The Withering World
“Tomorrow, everyone who is beautiful will come under suspicion. As will those with talent and those with character.”
His voice was hoarse. “Don’t you understand?
To be called beautiful will be an insult; talent will be called a provocation, and character an outrage.
Because it’s their turn now, and they will appear everywhere, from everywhere, emerging in their hundreds of millions and more.
Everywhere.
The ugly ones, the talentless, those without any character. And they’ll throw vitriol in the face of beauty.
They will tar and slander talent. They will stab through the heart anyone with character.
They’re here already … And there’ll be more of them. Be careful!”
Dolazi takav svet - Šandor Marai
DOLAZI TAKAV SVET
Dolazi takav svet
u kome će svako biti sumnjiv
ko je lep i talentovan
i ko ima karakter.
Lepota će biti uvreda,
talenat provokacija,
a karakter- atentat.
Jer dolaze oni
ružni,
nesposobni,
beskarakterni.
Posuće vitriolom lepotu,
premazati katranom i kletvom talenat
i probošće srca onih
sa karakterom.
Sándor Márai
He was born in 1900 on April 11 in the city of Kassa, Kingdom of Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia). Through his father, he was a relative of the Hungarian noble Országh family. In his early years, Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. In Egy polgár vallomásai, Márai identifies the mother tongue language with the concept of nation itself.He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Franz Kafka.
He wrote very enthusiastically about the First and Second Vienna Awards, in which as the result of the German-Italian arbitration Czechoslovakia and Romania had to give back part of the territories which Hungary lost in the Treaty of Trianon. Nevertheless, Márai was highly critical of the Nazis.
Marai authored 46 books. His 1942 book Embers expresses a nostalgia for the bygone multi-ethnic, multicultural society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reminiscent of the works of Joseph Roth. In 2006 an adaptation of this novel for the stage, written by Christopher Hampton, was performed in London.
He also disliked the communist regime that seized power after World War II, and left – or was driven away – in 1948. After living for some time in Italy, Márai settled in the city of San Diego, in the United States. Márai joined with Radio Free Europe between 1951-1968.[4] Márai was extremely disappointed in the Western powers for not helping the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
He continued to write in his native language, but was not published in English until the mid-1990s. Like other memoirs by Hungarian writers and statesmen, it was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 Kádár era. The English version of the memoir was published posthumously in 1996. After his wife died in 1986, Márai retreated more and more into isolation. In 1987, he lived with advanced cancer and his depression worsened when he lost his adopted son, John. He ended his life with a gunshot to his head in San Diego in 1989. He left behind three granddaughters; Lisa, Sarah and Jennifer Márai.
Sohar, Paul. “Márai, Sándor. 2013. The Withering World (trans. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott). Richmond, Surrey, UK: Alma Books. 242 pp.” Hungarian Cultural Studies. e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Volume 8 (2015): http://ahea.pitt.edu DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2015.204 New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press ISSN 1936-8879 (online) Márai, Sándor. 2013. The Withering World (trans. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott). Richmond, Surrey, UK: Alma Books. 242 pp. Reviewed by Paul Sohar, Freelance Writer For the longest time in the United States the only Hungarian name that ever came up in literary discourse was Ferenc Molnár, whose boulevard comedies were a staple on Broadway stages in the 1920s and 1930s and even made their way into films. In the past decade or two finally another Hungarian writer has broken into the English language book market, although in his case only posthumously: Sándor Márai (1900-1989), whose novels were published one after the other, prompted by the great critical acclaim he had received in Europe after his death. The success of these two writers abroad would require the psychoanalysis of the book industry since neither is from the mainstream of twentieth century Hungarian literature. Yet even Imre Kertész, the sole Nobel Prize winning Hungarian writer, has received less attention and popular acceptance than Márai. And now we have a bilingual edition of Márai's generously selected poems in an annotated and beautifully produced volume from a well-known British publishing house and supported by grants from various Hungarian and British government agencies, a distinction very few other Hungarian poets have ever enjoyed. This publication was no doubt facilitated by the success of Márai's novels, but what was it in the novels that appealed to contemporary readers? Could it be nostalgia for Central European mid-twentieth century sensibilities? Or for European culture before it was deconstructed and, supposedly, revealed to be an instrument of colonial oppression? Or for a time when it was enough to want to understand one's surroundings and it was not required to be clever? For a time when it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad? For a time when humanism was not a competitive sport and one could be a humanist without denigrating others who aspired to the same ideal by a different route and/or were buffeted by the same uncontrollable historical forces? For the time of Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, T.S. Eliot, Bertram Russell, et. al? Indeed, Márai’s prose resonates with that era, and now that I have read this large selection of his poems -- and not only the later, longer occasional ones -- I must concede that this poet has been unjustly neglected even among Hungarian litterateurs; he definitely belongs in the halcyon of twentieth century Hungarian poetry, together with Attila József (1905-1937), Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), Desző Kosztolányi (1885-1936), etc.; the omission of Endre Ady (1887-1919) is intentional: his symbolist style is more emblematic of the fin-du-siecle transitional period than of the