LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI WINS NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

                                          

LASZLO  KRASZNAHORKAI ( born 1954 ) 

I have always felt that translating is a  challenging  skill. A translator needs to read and understand a text and then rewrite that it in another language retaining not only the sense of the original but also the mood, atmosphere, and style. If there is word play or humour or sarcasm or melancholy  or philosophical message then that needs to be brought  with  same spirit in the target language. Many authors are lucky to get great translators . And  Laszlo Krasznahorkai from Hungary too has been lucky for he got English translators like George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet who put his Hungarian texts  into captivating English. Laszlo won 2025 Nobel Prize for literature. He deserved it by all standards and measures.He is a second Hungarian to win the Nobel  Prize, after Imre Kertesz in 2002. Laszlo was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula in southeast Hungary, near the Romanian border.

Laszlo’s work began to be read more widely in the 2000s, following English translations of The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War (1999). More global fame came when he was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2015 and the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 (for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming).

I have read his one novel and some  short stories . His work presents themes that centre around a mix of  absurdity, melancholy,  humour , survival  , resilience,breakdown of social structures, regressive totalitarian governments , individual freedom ,etc. His work bears  influence of Samuel Backett, Gunter Grass, Albert Camus ,Frenz  Kafka, Fyodor  Dostoevsky , Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Bernhard  and eastern philosophical thought .Laszlo has repeatedly referenced "The Castle" by Kafka as a key influence. Like majority of Hungarian writers, Laszlo remains  admirer of Albert Camus for firmly siding with Hungarians when Russia invaded their country. Albert Camus vehemently opposed the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, viewing it as a brutal suppression of freedom and a betrayal of the working class. He delivered a speech titled "The Blood of the Hungarians" on the anniversary of the uprising, where he praised the Hungarian resistance and condemned the Soviet action. Acknowledging influence of Kafka, Laszlo writes : 

"When I am not reading Kafka, I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka, I miss thinking about him." 

The settings of his novels move across central Europe's remote villages and towns, from Hungary to Germany, before skipping to the Far East, where his travels to China and Japan left deep-seated impressions on his mind ."Satantango", his 1985 breakthrough novel , is set in a similarly remote rural area and became a literary sensation in Hungary. The novel portrays, in powerfully suggestive terms, a destitute group of residents on an abandoned collective farm in the Hungarian countryside just before the fall of communism.

A fierce critic of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Laszlo  has said his government was a "psychiatric case" because of its stance on the Ukraine war. Orban opposes military aid to Kyiv and says Hungary should stay out of the war. However, Orban congratulated Laszlo  after the news of Nobel Prize reached him and also wished him well .

After the Nobel Award news was splashed by the media, Laszlo reacted  by saying, " I  had only planned to write one book, but after reading my  debut novel, "Satantango", I wanted to improve my writing with another one. My life is a permanent correction. " .

Laszlo has also written half a dozen screenplays in collaboration with the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr, who has adapted several of his novels for the screen. His major works include:

Sátántangó (1985)

The Melancholy of Resistance (1989)

War and War (1999)

Seiobo There Below (2008)

Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2016) 

His works are well-known internationally through translations, particularly his long and complex sentences and exploration of dark, apocalyptic themes. About the writing style of Laszlo, Prof Bran Nicol from the University of Surrey writes this:-

" One of the most striking features of Krasznahorkai’s writing is the sheer length of its sentences and paragraphs. It is not uncommon for a paragraph to comprise a single sentence and that sentence to last for a page or more, punctuated by commas and semi-colons. The effect, as Szirtes has said, is that readers feel guided into “loops and dark alleyways – like wandering in and out of cellars”. But the rhythm of the clauses produces a lyrical beauty which conveys the sense that the world is endlessly fascinating and beyond our comprehension. One of the allegorical contexts his work invites is, inevitably, that of totalitarianism and the Cold War. Reading Krasznahorkai transports the european reader into a temporal vaccum. The Melancholy of Resistance was published in a landmark year – 1989 marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the restoration of Hungary to a democratic parliamentary republic. That year ushered in what turned out to be a brief moment of political hope – until 9/11 triggered a return of the apocalyptic imagination.Its relevance to the contemporary mood and its sense of being beyond the norm is why Krasznahorkai’s fiction demands to be read.",

The pronunciation of "Laszlo" is "Lah-sloh". In Hungarian, the language of origin of the word , the stress is on the first syllable (LAH-sloh).

( Avtar Mota )

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