by Imre Kertész
Certainly a stranger. Look, it’s not just a question of my being liked or disliked but much more of how long an artistically inclined individual can maintain a creative life in discord with those around him or her … even the question of how long that may act as an inspiration, and when does the frustration arising from the dialogue of the deaf—to the point that it poses a danger to health, so to say—start to kick in.
To the extent that it may distort your power of judgment or maybe disturb the scale of values that you have elaborated so scrupulously? In your weaker moments, are you never seized by doubts or uncertainty?
Who can say they are not sometimes troubled by doubts? What I mean by that is that I always doubt every sentence I utter, but I have never for a moment doubted that I have to write what I happen to be writing. Would you believe that I am not sufficiently familiar with my own life’s work? Because that probably is the case. Once I have written a book, after suffering a certain spell of remorse and nausea, I no longer know what I wrote. I never took stock of the importance of one of my works; I know nothing about that: I’m far too permeated by “the world’s indifference.” In this chaotic, postmodern world of ours, spiked as it is with terrorism and atrocities, I don’t believe anything is of any special, let alone preeminent, importance. It seems to me that not only people but societies are not born for happiness but strife. The stated goal is always happiness, but that is always a will-o’-the-wisp. There is still no way of knowing how an individual life can be harmonized with society’s goals, about which we know hardly anything. There is still no way of knowing what motivates us, or indeed, when it comes down to it, why, over and above a vegetative automatism, we live at all. Still to this day, in all truth, no light has yet been thrown on even whether we exist at all, or are just embodied images of the neuronal bundles at work within us—a symbol that goes through the motions, because it is bound to go through the motions, of being an autonomous reality. For me, who is of no importance, one thing which is of no importance is nevertheless important: that’s more or less how it stands with literature.
These days you spend a lot of time in Berlin. What took you there?
Illness; depression; health; joie de vivre.
All four at once?
However odd it may sound.
Let’s start with the illness.
I won’t go into the physical symptoms; much more serious than those was the claustrophobic depression, which weighed my hand down like lead, locked my soul in the stocks (if it is permissible to speak of a soul as if one were talking about some kind of spinal osteoporosis, or a paralyzed limb which gives one constant shooting pains). Around a year ago, it was so bad that I was unable to touch the novel that was then in progress. In plain language, I broke down.
When did that happen?
Around the autumn of 2000. At that time, Magdi, infallible diagnostician that she is, with love as her sole implement, persuaded me that we should rent a little “workplace” in Berlin. She realized that if I were abroad it would be easier for me to create the inner freedom that is a precondition for a writer. She was not wrong, either: that turned out to be the solution, even though we had to accept the risk of taking that step (for instance, whether we would be able to pay the rent regularly). Later on, the Berlin Academy of Arts awarded me a grant for a semester, and once that had elapsed we simply stuck around, as it were, becoming cosmopolitans, commuting between Budapest and Berlin, indeed Chicago as well. It was in Berlin that Liquidation was resuscitated; as I walked on the Kurfürstendamm and its side streets, the intertwining broken threads of the story appeared to me in my imagination, the just-about-perceptible sutures at the site of the vanished junctions like the tacking on a coat that is turned inside out—the flimsy edifice of a novel that was still realizable. No, I’m sorry, but please don’t interrupt me! I fear you’re going to bring in the reception in Hungary or something of the ilk that I’ve already grappled with, have got over, and so is no longer of any interest to me. You know, there are times like now, for instance, sitting here in the Hotel Mondial, or on the café terrace of the Hotel Kempinski in the languid autumn sunshine, and absent-mindedly contemplating the late-afternoon traffic on the city’s streets, under the unbroken canopy of the enormous plane trees, when for a minute or two I step out of time, and for a fleeting moment I catch myself marvelling at the adventure that my life has been.
It seems you have “drawn good profit from your sandwiches,” as Laurence Sterne, that economical English writer, put it.
In that case I would much rather talk about joy than suffering. The greatest joy for me here, on this earth, was writing, language, Endre Ady and Mihály Babits, Gyula Krúdy and Dezs? Szomory, the wonderful language of those and so many other good Hungarian poets and writers.
You have become a well-known, indeed world-famous, writer, the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize for literature. People pay attention to you, expecting words of redemption, perfection, beauty, looking for them in your works. You are girt by an aura of glory …
What are you trying to say?
Nothing in particular, I just want to quote the words of the “Old Boy” in the frame novel of Fiasco: “I was not endowed with the redeeming word; I was not interested in perfection or beauty, not even knowing what those are. I regard notions of glory as the masturbation fantasies of senile old men, immortality as simply risible.” Don’t you find there is a contradiction here?
Of course I do! I see contradictions at every hand, but then I take delight in contradictions.
NOTES
1. In the Mátra and Zemplén Hills, respectively, in northern Hungary.
2. An outer suburb on the NE side of Pest (part of the Sixteenth District).
3. Just off the left bank of the Danube, level with the southern end of Margaret Island (Thirteenth District).
4. Turning off the main Rákóczi Ave thoroughfare in Pest, level with what became the ghetto.
5. In the Eighth District, off the Outer (Erzsébet) Avenue.
6. The pengő was the Hungarian currency from 1927 to 1946, when it was replaced by the forint. For most of this period 1 USD = 5 pengő (though it went into the squillions per $ during the hyperinflation which followed World War II).
7. A fillér was one-hundredth of a pengő (and now of a forint), i.e., equivalent to one cent.
8. Also in the Eighth District, not far from the Grand Boulevard.
9. Fourth District, the northernmost area of the city.
10. The movement was used by the authorities for compulsory physical training of Hungarian boys between the ages of twelve and twenty. It was also a way around the ban on regular army recruitment imposed on Hungary, as one of the defeated powers of the First World War, by the 1920 Versailles peace treaty.