twentieth century. Márai shares the voice of the hurt-abandoned child (a tone set and legitimized by Kosztolányi’s poetry volumes The Complaints of a Helpless Little Child ['A szegény kisgyermek panaszai,' 1910] and The Complaints of a Sad Man ['A bús férfi panaszai,' 1924]) and his contemporaries, who lost their secure moorings in a war-torn, convulsing world but still derived strength from their solid intellectual grounding and their faith in the redemptive power of civilization. Thus Márai rises above mere personal concerns by embodying universal elements into his otherwise very private poetry. Added to this extension of voice and concerns are the modernist influence of the time, unexpected turns of language, surprising juxtapositions of images, and metaphors of almost Dadaist dislocation. The result of all these is a life realized in poetry, but not quite: there is one more thing, and that is the formal style that adds more than just a finishing touch to his poems and serves as a framework and backbone for the poet to keep his exuberant flow of lines together. Free verse has become an essential part of modern poetry in the West, and initially a few Hungarian poets, like Milán Füst (1888-1967) and Lajos Kassák (1887-1867), enthusiastically embraced it, too, while others not so much rejected it as simply found no new freedom in it. Hungarian is a highly inflected language that on the one hand allows for a great variety of rhymes and easy ways to create formal verse, but on the other all this results in long words, which, when piled into long lines, can sound rather awkward, not to say prosaic. In fact, I feel that effective free verse in Hungarian can be best achieved by using short declarative sentences or sentence fragments. A good example of this approach is from one of Márai's relatively late poems, “Amen” From the very beginning, though, Márai was committed to a formal style which became dominant in the second half of his poetry writing career, at least as far as rhyme was concerned, even in poems that otherwise sound like free verse with their meter rather variable in the long lines. In addition to offering a wide choice of rhyme pairs, the Hungarian language is perhaps uniquely suited to formal poetry; the rhyme pattern, the meter, and the limited syllable count keep those five- or six-syllable words from bumping into one another; the form gives these long words order in which, instead of looking and sounding awkward, they function as finely-chiseled granite blocks. Thus they are like monuments, somewhat reminiscent of the gravitas of Latin verse, and instead of cramping the message, the form forces or helps the poet to channel the message and keep things from becoming an endless ramble. Hungarian poetry is often socially and politically engaged, and often it is the form that keeps it from degenerating into a diatribe. Even an extremely private poet as Márai was compelled by cataclysmic historical events to step out of his mental ivory tower and face the real world around him. Central Europe in the twentieth century was cursed with one tragedy after another, and Márai’s formative years coincided with WWI and the revolutions that followed. His upper-middleclass background provided him with a sheltered existence and an education that qualified him as a journalist in Germany and France. In addition, he had already published two volumes of poetry in Hungarian by the age of twenty, and he chose that language as his literary tool as he went on to write several novels and plays back in Hungary in addition to his journalist work abroad. His books did well even in translation, and life was good to him until 1944-1945, the last year of the war, when he had to hide his Jewish wife Ilona Matzner and then finally witness the destruction of Budapest, where up to then things had been relatively peaceful. The apocalypse is fully and dramatically recorded in a set of seventy-one half sonnets plus a longer epilog titled The Book of Verses (Verses könyv. Révai könyvkiadó, 1945), in which the surrealist metaphors and the petty problems of a sensitive soul are gone. By now the whining of the spoiled inner child has turned into the howls of the adult caught in a catastrophe in all its stark reality. This was when Márai, already past the age of forty, found his authentic poetic voice which was later further nurtured by one tragedy after another, the most profound being his exile from his homeland and language in 1948, when the communist dictatorship was fully established politically and economically and extended its total control over every aspect of life including the arts and letters. Exile did not seem to agree with Márai. Although he did not have to languish in D.P. (Displaced Persons) camps or make a living by doing menial jobs as did many other intellectuals of lesser standing, still, his income from Radio Free Europe did not make him financially independent, and his existential problems only increased with time. Living abroad with money in his pocket in the 1920s seemed to have been a liberating and exhilarating experience, but the postwar world was less congenial to the foreign and penniless writer. Worse yet, he was by then too old to adjust to a new and alien environment, let alone assimilate. By then he was in a foreign landscape not as a tourist just passing through but as a refugee with no other place to go. Life around him in the outside world was no longer a curiosity to observe and elucidate but something to grapple with. A crisis of the spirit ensued, but he dealt with it in some of his best poems, in Jeremiads of de profundis mode; at least two of these poems have since become monumental milestones in Hungarian literature: “Funeral Oration” [‘Halotti beszéd’] and “Angel from Heaven” [‘Mennyből az angyal’]. Written in 1950 in a loosely constructed style, almost free verse except for the rhymes, the former is based on the earliest extant written Hungarian text, a funeral oration, combined with a large number of other quotes from poems of patriotic exhortation that sadly contrast with Márai's real-life dispiriting reality of homeless refugee status. The literary references make this poem essentially untranslatable without numerous historical and textual notes, which the translation team helpfully and unobtrusively supplies at the end of the book.
Nice written article !