Literatur/Prosa

 

  • BÁNFFY Miklós: They Were Counted
    • Übersetzt von: Patrick Thursfield and Kathy Bánffy-Jelen
    • Verlag: Arcadia Books, London
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 596
    • This great novel paints an unrivalled portrait of the vanished world of pre-1914 Hungary, as seen through the eyes of two young Transylvanian cousins, Count Bálint Abády and Count László Gyeroffy. Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury of life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abády becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gambling tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire itself.
  • GÁLL István: The Sun Worshipper
    • Übersetzt von: Thomas DeKornfeld
    • Verlag: CORVINA Kiadó
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 160
    • The Sun Worshipper by István Gáll (1931-1982), published in 1970, is one of the important, though neglected works of the period. Inspired by the story of his life, it is about a young peasant boy turned writer and his relationship with a girl who comes from a Jewish-proletarian big city family. The story of their love and marriage provides a fascinating insight into Hungarian history and society around the time of the Second World War, up until the 1970s. Modern in both subject and structure, the novel is based on the rapid change back and forth between various layers of time.
  • HATÁR Győző: A Reader
    • Verlag: CORVINA Kiadó
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 464
    • The author, who lives in England, is considered as a Hungarian author who is, by now, a living legend. Though he has been living in London for the past forty years, he writes in Hungarian. The present volume, selected by the author, includes five stories, four novellas, seven philosophical essays, fifteen poems, one full play and a bibliography, and was translated into English partly by the author and by well-known translators of literature, e.g. George F. Cushing, George Szirtes, Eszter Molnár.
  • KAFFKA Margit: Colours and Years
    • Übersetzt von: George F. Cushing
    • Verlag: CORVINA Kiadó
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 244
    • Margit Kaffka’s (1880-1918) novel, Colours and Years, which came out in 1912, explored the complexities facing different generations of these new women and catapulted her to success. Based on the technique of the talking head, it reveals not only the character of the writer herself, her background and history, with special emphasis on her relationship to her mother, but life as it was lived just before the First World War in the small Hungarian town of Nagykároly. The poet Endre Ady’s words stand as a fitting tribute to her even today: „Let us rejoice in Margit Kaffka because she proves the triumph of Hungarian feminism... She is a strong person, an artist with an assured future: no criticism can hinder her true destiny, the path marked as her own”
  • KOSZTOLÁNYI Dezso: April Fool
    • Übersetzt von: Molnár Eszter
    • Verlag: NORAN Kiadó Bt.
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 160
    • Poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist, Dezso Kosztolányi’s (1885-1936) influence on Hungarian writing has remained strong to these days and his novels have been widely translated. His stories are admired for their insight into the Hungarian character and their structural qualities. The selection here is drawn from his work at different stages in his career in order to capture the character of his writing.
  • KRASZNAHORKAI László: The Melancholy of Resistance
    • Webpage von  KRASZNAHORKAI László
    • Übersetzt von: SZIRTES George
    • Verlag: Quartet Books, London
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 304
    • In this surreal, dark, humorous novel László Krasznahorkai describes the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a little town in Hungary. The circus promises to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world and its arrival is greeted with a frenzy of speculation. Bizarre rumours begin to spread that the circus has some sinister hidden agenda and as the expectant crowds gather, the town finds itself in the grip of hysteria.
  • KRUDY Gyula: The Knight of Dreams
    • Übersetzt von: Molnár Eszter
    • Verlag: NORAN Kiadó Bt.
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 120
    • As a novelist and a short story writer, Gyula Krúdy (1885-1936) created a body of work in which memory drives narrative. The world that memory seeks to recapture is that golden twilight of the Dual Monarchy, unforgettably evoked in his Sindbad stories. Sindbad puzzles over the amorous adventures of his youth, in an endless pursuit of dreams and emotions that he can never attain. Krúdy’s reputation and popularity in Hungary have never slipped and more of his work is appearing in translation. This selection from the Sindbad stories shows off his qualities as a writer admirably.
  • MADÁCH Imre: The Tragedy of Man
    • Übersetzt von: Thomas Mark
    • Verlag: FEKETE SAS Kiadó
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 192
    • The masterpiecc of Imre Madách, the „Hungarian Faust” written in 1864, is considered to one of the most precious texts of the Hungarian literature. The gigantic vision of the fate and future of humanity now appears in the masterful translation of Thomas Mark, accompanied by the illustrations of György Buday.
