Foreign Laughter, Foreign Music
I did not read László Krasznahorkai’s Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance) through before starting the translation. I glanced at it. My internal translation engine seems to work best through a kind of visual scratch and sniff method. What I saw looked daunting, the tone hard to gauge. There were no paragraphs at all: the text was a dark lava flow of type. The sentences were very long too, the first occupying half a page, the others often longer, rarely shorter. The first took a while to solve. This is how the published version of the translated book begins:
Since the passenger train connecting the icebound estates of the southern lowlands which extend from the banks of the Tisza almost as far as the foot of the Carpathians, had, despite the garbled explanations of a haplessly stumbling guard and the promises of the stationmaster rushing nervously on and off the platform, failed to arrive (“Well squire, it seems to have disappeared into thin air again...” the guard shrugged pulling a sour face) the only two serviceable old wooden-seated coaches maintained for just such an ‘emergency’ were coupled to an obsolete and unreliable 424, used only as a last resort, and put to work, albeit a good hour and a half late according to a timetable to which they were not bound and which was only an approximation anyway, so that the locals who were waiting in vain for the eastbound service and had accepted its delay with what appeared to be a combination of indifference and helpless resignation, might eventually arrive at their destination some fifty kilometres further along the branch line.
First I had to work out the structure of the sentence, seeking out the main verb, feeling the sentence grow like some strange plant that seemed to be putting out several branches in various directions all at once, the sense constantly and wilfully qualifying itself to build its picture of chaos, a chaos that would prove to be the keynote of the book. What seemed obvious was that the working through of that chaos would involve some dark irony whose precise degree of darkness was not yet established.
How seriously dark was the dark? I knew that a number of Hungarian readers regarded Krasznahorkai’s work as unremittingly bleak and depressing. László Krasznahorkai (born 1954) came to prominence with a novel called Sátántango (Satantango), which remains untranslated into English though it received high praise in Germany. He was and remains the constant collaborator of the film-maker Béla Tarr, who turned Satantango into a seven and a half hour film. Krasznahorkai and Tarr it seemed were darkness visible. But there seemed to me to be a kind of comedy at play in Krasznahorkai that was missing in Tarr, whose visual compulsiveness produced its own poetry. It was there in Krasznahorkai’s stationmaster rushing nervously on and off the platform and in the guard’s shrugging remark that the train had disappeared into thin air again. However dreadful the prospect of waiting at this platform, however dispiriting the notion of a meaningless timetable, however cataclysmic the potential breakdown of order – and that order, all order, would break down in the book – the rushing and the shrug were still oddly amusing. The word ‘haplessly’ – a perfectly possible reading – offered itself as a possibility – and the single word “squire” nudged its way into the text opening up a slightly edgewise and always ambiguously comic universe.
These were not merely lexicographical options but a way of reading or perceiving the rest of the book, which went on to develop its visionary fascination with notions of order pitted against apocalyptic chaos. The entire action of Melancholy takes place in a backward town in eastern Hungary. The central characters – an apparently simple newspaper delivery boy called Valuska and a retired musicologist called György Eszter – are both obsessed with implicit order, the former with the movement of the planets, the second with the notion of natural tuning. To Mrs Eszter, the fearsome estranged wife of the musicologist, the idea of order is less natural: a semi-fascist social orderliness. Into town rolls an enormous truck bearing the corpse of the biggest whale in the world. With it arrive a sinister crowd who are waiting for a word from the tiny bird-like lord of misrule travelling with the whale to bring violence and anarchy to the town. The book moves towards an orgy of destruction, the dangerous crowd rolling through the streets much as the prose rolls down the page, much, indeed, as the vast whale itself had rolled towards the market square.
Pace is everything in the book. The pace was inevitable, the vision tragic-comic, but the comedy changed in the course of its passage through English. It was as if English did not tolerate such monumental slow-paced Hungarian bleaknesses without a certain irony, an irony that was implicit in the Hungarian text but grew a little in translation. The very notion of order was different. It was the same with the grotesque and absurd elements, in so far as these could be separated. Grotesque and absurd meant something slightly different in the English.
