Boulevard Books is a publishing house dedicated to the promotion of world literature in translation, and this unpretentious, accessible series of pocket guides has won praise in Reference Reviews, The Guardian and elsewhere. The Babel Guide to Hungarian Literature in English Translation covers a range of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, drama and poetry, featuring reviews of individual works and anthologies supplemented by brief extracts, supported at the back of the book by a bibliographic “database” of Hungarian literature which has been translated into English.
Many of us could name a Hungarian composer or footballer, but would be hard pressed to name a single Hungarian writer. The most widely‐known I came across here were Imre Madách, author of an extraordinary verse drama much translated as The Tragedy of Man (1862), and Ferenc Molnár, author of Liliom, the play that formed the basis of the popular musical Carousel. George Szires remarks that the survival of the Hungarian language, an isolated example of the Finno‐Ugrian linguistic family, “seems almost an act of petulant defiance in the face of rationality” (it is, however, a “deeply musical” language).
Edwin Morgan has brought the major poet Sándor Weöres (1913‐1989) to the attention of an English‐speaking audience. W.H. Auden evidently considered a work by Ferenc Juhász (born 1928) to be “one of the finest poems of the century in any language” (its enigmatic title translates as “The Boy Transformed into a Stag Clamours at the Gate of Secrets”). Susan Sontag and W.G. Sebald admired László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), which Szirtes describes as “one black molten‐lava flow of type”.
Some of the English here is slightly uncertain (for example, “the events of the 1956 revolution and its retaliation”, p. 103), and I noticed a few minor errors (an account of The Tragedy of Man on page 100 refers to “the Jacobean terror”, which should be “Jacobin”). Nonetheless, this little book should be of interest to public and academic reference collections as well as to travellers. Together with the country’s turbulent history, I got a sense of a streak of mordant humour. István Örkény (1912‐1979), who remained in print “even at the height of Stalinist censorship”, was a specialist in “ultra‐short” stories; one of them is entitled “Life should be so simples”:
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1 remove fire extinguisher from bracket
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2 open valve
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3 approach source of fire
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4 extinguish fire
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5 close valve
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6 replace extinguisher on bracket.
