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  DEZSŐ KOSZTOLÁNYI (1885–1936) was born in Subotica, a provincial Austro-Hungarian city (located in present-day Serbia) that would serve as the model for the fictional town in which he later set several novels, including Skylark. His father was the headmaster of the local gymnasium, which he attended until he was expelled for insubordination. Kosztolányi spent three years studying Hungarian and German at the University of Budapest, but quit in 1906 to go into journalism. In 1908 he was among the first contributors to the legendary literary journal Nyugat; in 1910, the publication of his second collection of poems, The Complaints of a Poor Little Child, caused a literary sensation. Kosztolányi turned from poetry to fiction in the 1920s, when he wrote the novels Nero, the Bloody Poet (to which Thomas Mann contributed a preface); Skylark; and Anna Edès. An influential critic and, in 1931, the first president of the Hungarian PEN Club, Kosztolányi was also celebrated as the translator of such varied writers as Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Goethe, and Rilke, as well as for his anthology of Chinese and Japanese poetry. He was married to the actress Ilona Harmos and had one son.

  RICHARD ACZEL teaches English literature at the University of Cologne, Germany. He is a playwright and founding director of the theater company Port in Air. His translations from the Hungarian include Ádám Bodor's The Euphrates at Babylon and Péter Esterházy's The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn: Down the Danube.

  PÉTER ESTERHÁZY was born in Budapest in 1950. He is one of Hungary's most prominent writers, and his short stories, novels, and essays have been published in more than twenty languages.

  SKYLARK

  DEZSŐ KOSZTOLÁNYI

  Translated from the Hungarian by

  RICHARD ACZEL

  Introduction by

  PÉTER ESTERHÁZY

  New York Review Books

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Note

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Skylark

  Chapters: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII

  Copyright and more information

  Introduction

  Everyone was born at that time: Joyce, Musil, Broch, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Einstein, Picasso, Wittgenstein. They were all there in their respective cradles, everyone who counted, le tout Paris. The Hungarian modern classics were there too: Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Gyula Krúdy, Zsigmond Móricz, Lajos Kassák, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály.

  Everything came together rather nicely at the turn of the century, before the world collapsed. A spiritual golden age, in which one of the most important and glittering actors was Dezső Kosztolányi.

  He was born in Szabadka (Subotica)1 in 1885, in that (to use his words) poor, grey, boring, dusty, bored, comical, provincial town. Even if we don't believe literature to be a mirror, in which reality catches a terror-stricken glimpse of itself, we can still admit that whoever reads Skylark(and also The Golden Kite) can recognise in Sárszeg the Szabadka of the fin de siècle. The years of the fin de siècle are years of progress, of industrialisation; it is then that Budapest is born and at once becomes a genuine big city–even a little bigger than it really is.

  Szabadka is an in-between city, neither one thing nor the other, frightfully respectable, its development well balanced, not as impetuous as, say, the more southerly Újvidék (Novi Sad), but not motionless either, like the more northerly Danubian town Baja. A similar indeterminacy can be felt in its bourgeoisie too; that is, the so-called gentlemanly middle class whose ambiguities we can see close up in Skylark. For this bourgeoisie considers itself heir both to the anti-Habsburg revolution of 1848 and to the Ausgleich of 1867, the compromise with Habsburg Austria, the birth of Kakania.2

  Kosztolányi is a sparkling youth, as talented as the sun. He is thrown out of the school where his father is headmaster, perhaps in the spirit of the above-mentioned ambiguities, but more likely because of an argument about rhyme in the school literary debating society, where he refused to accept the authority of his teachers. His cousin is Géza Csáth, whose short prose pieces are in fact the first modern texts, the first writings that are really of this century.3

  Kosztolányi arrives at the University of Budapest where he gets to know, among others, the poets Mihály Babits and Gyula Juhász. The correspondence of the three young men is touchingly beautiful, slapdash, pompous, charming, sensitive, far-sighted and ambitious. Kosztolányi gets a taste of the city and immediately falls in love with it. He is one of the most steadfast, faithful lovers of Budapest. A good lover. For a short time he studies in Vienna, but gives it up, and at the age of twenty-three becomes a journalist for a Budapest daily, replacing the poet Endre Ady who is in Paris. He never breaks with journalism throughout his life. Generations have (or haven't) learned from him how to write a little two- or three-page feature.

  He begins his literary career with poems and symbolic short stories. The first volume of poems to bring nationwide success is The Complaints of a Poor Little Child, which appears in 1910. After this he publishes a book nearly every year. Kosztolányi wants everything: life, literature, success.

  In 1908 the journal Nyugat (West) had been founded, the alpha and omega of modern Hungarian literature. Even today the voices of our older literary colleagues still falter when they speak about an exceptional experience, like being booted out by the fearsome editor, Ernő Osvát. (No such great things awaited Hungarian writers of the next generation: we were booted out by absolute nonentities.)