There is a marvellous scene in the book where Valuska is in a pub at closing time persuading the drunken customers to act out a full eclipse of the sun. Tarr’s film version of the book, The Werckmeister Harmonies, employs only part of the story and begins with this scene, concentrating on the desolate symbolism of the spinning and lurching figures: the text moves more slowly and deliberately, leaving space for comedy.
Some of them, those stuck in the corner nearest the fireplace, or under the coat rack, or laid out across the bar, were suddenly smitten with the desire for a sleep so deep that not even a volley of cannon would have woken them, nor could he [Valuska] look for comprehension among those who, having lost the thread of conversation about the monster due to arrive on the morrow, remained standing but glassy eyed, though, doubtless, having regard to the miserable innkeeper staring pointedly at his watch, both the horizontal and vertical among them would have agreed upon a common course of action, even if only one of their company, a purple faced baker’s apprentice, was capable of giving it form by means of a sharp nod of the head. Naturally Valuska construed the onset of silence as an undoubted sign of the attention about to be concentrated on him, and, with the help of the house-painter (a fellow covered from head to foot in lime) who had invited his intervention in the first place, employed what remained of his sense of direction to clear a space in the middle of the smoky bar: they pushed back the two chest-high drink stands that were anyhow in the way, and when the forceful if vain entreaties of his erstwhile assistant (“G’won, squeeze up to th’ wall a bit, willya!”) met the unsteady resistance of those clinging vaguely to their glasses and showing a few faint signs of life, they were constrained to employ the same methods on them so that after the minor kerfuffle caused by all that shuffling and involuntary backward stepping, a space did in fact open, and Valuska, hungry by now for the limelight, stepped into it, and picked for his immediate audience those standing closest to him, who happened to be a lanky driver with a pronounced squint, and a great lump of a warehouseman, referred to for now simply as ‘Sergei’.
Then the demonstration begins.
...he could find no place in the utterly different “enervating dryness” below, and would often feast his eyes, as he did now, on what he considered to be the friendly, if sometimes dim and uncomprehending faces opposite him , so that he could allot them their usual parts, beginning, in this case, with the gangling driver. “You are the Sun,” he whispered in his ear, and it never occurred to him that this was not at all to the liking of the aforesaid, for it is annoying for a man to be mistaken for someone else, an insult in fact, especially when his eyelids insist on drooping and night creeps insidiously on so he is unable to raise even the mildest protest. “You are the Moon, ” Valuska turned to the muscle-bound warehouseman, who shrugged his shoulder indifferently to indicate that it was “all the same to him,” and was immediately driven to the desperate expedient of waving his arms about in order to regain the balance lost through one careless movement. “An’ I’m the Erf, if I’m not mistook,” nodded the house painter in anticipation, and grabbing the wildly flailing ‘Sergei,’ stood him at the centre of the circle, turning him to face the driver who had grown morose from the continuous erosions of twilight, then, as befits one who knows his business, took an enthusiastic step behind them. And while Mr Hagelmayer, who had been fully eclipsed by this configuration of the four of them, yawned in protest, clattered the glasses and slammed lids to draw the attention of all those with their backs to him to the irredeemable passage of time, Valuska was promising to deliver an exposition so clear that everyone could understand it, that would provide, as he said, a chink through which “plain people such as we are might glimpse something of the nature of eternity,” the only assistance he required being that they should step with him into unbounded space where “the void which offered peace, permanence and freedom of movement was sole lord” and imagine the impenetrable darkness which extended throughout that realm of incomprehensible, infinite, ringing silence.
