His mere arrival itself had been excessively mysterious, or at least had proceeded very differently from that of the others, for he had not come by train and then by bus; for however unbelievable it seemed, the afternoon of the day of his arrival, perhaps around six o'clock or half-past six, he simply turned into the campground gates, like a person who had just arrived on foot, with nothing more than a curt nod; and when the organizers politely and with a particular deference inquired as to his name, and then began to question him more pressingly as to how he had arrived, he replied only that someone had brought him to a bend in the road in a car; but as in the all-enfolding silence no one had heard the sound of any car at all that could have let him out at any "bend in the road", the entire thought that he had come in a car but not all the way, only up to a certain bend in the road and only to be put out there, sounded fairly incredible, so that no one really quite believed him, or more accurately, no one knew how to interpret his words, so that there remained, already on that very first day, the only possible, the only rational – if all the same, the most absurd - variation: that he had travelled entirely on foot; that he had picked himself up in Bucharest and set himself to the journey: instead of boarding a train and subsequently the bus that came here, he had simply made on foot – and who knew for how many weeks now! – the long long trip to Saint Anna Lake, turning in through the campground gates at six or six-thirty in the evening, and when the question was put to him as to whether the organizing committee had the honor of greeting Ion Grigorescu, he dispensed his reply with one curt nod....
Something Is Burning Outside, László Krasznahorkai (trans. Ottilie Mulzet)
Despite the fact that his novels have been translated into numerous languages, and despite the fact that his work has received the attention of publications like The New Yorker and The Guardian, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai remains virtually unknown in the United States.
In part, this may be attributed to the fact that so few of his works have thus far been translated into English:
Of course, translating Krasznahorkai into any language is not exactly a straightforward process. As James Wood points out in The New Yorker,
[Krasznahorkai's] tireless, tiring sentences feel potentially endless.... It’s often hard to know exactly what Krasznahorkai’s characters are thinking, because his fictional world teeters on the edge of a revelation that never quite comes.... Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. His demanding novel The Melancholy of Resistance is a comedy of apocalypse.... The pleasure of the book flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness....
Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai achieved fame (at least in Europe) with the publication of his very first novel, Sátántangó, in 1985. His novel War and War (1999) was brought to publication, in part, with the assistance of the American poet Allen Ginsberg. The translations this writer has read suggest, often simultaneously, elements of Proust, Kafka and Beckett. How much of this is due to the author himself, and how much to his able translators (most frequently, the Hungarian poet George Szirtes), might make for an interesting investigation:
In any event, folks who do not normally collect "dense" works of literature might be well advised to wean themselves on something less daunting. Krasznahorkai's novella, Animalinside (trans. Ottilie Mulzet) matches the art of painter Max Neumann with very short texts by Krasznahorkai. (New Directions, Krasznahorkai's English-language publisher, had only 2000 copies of this title printed, as Neumann's images were printed in a seven-stage process. The image below is via Vertigo:)
Because, as noted above, much of Krasznahorkai's oeuvre has yet to be translated into English, the author represents something of a ground-floor opportunity for English-language book collectors.
This is the case with much "foreign" literature that has yet to be translated into English: Arabic literature, Islamic literature (which is not necessarily the same thing), Latin American literature, novels of officialdom, Popescu Prize winners, Primeo Planeta winners. A private library often can be built "under the radar" of one's fellow book collectors simply by realizing that the world of literature does not stop at the borders of the United States....
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