  Nyugat was a real periodical; that is, not merely a rallying point for first-rate writers, but a point of crystallisation and a force of integration in what might be called the new, modern movement. If we wish to attach labels we can say that Kosztolányi was a member of the first Nyugat generation, a representative of l'art pour l'art, a writerly writer; Homo aestheticus, as he called himself, in opposition to the Homo moralis. Courageously and coquettishly he chooses the “babbling surface” as opposed to the “silent depths.” “Oh, sacred, clowning emptiness!” he cries out, in his “Song of Kornél Esti,” above all to his friend, the morally serious Babits, who grew more critical of Kosztolányi in later years.

  Kosztolányi does not seek his own authentic face, but the authentic mask. He continually lives through roles and is close to classical decadence. The dandy is the last flowering of heroism in our age of decline, says the great dandyologist Baudelaire. Kosztolányi is a classical dandy, strict and severe.

  He is multicoloured and ineffable, like a rainbow. There is nothing accidental about his shifting between genres. Critics at times heatedly debate whether he was primarily a poet or a prose writer, and whether his many-sidedness was an advantage or a disadvantage. I think it was neither the one nor the other, but simply a fact. In poetry he is the virtuoso, the child dizzied and shaken by all the wonders of the world. In prose he is precise, at times already an anxious anticipator of the nouveau roman, an adult facing up to the facts of the world.

  He writes longer prose pieces from 1920. For him the twenties are the years of the novel: Nero, the Bloody Poet, Skylark, The Golden Kite, Anna Édes.4 In 1924 he publishes a volume of verse entitled The Complaints of the Sad Man, rhyming with, answering and continuing the successful volume of 1910. This is a time of arrival. His reputation grows both at home and abroad. He becomes acquainted with Thomas Mann, who–as Hungarians never fail proudly to point out–writes a preface to the German edition of Nero.

  Hungary has always had a great tradition in literary translation (the attentiveness of small nations–to themselves). Kosztolányi's achievement in this field is significant, his utterly exceptional sense of form almost predestines him for this. His translations include A Winter's Tale and Alice in Wonderland, to mention only two of the
English references.

  At the end of his life the virtuoso Kornél Esti stories appear, and the great late poems of the volume Reckoning. The “Meistersinger spun from the magic of poetic play and fate, imagination and tears” dies a difficult death from cancer of the larynx in 1936.

  A parlament a falra ment (Parliament hall has gone to the wall). First of all, of course, my poor translator goes to the wall, indeed, bangs his head against it, tearing out his hair. But such is life: hard. My life is hard, so was poor Kosztolányi's, why should the translator be the one to get off lightly? Yet even irrespective of the meaning of this sentence (that parliament hall has gone to the wall), one can appreciate its manifold beauty, rhyme and symmetry. This sentence formed the foundation of my children's political education. The Hungarian parliament, that unbelievable and–to Hungarian eyes–beautiful, if arguably intolerable, pseudo-Gothic building, at once announces the age of the young Kosztolányi, the incomprehensible self-confidence and ambition of the beginning of the century and the undeniable emptiness of its intentions. Driving past this building, all I had to do was point and the children would merrily whoop, “Parliament hall has gone to the wall.” In those days, anything more about the Hungarian parliament, or our so-called socialist democracy, simply wasn't worth knowing.

  Kosztolányi was perhaps the world's greatest rhymer, or master of rhyme. The Hungarian language is particularly well suited to this circus stunt, indeed it is hardly even a matter of bravado. Hungarian, unlike other languages, to this day treats rhyme, that cheap and dubious element, as a generally accepted and usable possibility.

  I would even venture to say that it was Kosztolányi who did most to make the Hungarian language what it is today. To change a language visibly, perceptibly, at the everyday level, is something very few writers ever achieve. Kosztolányi changed the Hungarian sentence. The Hungarian language anyway stands in a dramatic relationship to the sentence. Our language, as Babits wrote, “doesn't roll along on such well-worn wheels, doesn't think in place of the writer. It lacks those solid, ready-made phrases, those tiny components of style on which the English or French writer can draw without so much as thinking.” In Hungarian there are no clearly defined prohibitions; in a certain sense everything is possible and everything has to be invented over and over again. Every single sentence is an individual achievement. This individuality is both good and bad.

  Kosztolányi simplified the Hungarian sentence, made it shorter, purer. The nineteenth-century sentence was long-winded, the meaning wandering through long periodic structures, and in any case the Hungarian long sentence is a dubious formation because the words do not have genders and the subordinate clauses are more uncertainly connected to the main clauses than in the reassuring rigour of a Satzbau (German sentence construction). Such sentences totter along, uncertain even of themselves, stammer a little; in short, are extremely lovable.

  These are our internal affairs, important internal affairs; let's look at what lies beyond the sentence.

  First of all, in the spirit of Kosztolányi, we might say: nothing. Beyond language there is nothing. There are only words, and from these words the poet builds up everything, not just his books, his works, but ultimately he assembles himself and his own fate through words–his feelings, his father, his lovers. This is, of course, an exaggeration, even if it happens to be true. It is true because a writer–in the opinion of this present writer–should not have something to say, and an exaggeration because it would not be a good thing if his books didn't have anything to say either. If the writer speaks, that's pedantry; if the book keeps silent–then what's the point?