The miracle of the book seemed to lie as much in the self-deflating grandiosity of those long periods as in the obsessive comprehensiveness of its vision. Human beings, it tells us, are hapless in the face of stars and railway timetables, comically inept when confronted with the forces of decomposition and ruin. Their suffering is terrible, unremitting yet absurd. It is as if Pa Ubu had entered Kafka’s Castle. It is Joyce with the lights off, Flann O’Brien locked into a cellar. It may be difficult to decide at what point the alarm turns to tears of laughter or grief, but then that is the point.
The book rolled slowly over and through me for four years. Four years was two and a half years longer than it should have been. They were four years of frustration, exhaustion and cursing. I cursed the endless sentences, the lack of landmarks that paragraphs might have offered, and, as it sometimes seemed to me, the wilful manner and cosmic ambition of the author. At times the book seemed to be a particularly terrifying example of the kind of elephantiasis that afflicts Hungarian fiction. The smaller the country, I quipped to myself, the greater the ambition. You make up for the lack of language territory by offering sheer verbiage as compensation. Hungary was a small country locked into its isolated language: the prolific energy and ironic earnestness of its authors was their way of battering down the doors to the outside world.
Though little reviewed in England (that is to say it was reviewed briefly albeit with intense pleasure) Susan Sontag and W.G. Sebald 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 it was a marvellous book but that 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. That book was War and War.
It was after I had begun 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 world wide success of his novel, A gyertyák csonkig égnek, literally ‘The Candles burn down to Stumps,’ but better known in English as ‘Embers.’
*
The above essay was written and published in 2005. Seven years have passed since then and I have translated three more Márais and two more Krasznahorkais. For Márai the translations that followed included the first world war novel, The Rebels; the novella, Esther’s Inheritance; and the four-part compendium novel, Portraits of a Marriage. Márai tended to crowd out Krasznahorkai because of demand, and because Márai was, on the whole, faster work.
War and War, to which I refer but do not describe, was published in 2006. As often with translated authors the books in translation don’t appear in the same order as they did in the original language. In order of Hungarian publication the translated novels are, Satantango (Sátántangó, 1985), The Melancholy of Resistance (Az ellenállás melankóliája, 1989), War and War (Háború és háború, 1999) to which, in the English translation, was appended the short story, Isaiah Has Come (Megjött Ézsaiás, 1998), Animalinside (ÁllatVanBent, 2010), with Seiobo Has Been Down There (Seiobo járt odalent, 2008) to come. That is a provisional title for Seiobo, which has been translated by Ottilie Mulzet, who also translated Animalinside.
In English translation the order is The Melancholy of Resistance (1998), War and War (2006) Animalinside (2010 / 2011) and Satantango (2012). I am responsible for the three novels, as well as for the short story that first appeared on the web, The Last Wolf (Az utolsó farkas, 2009) and a few other bits and pieces.
After War and War I thought I wouldn’t want to do more Krasznahorkai. There was so much other work to do – my own and translations – and War and War was exhausting. It wasn’t the story or the voice – I think I had a voice that I felt to be Krasznahorkai’s voice ‘as-through-me,’ a voice that purred along once engaged – but the move towards full chapter-length sentences, often several pages long. I won’t forget, for example, the very long sentence that begins: ‘He read the enormous, ever longer sentences and typed them into the computer though his mind wasn’t on it, but somewhere else, he told the woman, so everything...’
The balance between comedy and dark vision is central to Krasznahorkai. The comedy is not central, except in so far that the world is conceived in terms of terror, oppression, obsession, chaos and absurdity and that produces a comic incapacity in the helpless or evil people that inhabit it. In War and War the story is that Korin, a scholar, finds an extraordinary document in a Hungarian archive and becomes obsessed by it. The document is an account of the wanderings through time of four characters, who are themselves haunted by a demonic figure, Mastermann. These characters appear in time usually before some dreadful events, and form a mysterious, inconclusive commentary on human history. Korin believes the document to be of enormous importance and sets off to New York to deposit the contents of the document on what he believes to be a point of eternity on the internet, in the city he considers to be the centre of the universe.
