blue-eyed boy", who speaks
in "a singing slightly effeminate voice, lisping slightly", and Mensch, the money
lender, is pure stage Jew:
A short, scrawny creature, he was sitting in a dressing-gown at a long narrow table, the
fingernails of his delicate, yellow hands grown sharp and curling, so that he appeared
to grasp things the way a bird of prey seizes its quarry, his lank grey locks hanging over
his brow, and his small, bright, intelligent eyes, eyes that glowed from beneath deep
wrinkled lids, staring with burning curiosity at the stranger. He greeted Giacomo in his
dirty kaftan, lisping and bowing stiffly without rising from his chair, mixing French,
Italian and German words in his speech but mumbling all the while, as if not quite taking
him seriously but thinking of something else, not really listening to his guest. "Ah!"
he said, once the visitor had given his name, and raised his eyebrows until they met the
dirty locks above them. He blinked rapidly, like a monkey hunting for fleas. "Have these
old ears heard correctly? Is an invalid to trust these poor ears of his?" He spoke of himself
in the third person, with a kind of tender intimacy, as if he were his own nephew.
"Mensch is a very old man," he lisped ingratiatingly. "No-one visits him nowadays, old
and poor as he is, " he mumbled. "But here is a stranger come to call," he concluded
and fell silent.
It might seem unlikely that the author could transcend these apparently lazy
stereotypes, but Shakespeare does, and so does the operatic analogy best suited
to Márai, which is not operetta in the end, but something grander and more
substantial. Out of second-hand frills and period lace comes a furious masked
discourse in which Casanova's one true female love, dressed as a man for the
masked-ball, pays a visit to the great seducer, who is dressed as a woman for the
same occasion. The longest and most intense of the arias belongs to Francesca,
who first proffers then discards layer after layer of the courtesies of female love
to leave a mass of fierce and brutal energy, at which point the theatrical costume
she is wearing makes a spectacular and complex counterpoint to the visionary
content of her speech. This aria has been prepared for by some equally powerful
short ones, particularly that of her aged but still dangerous husband, the Duke of
Parma. It is in these passages that Márai may be seen as occupying the same
literary culture as Krasznahorkai: paragraphs disappear, sentences stretch and
there is only the semi-comic darkness where the ignorant armies of human logic
and human passion clash by night.
A small excerpt from the Duke of Parma's monologue might help suggest this.
The old man has arrived at Casanova's room and produces a secret letter, from
his young wife to Casanova, that he has intercepted. He has already threatened
to kill Casanova if he ever encountered him again as a rival. The letter, written by
the barely literate young woman, consists of only four words that he proceeds to
analyse with a dangerously ironic close reading.
"This, then, is the letter," he declared with a peculiar satisfaction, dropping the parchment
together with his spectacles into his lap and leaning back in the chair. "What do
you think of the style? I am absolutely bowled over by it. Whatever Francesca does is
done perfectly: that's how she is, she can do no other. I am bowled over by the letter,
and I hope it has had an equally powerful impact on you, that it has shaken you to the
core and made its mark on your soul and character the way all true literature marks a
complete human being. After years of reading it is only now, this afternoon, when I first
read Francesca's letter, that I truly realized the absolute power of words. Like emperors,
popes and everyone else, I discovered in them a power sharper and more ruthless
than swords or spears. And now, more than anything, I want your opinion, a writer's
opinion, of the style, of the expressive talent of this beginner. I should tell you that
I felt the same on a second reading - and now, having glanced over Francesca's letter
for a third time, my opinion has not changed at all. The style is perfect! Please excuse
my shortcomings as a critic, do not dismiss the enthusiasm of a mere family member
from your lofty professional height - but I know you will admit that this is not the work
of a dilettante. There are four words and one initial only, but consider the conditions
that forced these four words onto paper, consider that their author, even a year ago,
had no acquaintance with the written word: turn the order of the words over in your
mind, see how each follows the other, like links in a chain hammered out on a blacksmith's
anvil. Talent must be self-generating. Francesca has not read the works of
either Dante or Virgil, she has no concept of subject or predicate, and yet, all by herself,
without even thinking about it, she has discovered the essentials of a correct,
graceful style. Surely it is impossible to express oneself more concisely, more precisely,
than this letter. Shall we analyse it? 'I must see you.' In the first place I admire the
concentrated power of the utterance. This line, which might be carved in stone, contains
no superfluous element. Note the prominence of the verb...
