There are quite a few interesting pieces, including an (whose most famous novel—The Door appears to be out-of-print on Amazon . . . Can this possibly be right?), and a “Close-Up” featuring called that begins:

I’ve often wondered what would happen were Hungary to slip off the face of the Earth from one day to the next. Would anyone care? Who’d mourn, who’d rejoice? What would the world stand to lose or gain from such an odd cataclysm?

Although it’s not really made explicit, this issue seems to have a special focus on Gyula Krudy. There’s a piece called a couple short stories by him ( and ) and of Ladies Day that came out from Corvina Press last year.

Krudy’s Sunflower came out from NYRB last year and was one of my favorite translations of 2007. (It actually made our Top 10 list.) The book is very strange and captivating, and definitely worth reading. Krudy’s Adventures of Sindbad is available here in the States, but that seems to be it . . . which is really unfortunate, since Ladies Day sounds so interesting and unique:

Hungary’s conflicted history—its shifting frontiers, drastic amputations of territory and population—has produced, George Szirtes suggests, a particular reaction in Hungarian writing—“an interest in the grotesque, the black joke, the magical gone wrong [my italics]”. That last thought might have been written—perhaps was written—with Gyula Krúdy’s extraordinary fictions especially in mind. Even more than Sunflower, the novel which immediately preceded it, Ladies Day, now available in John Batki’s American-English translation, is shot through with a queer magic, a disturbed energy of language, character and situation for which it’s hard to think of a parallel, in the Anglo-Saxon literatures, at least.

The Hungarian Cultural Center presents John Lukacs in conversation with John Bátki. They will be discussing Gyúla Krúdy’s Sunflower. This fantasia of a book has never before been published in the United States.

Thursday, September 20, 2007, 7:00pm, Hungarian Cultural Center, 47 Broadway, 5th Floor, Free

If you aren’t familiar with Krúdy’s work (which has been compared to that of Robert Walser and Bruno Schultz), you’re in for a treat. Practically everyone who worked on the book here—from proofreader to book designer—has found herself bowled over by it.

Here, for example, is one of his translators, the usually sober-minded poet George Szirtes, describing Krúdy’s Sindbad stories (no relation to the Arab sailor): “The language comes to pieces . . . leaving a curiously sweet erotic vacuum, like an ache without a centre.” Besides whetting your appetite for some sweet erotic vacuuming, does that make Krúdy’s literary power clear to you? No? Well, perhaps this old jacket copy will help: “Krúdy’s verbal / shamanistic trance-and-dance translates historical reverie into a vision that transcends national and ethnic borderlines.” Not quite clear yet? Historian John Lukacs, probably Krúdy’s greatest promoter in English, finally nails it: Krúdy “is translatable only with the greatest of difficulty — in essence hardly translatable at all.”

Via , who shares our soft spot for the Hungarians.