Korin feels he is being pursued. He is obsessive to the point of madness and, like the Ancient Mariner, feels he must regale whoever he meets with the tale. Passages from the manuscript are enigmatically interspersed through the book. At the very beginning of the book we pick up Korin on a railway bridge in Budapest, surrounded by a gang of dangerous, feral children:
1.
I no longer care if I die, said Korin, then, after a long silence, pointed to the nearby flooded quarry: Are those swans?
2.
Seven children squatted in a semi-circle surrounding him in the middle of the railway footbridge, almost pressing him against the barrier, just as they had done some half an hour earlier when they first attacked him in order to rob him, exactly so in fact, except that by now none of them thought it worthwhile either to attack or to rob him, since it was obvious that, on account of certain unpredictable factors, robbing or attacking him was possible but pointless because he really didn’t seem to have anything worth taking...
As Korin tells the story of the four time-travellers his voice becomes entangled with the voice of the text, so the effect is rather like Sebald’s in Austerlitz where voices are in constant, barely signalled motion. So, for example, Korin talks about the passage in Cologne:
They were making their way through Lower Bavaria and had stopped at a market when Falke heard that something was happening in Cologne, said Korin, a fact he discovered as a result of the interest he showed in a work by a certain Sulpiz Boisserée at the bookstall where he had stopped to leaf through certain items, and he had become interested enough in one to linger and read more of it when the man on the stall, the bookseller, having been assured that Falke had no intention of stealing it but was seriously thinking of buying, told him his choice was a sign of the most refined taste, because something really important was in preparation at Cologne and furthermore that he, the bookseller was of the opinion that it was of a magnitude to shake the world; and the book that Falke was holding in his hands was the best work on the subject and he was pleased to recommend it in the most earnest terms, its author being the young scion of a long established family of tradesmen, who had dedicated his life to art, and had made it his chief aim to make the world forget an international scandal, if he may put it that way, by producing something spectacular of international significance to cover it; for the honorable gentleman would no doubt know, he leant closer to Falke, what precisely happened in 1248 when Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the foundation of the cathedral, and would no doubt also be aware what was to be the fate of the divine plan according to which the foundation stone of the world’s highest and most magnificent sacred structure was then laid, because what he was talking about, of course, was the story of Gerhard, the architect and the devil, said the bookseller.
The effect is like wandering through a maze in a dream in which historical scenes appear brilliantly but ominously lit. It is, however, a very dark book overall: the prose crowds the reader in and there is no escape from it.
In translating it, of course, I couldn’t help but ask the obvious question. In what manner had the sentences grown to this extent since The Melancholy of Resistance, and why? Was it mannerism? A test of endurance? You have to take a deep breath before diving into each chapter. There is a sense of drowning and panic as you read – and still more so as you translate. You are looking to come up for air and take your bearings. Could you put your head above the water and see how far of the seemingly endless sentence there is still to go?
A few years later I was asked to translate The Last Wolf – a twenty-eight page single- sentence story, but by that time I had learned to move with the undersea currents that were picking my bones in whispers: I was a Phlebas who had survived to tell the tale and might yet tell more. That sense of drowning but surviving is an analogy for the vision too.
Because long sentences are not the end of it: they are merely the water into which you are dropped.
One feature the reader might fail to notice, but which, as translator, I couldn’t help noticing, was precision of location. There are specific references to specific places through War and War. In the New York part of the book, for instance, as Korin makes his way through the city, I began to follow his route on a New York street map. At one point Korin enters a building and I found the building on the internet with photographs much as the book describes it. I began to get the sense that overlapping claims to fictionality, document, and verisimilitude were an aspect of the vision. It was not that I became as obsessive as Korin but that I became aware of entering a world as obsessive as his, one in which a map of the idea of reality was lightly pinned to a real map of some real sunken Atlantis. So Cologne Cathedral, so New York, and so, at the end Schaffhausen, where Korin arranges for a plaque to be put up in the local museum, and where, in real life, there is precisely such a plaque, marking precisely such a fictional figure – an art work that is itself reality.