...and so on for three remorseless pages, expending a ridiculous amount of
energy on each of the four vital words. This furious, precise, but pointless exegesis
is produced by excess: excess of love, jealousy and fear of death. The Duke's
remorselessness is what Casanova is up against. It is such remorselessness that
makes Márai such an unlikely great writer for a contemporary audience. The conventions
he works with are subjected to far greater strain than they are intended
for and are thus transformed in his hands into something mould-breaking and
strikingly relevant to contemporary concerns about love, desire and possession.
The translator enters the book like a member of the chorus. He joins his voice
to one of the available melody lines and does what is necessary to amplify the
music of the mind that moves through the language or score before him. Just how
ironic is the Duke of Parma? How serious? How accurate? How perceptive? How dangerous? And if he is all these things to various degrees, how do these degrees
and proportions play themselves out in English? Where are the echoes? There is
no difficulty in finding echoes for the gay barber or the Jewish moneylender.
These are tunes everyone knows by heart. A Jonathan Miller production of
Rigoletto had the Duke singing the famous air La donna e mobile, by dropping a
coin into a jukebox. A cheap sentiment to a cheap tune, said the production. The
production subsumed and ironised the cheapness. Miller had bigger fish to fry.
And so does Márai. As with Krasznahorkai, the devil is in the detail, but the
detail is part of a project. The Duke of Parma is a little like the Grand Inquisitor
in Dostoevsky, a little like Iago in Shakespeare, but mostly he is a voice in Márai's
head. When Francesca enters, she is even greater than the Duke. After she
finishes her monologue, the reader feels there can be little left to say on the subject
of passion. Her voice, like the Duke's, arises out of Márai's desire to know
and understand. That desire employs luxuriant prose but it understands the effect
of such prose and knows how deep it cuts. A book that appears to be fribbling
and grandstanding by turns explodes at the end. The jukebox blows up.
Casanova, who is himself something of a jukebox, but is also portrayed as a force
of nature, is doomed to carry the tunes of that jukebox through the rest of his life.
There is in Hungarian writing, whether poetry or prose, a precarious balance
between weight and lightness, between despair and laughter. It is compressed
and landlocked, occasionally a touch provincial in imagination, booby-trapped
with anxieties and melancholy. It is forever pressing against the limits set on it
by circumstances. That is why its laughter always seems a little edgy and
nervous. Ears trained exclusively on the twentieth-century English novel may
occasionally find it hard to place this laughter and this music, but it is available
in English too, though the translator has to stretch a little, taking a step forward
in one place, a step back in another. The translator has to adapt the text because
language is not to be bullied into submission. The translator has to be a little sly,
a little brazen and a little rakish, all the while observing the customs of the place.
Both Krasznahorkai and Márai expand the horizons of English-language writing:
they are semi-familiar strangers who know their manners but are visibly straining
at the leashes. It is the translator's job to see that they pass through border
controls, take their places in the street and become part of the landscape.
George Szirtes
won the foremost British poetry award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, in 2005 for his book of poems
Reel. An outstanding translator of Hungarian fiction and poetry, he has also translated
the novels of László Krasznahorkai, Sándor Márai and fiction by Krúdy and Kosztolányi.
His version of Krasznahorkai's Háború és Háború (War and War) will be published by New
Directions (USA) in 2006. He is currently working on a group of novels by Sándor Márai
including A Zendülők (The Rebels) for Knopf/Viking-Penguin.
