´(...) staying in one place, without which travel lose its meaning (...)´
I may have leaved my Central European love behind, but all those years when I was assiduously delving into languages and cultures of this intellectual realm, are always with me. Those days, I am not a regular observer of the life there, those languages that they took such long days to learn are fading and in the last five years I haven´t been eastwards farther away from Prague. However, I have my triggers, from the lángos - fake ones - sold in winter in Berlin market´s to the books hidden in my Kindle I´ve long forgot I ever had.
This year, I promised myself to travel more around my library and improve some languages I used to love, Hungarian among them. And although I still need to find a bit of time to review some grammar and especially vocabulary, before reading something in the original language, a mental trip back to the Hungarian culture happened already.
Szilárd Borbély is one of those many authors from Central Europe ´discovered´ in the rest of Europe. Without their translation, the rest of the world would not have been able to access their works. Multi-awarded translator Ottilie Mulzet contributed tremendously in the last years to bring extraordinary Hungarian authors to the literary map of the moment.
Szilárd Borbély published not too much prose, but a lot of poetry that still have to be discovered - Mulzet already translated Final Matters: Selected Poems 2004-2019 - and appreciated in the non-Hungarian languages. He died by suicide at the age of 50. His first novel, translated also by Mulzet, a realistic story about a poverty-ridden Jewish family in a Hungarian village in the 1960s-1970s, was a literary revelation, as he was realistically addressing a topic that was rarely approached in the post-war Hungarian literature. I still have to review the deeply lyrical In a Bucolic Land, translated by Mulzet as well.
Kafka´s Son has a different, more univesal and intertextual take. Kafka´s writings - whose 100 years since his death are celebrated in Europe this year - resonate with a certain local sensibility, built through daily hardships and traumatic histories. It´s a destiny of fragmented identity, put on silent due to various circumstances, still struggling to manifest otherwise. The conflict with a distant father that Kafka revealed in Letter to the Father, may be read beyond our everyday relationship with our fathers, but as a geographical and historical story of alienation as well.
Postumously published, Kafka´s Son includes small stanzas of struggles - with faith, family patriarch, religious failures, writing destiny - where Kafka´s works made into only one of the layers of understanding and inspiration. Kafka can be any one of us, Central Europeans, and sometimes I realize that I am more belonging to this place as I ever realized. Maybe this literary journey I have ahead this year will help me - as usually happens alongside journeys - understand something more about myself as well.
PS: A side note of appreciation for the beautiful cover as well.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
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