11. Precise quote (Spring 1991): “I am beginning to comprehend that I was held back from suicide (from the examples of Borowski, Celan, Améry, Primo Levi, and so on) by a ‘society’ which, after the concentration camp experience, brought me proof, in the form of so-called ‘Stalinism,’ that there could be no question at all of freedom, liberation, the great catharsis, etc.—in other words, everything that intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers not only spouted about but manifestly also believed in; which guaranteed me a prolongation of slave existence, thereby ruling out the very possibility of any such error. That is why I was not touched by the flood of disappointment that lapped around the feet of people living in freer societies, who had undergone similar experiences and were attempting to flee it, until gradually—despite the quickening of their steps—it rose up to their necks.”
12. Actually Black Sailing Ship and anyway published in 1958.
13. A complex metaphor for a lady of the night used by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Transl. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949. E.g., “One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetæra esmeralda [the clearwing]” (p.
14); “A brown wench puts herself nigh me, in a little Spanish jackets, with a big gam [i.e. shapely legs], snub nose, almond eyes, an Esmeralda,…” (p. 142); “I saw the snub-nosed girl beside him, Hetæra esmeralda: her powdered bosoms in Spanish bodice …” (p. 148); “… Adrian went back to that place on account of one particular person, of her whose touch burned on his cheek, the ‘brown wench’ with the big mouth, in the little jacket, who had come up to him at the piano and whom he called Esmeralda” (p. 154); “The letters composing this note-cipher are: h, e, a, e, e-flat: hetæra esmeralda.”
14. Imre Kertész: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Reflections Sparked by the Sight of a War-torn City,” Logos (2003), accessible at http://www.logosjournal.com/kertesz.htm.
15. In the First District, this runs SE from approximately Moszkva Square.
16. See entries for 1974: “Silence is truth. But a truth which is silent, and the ones who speak up will have right on their side.”
17. See entries for the summer of 1964.
18. The nickname by which Elisabeth, the widely popular Empress of Austria from 1854 to 1898, was known.
19. From the final paragraph of Someone Else, included in a translation of an extensive selection of extracts published by the journal Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 2, Spring 2004, p. 314–346.
20. In the Second District of Buda, a block west of the Danube and level with the southern tip of Margaret Island.
21. See towards the very end of the entries for 1988.
22. An entry for 1966.
23. Cf. “A person always lights upon the lie he is in need of just as unerringly and just as unhesitatingly as he can unerringly and unhesitatingly light upon the truth he is in need of, should he feel any need at all of the truth … (The Union Jack); “the sentences we have a need of seek us out sooner or later …” (Kaddish for an Unborn Child).
24. Novels by, respectively, Aleksandr Bek (1944) and Vasili Azhayev (1948).
25. Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895), Cf. “Also lying there was a ragged, yellow-covered volume of Valéry’s essay on Leonardo. He needed these for a translation he was doing” (Liquidation, p. 112).
26. Drifting on the Water (1928) in Hungarian is Valamit visz a víz, so a play on words can be made through the similar sounds of “víz” and “Weiss.”
27. I.e., he had been identified as Jewish.
28. Among the entries for the summer of 1981 in Galley Boat-Log which is not quoted is the remark: “Good translators do not exist. This is because of the nature of the Word: you talk in your own language but you write in a foreign one” (J.-P. Sartre, Words. Transl. I. Cleophane. London: Penguin Books. 1967, p. 104).
29. Author’s footnote: The sole exception is Sára Molnár’s Ugyanúgy téma variációi. Irónia és megszólitás Kertész Imre prózájában [Variations on the Same Theme: Irony and Mode of Address in the Prose of Imre Kertész]; (Cluj-Kolozsvár: Koinónia, 2005), which was published just before the Hungarian manuscript of Dossier K. (i.e., K. dosszié) went to press. Sára Molnár’s analyses of the texts show a profound insight, but I have not had sufficient time to ponder on her discerning evaluations with the seriousness they deserve; nevertheless, if anyone wishes to tackle my work through the route of critical analysis, this is the one book I would venture to recommend.
30. Cf. note 11.
31. Penultimate entry for 1974.
32. Cf. Scattered entries from Christmas 1963 to Summer 1968.
33. Cf. Entry for summer 1981.
34. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
35. Cf. 1964 entry in Galley Boat-Log.
36. Entry for August 1973.
37. “A Holocaust mint cultura” [The Holocaust as Culture], a talk delivered at the University of Vienna, 1992, published in The Exiled Language, p.89
38. “Bits and Bobs.”
WORKS REFERENCED
In English:
Fatelessness. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Fiasco. New York: Melville House, 2011.
Kaddish for an Unborn Child. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Liquidation. New York: Knopf, 2004.
The Union Jack. New York: Melville House, 2009.
In Hungarian:
A száműzőtt nyelv [The Exiled Language]. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 2001.
“Jegyzőkönyv” [Sworn Statement]. Published with “Élet és irodalom” [Life and Literature] by Péter Esterházy.
Budapest: Magvető-Századvég, 1993.
Gályanapló [Galley Boat-Log]. Budapest: Holnap Kiadó, 1992.
Valaki más. A változás krónikája [Someone Else: A Chronicle of the Change]. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1997.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. At the age of fourteen he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at the Buchenwald concentration camps. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near-anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little-known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelessness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included Fiasco and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and The Pathseeker. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” He lives in Berlin.
TIM WILKINSON is the primary English translator of Imre Kertész (his titles include Liquidation, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker, and The Union Jack) as well as numerous other significant works of Hungarian literature. His translation of Kertész’s Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club Translation Prize.