  • MADÁCH Imre: The Tragedy of Man
    • Übersetzt von: Charles Henry Meltzer and Paul Vajda
    • Verlag: KOSSUTH Kiadó Rt.
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 160
    • The bilingual (English-Hungarian) volume was published on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the birthday of the great Hungarian poet and dramatist, illustrating the atmosphere of The Tragedy of Man with abstract paintings not using definite contours, but only colors. Antal Jozefka, the renowned Hungarian painter, eliminates the small details of the objects, thus giving them a symbolic function to express the essence and provide an imposing aesthetic experience. In the dramatic poem, Lucifer and Adam or God, the Bad and the Good, struggle against each other through the whole of world history, proving that history is also a sequence of failures of Man. But the fate of mankind is not disconsolate, since the life of those zealous for lofty ideas has a goal: the goal is struggle itself, in which God’s mercy helps the hero.
  • MÁNDY Iván: What was left
    • Übersetzt von: John Bátki
    • Verlag: NORAN Kiadó Bt.
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 160
    • Iván Mándy (1918-1995) created one of the most original oeuvres in 20th century Hungarian fiction. The stories written in the first half of his career have become classics of the genre, recalling Chekhov and Salinger. From the 1970s on Mándy’s writing, borrowing techniques from the radio play and the cinema, have projected scenes from the narrator’s mindscapes, catching memory and desire in the act, capturing states of mind in the process of becoming, strange and familiar voices arising from the near and distant past, erasing the tenous boundaries between dreaming and waking, past and present. The dozen stories and novellas in What was left have been selected from four collections of Iván Mándy’s fiction published between 1972 and 1992. In them, starting from the material things of everyday life, transcending the realm of the rational and, like his beloved Buster Keaton, approaching other dimensions in the hierarchy of being, Iván Mándy works his quiet, enigmatic and preposterous charme.
  • MÁNDY Iván: Fabulya’s Wives and Other Stories
    • Übersetzt von: John Bátki
    • Verlag: CORVINA Kiadó
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 192
    • Iván Mándy (1918-1995) was the Hungarian Academy’s nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. His oeuvre of fiction and radio plays ranges from short stories focusing on the "little people" forced to the "sidelines" of existence to the more disembodied texts where the objects of everyday urban life speak to us in human voices. His texts emerge as authentic visions, documents of the human condition, universal in their validity and appeal. Fabulya’s Wives, originally published in 1959, is a picaresque tale about an unforgettable bohemian and the entanglements of his business and amorous affairs in the Budapest of the early Fifties. The accompanying stories from the cycle Lecturers, Ghost-Writers (1970) offer glimpses of the same set of characters in their tragicomic struggles to survive with dignity intact while destitute and downtrodden in the totalitarian squalor of the early 1950’s when Stalinism ruled Budapest.
  • NEMES NAGY Ágnes: On Poetry. A Hungarian Perspective
    • Übersetzt von: Mónika Hámori
    • Verlag: Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1998
    • Nummer von Seiten: 196
    • "It is wonderful to have these essays by a significant poet of our century gathered together and expertly translated into English. Ágnes Nemes Nagy is one of the most important figures in East European poetry, and her work is still in the process of being discovered by English-speaking readers. Her prose, meanwhile, reveals another side of her sensibility, and its range of subjects and insights is considerable. This collection will be of interest not only because it is the work of an important woman writer and a Hungarian survivor of Stalinism, but because it is the writing of a skilled and deeply thoughtful poet. (David Young) Contents: Without Buffaloes + Negative Statues + Ephemeral Apple + On the Crisis of Language + Do We Know What We Are Doing? + Rose, Rose + A Dialogue on Contemporary Poetry + Star-Eyed + The Geometry of the Poem + Preface for my Poetry Collection / Navigation is Necessary + Yellow-and-Blue + On Style + Mother Tongue + The Poet’s Secret + How Many Blues Are There? + Hyacinth + Hyacinth with Scruples + Hyacinth in Snow + Living Geometry
  • ZILAHY Lajos: Two Prisoners
    • Verlag: Prion Books, London
    • Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999
    • Nummer von Seiten: 468
    • Set in Budapest during the First World War, this is a searing love story of two people whose lives are shattered by war. Miette and Peter’s idyll is destroyed when Peter joins the army and is taken prisoner. Their struggle to remain true to each other during the years of separation and torment moves to a tragic and ironic finale in the depths of Siberia. Two prisoners was a great success of the Transylvanian-born author Lajos Zilahy (1894-1974) who is considered one of the finest Hungarian novelists of the century. It has not been available to English language readers for thirty years.

 

 

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