  Kosztolányi's books, let's be precise here, speak about death, about play and about Kakania, or rather about the interweaving of all three, sometimes about their identity, about the confusion of twentieth-century man for whom life is a game, the whole world is a game, and this world is: death. But even this is not certain.

  He writes in his diary:

  I have always really been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else.

  It is only since then that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise that I had to do something. I began to write poetry. [...] For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying. I have nothing but disdain for those writers who also have something else to say: about social problems, the relationship between men and women, the struggle between races, etc., etc. It sickens my stomach to think of their narrow-mindedness. What superficial work they do, poor things, and how proud they are of it.

  Kosztolányi is stoical, but oddly so, one might even say insincerely so. His is the stoicism of a young man. Kosztolányi's every reflex is that of a young man. (He grew old hard, found it hard to grow old, like a beautiful woman.) He believed in nothing except style. Yet he wasn't a man of principle. He is characterised at once by a love of life and a terror of life. He has no magic potions, he says, nothing helps–but why should one be disappointed because of this? He raises the questions of a man of today, but not the questions of a disillusioned man. We hear the dignity, at times the desire to show off, of a man in the shadow of death.

  He sets to work on Skylark in the spring of 1923. Szabadka already belongs to another country, our mothers and fathers belong to another country, they are just in the process of learning Serbian; everything is alien, once again our own past is disappearing. Kosztolányi looks back at a world he knew well, where he knew his way around as if at home, but without nostalgia. He knows how the story ends; he sits there in his own nothingness.

  The time of the novel is 1899, the eternal present moment, a Faustian moment: in miniature, in a provincial setting. Kosztolányi shows us the margins of a world whose centre we know from Musil. We are in the borderlands of Kakania.

  Kosztolányi's character as a prose writer does not, however, stand close to that of Musil, rather to that of Chekhov. He shares that same helpless fascination for the banal and trivial, for a drama-of-being which can be unravelled from a remote gesture, a twitch of the mouth, a dismissive wave of the hand, from lamplight and ugliness. A spider's web over a mine.

  Skylark's ugliness is not a symbol. This ugliness is the unnameable anxiety which we would dearly love to forget, to dispel, but it is not possible, it always comes back, is always with us, relentless, just like a daughter with her father. Skylark's hideousness, her soft puffiness, dullness, aggressive goodness is: us. It is our lives that are so stiff, so predictable, so impersonal, so Hungarian. Skylark is eternal. There's no deliverance. Our little bird always flies home.

  Kosztolányi's prose is quiet and sharp. Today our books are noisier and perhaps more blurred.

  —PÉTER ESTERHÁZY

  1993

  1. Subotica today belongs to Vojvodina, until 1990 an autonomous province of Serbia. It became part of the newly created state of Yugoslavia in 1918 at the end of the First World War. As a result of the postwar settlement (Treaty of Trianon, 1920), Hungary lost approximately two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population to the new successor states.

  2. A term invented by Robert Musil to describe the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was coined from the abbreviation K. u. K. or K. K. (whence Kaka-nia), which stood for Kaiserlich und Königlich (imperial and royal) and was used in reference to all the monarchy's major institutions.

  3. A selection of Géza Csáth's short stories is available in English. See Géza Csáth, Opium and other Stories, selected with a biographical note by Marianna D. Birnbaum, translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers with an introduction by Angela Carter, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1983.

  4. In addition to Skylark, two other novels by Kosztolányi are available in English translation: Nero, the Bloody Poet, translated by George Szirtes as Darker Muses, The Poet Nero, Cor
vina, Budapest, 1990, and Anna Édes, translated by George Szirtes, Quartet Books, London, 1991.

  Skylark

  I

  in which the reader is introduced to an elderly couple and their daughter, the apple of their eye, and hears of complicated preparations for a trip to the plains

  The dining-room sofa was strewn with strands of red, white and green cord, clippings of packing twine, shreds of wrapping paper and the scattered, crumpled pages of the local daily, the same fat letters at the top of each page: Sárszeg Gazette, 1899.

  Beside the mirror on the wall, in a pool of bright sunlight, a calendar showed the day and the month: Friday I September.

  And through the window of an elaborately carved wooden case, the sauntering brass hands of a grandfather clock, which sliced the seemingly endless day into tiny pieces, showed the time: half past twelve.

  Mother and Father were busy packing.

  They were wrestling with a worn, brown leather suitcase. When they had squeezed one last comb into the canvas pocket of the partition, they zipped it shut and lowered it to the floor.

  There it stood, ready for the road, bursting at the seams, its bloated belly protruding on either side like that of a cat about to bear nine kittens.

  The remaining bits and pieces they packed into a wicker travel basket: lace knickers, a blouse, a pair of felt slippers, a buttonhook and other oddments their daughter had carefully set aside.

  “The toothbrush,” said Father.

  “Heavens, the toothbrush!” nodded Mother. “We nearly forgot her toothbrush.”

  Still shaking her head, she hurried out into the hall and from there to her daughter's room to fetch the toothbrush from the enamelled tin washbasin.

  Father pressed down once more on his daughter's belongings, gently stroking them flat and smooth with his palm.