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.