Sandor Márai-in memoriam

Sándor Márai – in memoriam

by André Balog

Sándor Márai’s novel “The Rebels” (“Zendülők”) was published in English translation for the first time in March 2007 by Knopf , and it is reviewed by Arthur Phillips in the April 2, 2007, issue of The New Yorker . The third in Knopf’s ongoing issues of Márai’s works – following “Embers” and “Casanova in Bolzano” – “The Rebels” was translated by George Szirtes, whose poetry is currently featured on the website of the Hungarian Cultural Center, New York Phillips – his own first novel, “Prague” (2002), took place largely in Budapest – praises Szirtes’s rendering for its “luminous prose.”

While Márai’s works are enjoying unprecedented posthumous success in Italian, German, Spanish and French translations, until present, regrettably, only these three novels by the great 20^th-century Hungarian novelist have been translated into English. (A portion of Márai’s diaries – which amount to many volumes in Hungarian – “Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948” [“Föld, föld!”], was brought out by Central European University Press in 1996.)

It is difficult to feel unreservedly jubilant about Márai’s belated recognition outside Hungary in light of his suicide at the age of eighty-nine in San Diego, California, where he put an end to decades of exile in Switzerland, Italy and the U.S. By this time, Márai had had seen his home in Budapest bombed to its foundations in World War II, became widowed after 63 years of matrimony, and survived the death of his adopted son. During the forty years of communism in Hungary, Márai’s works were banned in Hungary, and his later output – written in Hungarian – was published in small editions by émigré presses.

“The Rebels,” Márai’s fourth novel, was published in 1930, and from its first appearance it garnered virtually unanimous praise, culminating in Antal Szerb’s tribute, naming it “one of the best Hungarian novels.” György Sárközi was among the first to point out resemblances between Márai’s “The Rebels” and Jean Cocteau’s “Les Enfants terribles,” an alleged kinship that haunted the Hungarian novelist for some time, though he explicitly denied knowledge of Cocteau’s work at the time “The Rebels” was being written. The chronology of the two novels’ conception and publication history supports Márai’s claim; in any case, his stance as a novelist was closer to that of André Gide than to Cocteau’s. The sympathy was not one-sided: Gide, too, apparently held Márai’s work in high esteem (“The Rebels” was brought out in French translation by Gallimard in 1931), as did Thomas Mann.

In 2003, the town of Salerno paid homage to Sándor Márai, who lived in the southern Italian town between 1968 and 1980, with a memorial exhibition. Looking at the photographs documenting Márai’s Italian years, I recalled my own first encounter with the Márai legend.

In 1975, a year after moving to New York at the age of 20, I wrote a fan letter to Gore Vidal – who lived in Ravello, a hilltop village above the Bay of Salerno – and he invited me to visit him in his cliff-side villa. During one of my postprandial walks in town, I was surprised to overhear a conversation in Hungarian between an old Hungarian man and a woman who appeared to be his wife. In those years it was unusual to encounter visitors from Hungary anywhere but on the most beaten tourist paths in Europe, and the couple’s demeanor suggested that they were not on temporary leave from Kádár’s Hungary. (Back then, one could tell “Hungarian-Hungarians” from, say, Italian-Hungarians simply by looking at them.) When I reported my sighting to Vidal, he opined that the Hungarian man was likely to have been the writer Márai, who lived somewhere “down there,” pointing toward the bayside. Having grown up in Hungary during the 1960s, Márai’s name was known to me only from my mother’s tattered copy of “Füveskönyv” – a volume of his collected aphorisms – and from whispered stories of his self-exile from Hungary in the late 1940s as the country was being swallowed up into Stalin’s empire.

Years later, as I read one after another novel by Márai – who became, posthumously, a best-selling writer in post-communist Hungary – I often regretted that I had not eavesdropped on him more assiduously of that Campanian afternoon. Back then, very few people in Italy, apart from the omniscient Gore Vidal, would have heard of the Hungarian novelist, who was living out the third decade of his exile on their soil. As of this writing, “Le braci,” the 1998 Italian translation of Márai’s “Embers” has seen 32 editions, and eleven of his other works have appeared in Italian. Habent sua fata libelli, goes the old adage since long before printing was invented. That writers, too, have their own destinies – though admittedly more obvious – is less frequently invoked with fellow feeling.

Márai’s novels in English translation:

Márai’s memoir: