The second installment in NYRB Reading Week takes me far away from 1970s New York City to a fictional version of 1899 Subotica (at that time the Hungarian city of Szabadka). In Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark, an old married couple—the husband is fifty-nine—sees their spinster daughter off for a week in the country with relatives. [...]
|
|
||||
|
After reading, ages ago now, Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy, I wanted to read some more Hungarian literature, and now I have. Embers is a very different novel, and Sándor Márai is clearly a very different novelist, but this too is an elegy for a disappearing time and place, and it’s quite lovely. Here it [...] Gyula Krúdy makes me wish my Hungarian went beyond “szeretlek” and “a viszontlátásra.” John Lukacs warns in his indispensable introduction to the NYRB edition of Sunflower that no matter how beautiful it may seem, we are missing so much in even a good translation, and based on what I have read I would definitely [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
|||
|
Copyright © 2012 bibliographing - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments