The Nobel laureate next door

While Kertész's Nobel in 2002 - primarily in Hungary itself, but to some extent also on the global market - may have seemed unexpected to many, bearing in mind that this extraordinary, lucid and somewhat stubbornly cynical chronicler of his own experience of the Holocaust was much better known and accepted among German than among Hungarian critics, Krasnahorkai's Nobel is actually not such a big surprise. Namely, we are talking about a writer who has been attracting great interest from both the Hungarian and international literary public for exactly forty years, and whose every new book, since Satantang In 1985, he always looks forward to it with great impatience.

Through every writer, especially a great master of language, and Krasnahorkai undoubtedly is, he inevitably speaks not only what Danilo Kiš called genes have been identified. (own) reading, but also the being of its own language, with all its richness, but also its limitations. To that extent Krasnahorkai, no matter how Hungarian and worldly, and our critics have rightly compared him to the greats of world literature such as Melville, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Marquez, Thomas Bernhard, Cormac McCarthy and others, still primarily grew out of the Hungarian linguistic and literary tradition. His story-telling, no matter how thematically and stylistically independent it was, nevertheless arose from what the great Hungarian storytellers of the twentieth century left him as a legacy, such as Zygmond Moritz (for naturalistic descriptions and popular humor), Deze Kostolanyi (for fine irony and a different, more bourgeois type of humor) or Miklos Meselj (for meticulous attention to detail), to name just a few. That's why I agree with the late academician Imre Bori, who, when Kertész won the Nobel Prize in 2002, said that in the history of Hungarian literature there had been writers who deserved this literary award before.

Hungarian literary historians agree that Krasnahorkai's first novel represents an important element of what was called the (postmodernist) turn in Hungarian prose in the 1980s. Nevertheless, from today's perspective, it may seem a bit unusual, when we see with a gap of four decades that Krasnakhorkai does not fit into any literary trends or stylistic fashions of the time. On the contrary, we are talking about a writer of ancient, or perhaps better said, timeless literary procedure. Even his endlessly long, winding sentences are not a new phenomenon in world literature. Thematically, the plots of his novels - especially the first two, Satantang i Melancholy of resistance - revolve around a few somewhat typical heroes: ravishers and idealists in a lonely and at least strange search for the essence, for answers to the main and most painful questions of human existence. On the other hand, in Satantangu, for example, we also have colorful characters of false prophets who come, not in sheep's clothing, but in the guise of demagogues who promise an exodus and a better life there somewhere, but wolves are predatory anyway.

In a very rough, very simplified view, Krasnahorkai's opus, which today consists of about twenty books, could be divided into fiction on the one hand, and travelogue-reflexive prose on the other. In some additional division of his fictional prose, three novels stand out, Satan Tango, Melancholy of resistance i The Return of Baron Wenckheim as, conditionally speaking, novels of the writer's native world or the world inspired by his homeland. We could define these three books, again very conditionally, on the thematic level as a kind of novelistic trilogy inspired by the homeland. These ironic-dystopian books with extraordinary epic power and (sometimes dark) humor provide a postmodernist prose vision of what the great modernist poet André Adi at the beginning of the twentieth century called Hungarian meadow. It's just that, unlike Adi's poetic symbols, here we are dealing with polyphonic novels in Bakhtin's sense, which, on the rhythmic level, could be read like, say, listening to an all-night concert.

From this template - although template is not the right word, because Krasnahorkai's works are anything but template - the novel from the late nineties of the last century deviates to some extent. War and war which, like a real postmodernist novel, operates with a found manuscript. However, the main character of the novel is again a troublemaker, just like the heroes in the aforementioned trilogy, and his fate is equally tragic, if not more tragic than Krasnakhorkai's other troublemakers. And yet, the manner of his suffering, as well as what will happen out of the book happening after his death on the pages of the novel, distinguishes it from the previously mentioned books. I would say that it is not too much of a problem that I revealed the fate of the main character here, because Krasnakhorkai's works cannot be to spoil, the reading pleasure cannot be ruined by retelling the plot, it can be read, like any truly great work, even if we know the plot well. Especially if we already know the plot well.

When it comes to Krasnahorkai's stories, I would single out those books in which the author, again in his own way, deals with beauty as such, that is, with the craft side of art, which requires almost monastic asceticism and devotion. It's about books The world is coming. i Seyobo was down there.. Beauty may not save the world, but it does help us to bear the corporate, alienated and digitized desert of our everyday life at least a little bit easier. Which is not so little to begin with. It is up to us translators to try to bring at least a part of this unique world of Krasnahorkai to our readers in the years to come.

In search of Odysseus

We are planning a trip through Dalmatia for May 2015. László won the International Man Booker award and we are postponing the trip. At the beginning of October 2016, we are in Dubrovnik. There is too much of everything in the City. Too much literature: we are sitting in the "Moby Dick" restaurant, talking about the Ragusa episode of Allen Ginsberg in the early eighties. The first night, László will have a hard time sleeping in his hotel near Stradun, so in the wee hours he talks to his close friend from New York, the author Publications number 49. There is also too much of Hungary: we look at the relics of Hungarian rulers in the monastery treasuries.

Very quickly it becomes clear that we are running away from the Nobel committee and that we are looking for a hiding place in the Adriatic, an area without signals, without messages and calls. During an afternoon walk in Lokrum he says, "you know, Imre (Kertész) told me, Laci, that prize ruins the rest of your life".

...

In Korčula, we are then greeted by already deserted October streets and a storm. My parents and friends, the area where I come from. László has carte blanche, I don't expect him to write anything. If he writes, let it be something completely small, someone almost nothing, as the famous piece by the French composer Luc Ferrari reads, recorded at the end of the sixties at the other end of the island, in Vela Luka. However, László mentions some first ideas, themes with which he would like to follow up on some of his earlier stories and questions that remained unanswered. He mentions that we definitely have to visit Odysseus' cave on Mljet.

It's Saturday, October 8. national holiday, Independence Day, which in the meantime changed the date (again) in Croatia. A perfect autumn day. We arrive at Mljet by catamaran. We visit the National Park and lakes, a landscape that has become so close to my body as a seasonal tourist guide. We are almost completely alone on the islet of St. Mary in the middle of the Great Lake, and the present masters, who are currently working on the renovation of the monastery church and cloister, receive us very warmly and chat with us. On the boat ride back to the pier, László tells me gently and firmly at the same time, "this was good, but not good enough". They mean, we have to go to Odysseus's cave! Embarrassment in front of a friend: instead of being his guide, I became one resistor his wishes, as Alyosha, my father, would say, and a model for a literary character who would later Always after Homer to recite to Japanese guests The Odyssey.

It's a holiday, the tourist season is coming to an end, the chances of finding transportation to Babino polje and the path to the cave are slim. But... we didn't give up!

The Adriatic is a sea, but when you approach it at breakneck speed along goat-like, rocky paths, and when you suddenly see it, it becomes an ocean, infinity and an epiphany. In flight from the world and all possible committees, László sought Calypso, the magical nymph of death and an impossible refuge, in Odysseus's cave, I realized.

We threw our eyes and shadows forever into the throat of that Mljet grotto, and a few days later in Pupnat we toasted Dylan on the Nobel Prize.

Petar Milat

(The author is an editor at the MaMa Multimedia Institute from Zagreb)