One might regard such coincidences as games – and indeed they are games – but they are not simply PoMo teasers. The fiction that envelops us is not a jokey simulacrum: it is in deadly earnest. It does not simply say: the world is like this in language but that the world is like this.
I think that is a core perception, a necessary understanding of the book. Once accepted, the tricks and mannerisms seem not so much play as a way of struggling through deep water. And that may possibly be a key difference between old style ‘free world’ post modernism, and the ‘iron curtain’ version. The stakes are simply higher in the latter.
*
The status of Krasznahorkai as a cult novelist was clear from early on, not just any old cult either. It was as classy a cult as you could hope for, but small. It was also, to some extent, the minor part of a bigger cult: that of the film director Béla Tarr.
The relationship between the novelist and film director goes back to before 1988, to the first collaboration between Krasznahorkai and Tarr, Damnation (Kárhozat) for which Krasznahorkai wrote the script. Tarr had made a series of documentary based films before that, involving amateur actors. but also a remarkable TV version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth involving a 62 minute take. Tarr’s films before the entrance of Krasznahorkai were different in many respects from the films he made after, as Krasznahorkai himself tells us, and as we can see by looking at Tarr’s early films. That filmic vision changed after Tarr entered Krasznahorkai’s literary imagination.
After Damnation came Tarr-Krasznahorkai’s magnum opus, Sátántangó (1994), a seven- and-a-half hour film following Krasznahorkai’s novel fairly closely, which is not surprising as the author wrote the script. It is not, however, a shot-by-shot literary interpretation of the book and certainly not any kind of substitute for it. It is primarily a magnificent film. When people first think of Tarr it is probably of Satantango they are thinking. It is an unforgettable experience, a vision composed of very slow shots, its eye so fixed on the faces and locations, that it is as if the viewer were living in another dimension. It is, one should add, a brilliant eye: hypnotic, obsessive, enormously opulent in its reduced, obsessive way. Mihány Víg’s music too is hypnotic and beautiful. The film is essentially a vision of evil and loss set in a landscape of cows, mud and decay. And rain. Rain is the music beneath the music in the films, and present in the books too in some way as a rain of the spirit.
If Satanyango is the full blown vision of the Krasznahorkai-Tarr world then The Werckmeister Harmonies – the film version of The Melancholy of Resistance is its crystallisation. The film doesn’t deal with the whole book but what it does deploy it presents with great poetic skill. If the film Satantango is an epic in both concept and duration, The Werckmeister Harmonies is an epic in concentration.
Because the film needed no major translation, it was by way of Tarr that potential foreign readers came to Krasznahorkai, to the extent that the film Satantango preceded the English language translation of the book by eighteen years, and while the English- language publication of The Melancholy of Resistance did precede The Werckmeister Harmonies by a couple of years (the American edition appearing in 2000, the same year as the film,) the fact was that many people came to Krasznahorkai by way of Tarr’s marvellous and critically praised films, reversing the actual order of genesis and influence.
There is no point in extending this article with more debates about the relationship between book and film since it is a well explored question in many more cases than this, but this was worth saying. What we are left with is a translated book titled Satantango, the last in a set of novels in English, but the first of the same set in Hungarian.
It is fascinating to consider what has made the English translation of Satantango the great breakthrough book for Krasznahorkai in anglophone territory. There is no doubt it has, ever since the book was heralded, pre-publication, with a five page article titled ‘Madness and Civilization’ by the critic James Wood in the New Yorker on 4 July 2012. The reviews that followed have been long, prominent and almost uniformly enthusiastic, so that László Krasznahorkai is now a major figure on the world stage.
