"I do not want to be successful at such a price." Interview with Ferenc Barnás

In mental defeat, doctors do not really have the means to help you, but if you try to spring upwards rather than simply go down, then this dynamics may produce a very special personality.

The Door: István Szabó's film

Spotless collars, handkerchiefs white as snow gleam around Emerenc Szeredás; no sick person remains untended, no street unswept. Yet in the world of consolidating socialism of the Hungary of the 1960s, the harshness and strange lifestyle of this ex-servant somehow seems irritating and inscrutable.

Poems

Ernő Szép

"Ernő Szép was and is an important, noble, peculiar and outstanding figure of 20th century world poetry." "It would be stupid and senseless to measure in years or decades. Very early on, Ernő Szép already had his own, so to say, zen mind and zen voice... his own koan and haiku style." (Dezső Tandori)

Éva Fahidi's Anima Rerum

More than eighty-five years old, Éva Fahidi lives in the inner city of Budapest, her memory is crystal clear, her manner of expression sharp as a razor. She had just passed her eighteenth birthday when on June 27, 1944 she was crowded into a cattle car in her native town of Debrecen in eastern Hungary and was deported to Auschwitz.

Anima Rerum. The Soul of Things (excerpt)

Éva Fahidi

Everything related to train wagons had good associations for us. The one thing we never dreamed of was that we’d also be herded into a wagon someday, and that it would be unbearable. How unbearable? A person can bear anything.

Publishing Hungary

Publishing Hungary, a government programme aimed at popularizing Hungarian literature and publishing works in foreign languages, has been launched.

Black Snowman: Gridlines (short story)

Krisztina Tóth

If one looked around, there were ten-storey apartment blocks stood everywhere, as far as the eye could see... For me, the whole of this scenery was at once familiar and reassuring. I had seen it continually since my childhood, an endless cross-hatching grid extending outwards in every direction...

Satantango in English

László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 masterpiece Satantango has finally come out in English, in the translation of British-Hungarian poet George Szirtes. This is the third book available in English by an author whom Susan Sontag called “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse”.

I had to create an alternative destiny for her: an interview with Elina Hirvonen

Elina Hirvonen, a Finnish writer and filmmaker visited Budapest on the occasion of the publication of her second novel in Hungarian. We talked to her about Africa, motherhood, and the link between suffering and strength.

Poem of the month - Ágnes Nemes Nagy: Thirst

While the purist may fault this translation for departing from the form of the original by failure to rhyme and cropping a syllable, others will surely complain that a mere male is too reckless for words in attempting, even at second-hand, an account of female sexuality.

The ten most beautiful words and where they came from

Perhaps in a language as enchantingly beautiful—fully admitting to an extreme bias in this case—as Hungarian, it should come as no surprise that poets are forever compiling lists of the ten most beautiful words.

I lived on this Earth: An anthology of poems on the Holocaust

This new anthology, edited by George and Mari Gömöri, contains poems by eighteen  Hungarian poets on the Holocaust, spanning three generations, from Miklós Radnóti to Szilárd Borbély.

For better or verse?

A fair amount of hot air has been emitted over literary translation in general, with talk of the destruction of source-texts, the invisibility of the translator and the rest. Verse translation, however, is spoken of even more oddly at times, and the object of this paper is to examine the problem and propose a future course.

The Woman in Blue (short story)

Ervin Lázár

They were looking for a woman with a baby, he said, and anybody that sees them is bound by the rigor of the law to report it. If they don’t, they’ll be shot and their house burnt to the ground.