I have already talked of the technical difficulties of translating very long sentences. They are not quite so long in Sátántangó, which is a reminder that the difficulties are not of a numerical nature. Connecting up clauses to make a very long sentence is perfectly possible as was clear in War and War, albeit occasionally with the effect of raising the volume on the comedy button.
Sátántangó presents us with a small defunct co-operative farm or estate, the remaining inhabitants of which are desperate to get away. They are trapped in an endless cycle of rain, mud, deception and desperation. They had invested some trust in a figure called Irimiás, and his sidekick Petrina, who are, at the beginning of the book, presumed to be dead. One day the bells in a distant field begin to toll though there is only a derelict church there. One of the characters wakes from an adulterous bed to hear it. Soon there are conspiracies to run off with a common fund of money but then comes rumour of the return of Irimiás and Petrina. Meanwhile the doctor, an old souse with a bad heart, is watching and noting everything from his own window, his notes being the raw material of the novel. The plot of the novel is constructed as a complex dance that gives the novel its title, a tango in which the characters move into various relationships with each other. A simple, innocent girl dies. Irimiás and Petrina – who may be police informers – return just as her death is reported. Irimiás addresses the company at the girl’s hearse and persuades everyone to give him their money so they can find new work in other towns, he being able to arrange this work. He is a much feared figure, something of a demon. The company sets off, they experience a vision, and eventually arrive at the nearest town. The doctor who has been left behind investigates the bells, makes a discovery and writes in his files. It rains throughout, as is mandatory in Krasznahorkai.
Nothing in Krasznahorkai is about plot. Instead of plot we have system. Reading the book is entering, learning and resigning yourself to the system. The system works by accumulation of complementary patterns: microcosms, macrocosms; apprehension, fulfilment; natural , supernatural; ordered, chaotic. The story, as story, moves between these patterns to create its own systematic cosmology, accumulating events within the system accumulating prose that prevents escape. Think of one of Piranesi’s Carceri as interpreted by M. C. Escher. Once inside any one part of War and War you’re not going to get out till the end of the chapter.
But beyond the systems, which are not the translator’s business, there is the question of voice, as informed by the system. If I may briefly mention my particular case, I am a poet who has come by translation at a certain point in his publishing life and has stuck with it, so far at least. Michael Hofmann is a similar case from the German. I can’t speak for him, but the best way I can understand this dual role is as an extension of the poetry. Poetry is a matter of intense listening for some poetic principle within language as it relates to specific material. In the case of prose translation from the Hungarian it is a question of apprehending some essential poetic in the original text. Lexicographically I may be wrong – I know I have been at times – and there may be times I miss some point of cultural significance, but my ear has been, primarily, for the poetics of the text. Krasznahorkai offers a poetics that one might learn to move with, as with a partner in a dance. The translation is that dance.
Sátántangó, like the other books, is about the unremitting accumulation of signs, but being an early work the prison is not quite as Piranesian as it was to become. At the heart of it – as the title indicates – is a dance, as both system and event. The dance scene at the bar in Sátántangó is a hot, close, sweaty, drunken metaphor for the whole. A visceral understanding of that dance helps convey the colour of the writing. Inside a bunch of trapped and helpless people swaying together, flirting, cursing, collapsing: outside the innocent girl heading off to her death while the doctor lumbers about in his own debilitating condition. There is something laughable in the sheer incompetence of the actors, something comic in their cosmic insignificance, something very funny about a blind giant in a bar crashing about like a thundercloud in a narrow sky.
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.
Read the first three chapters of the English translation of Satantango, by George Szirtes.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His family were refugees from the 1956 Uprising and settled in England where he studied sciences at school, trained as an artist and finished up being a poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door won the Faber Prize in 1980. His twelve books since have won various awards, most recently the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). He has been translating from the Hungarian since his first return in 1984 and has published over a dozen books of translated prose, verse and drama, that have won a number of prizes. He has edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian writing and written a book on art as well as a number of libretti and musicals. He reviews for The Guardian, The Times and other papers and teaches part time at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he has published Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006).