He comes up with the word hippopochondria which is forcing two foreign things together. However he is not interested in etymology. Etymologists will be aware that hippo comes from the Greek for horse while hypo from the Greek for under. He shows us, as an example, the relationship between hippopotamus and hypochondriac. In his his Saint Orpheus’s Breviary series, he will often slide off into the past and he does the same here with a story about a miserly girl of Semitic origin who becomes a nun, is almost canonised and leads a Turkish fleet against a Lutheran pope.Īnother technique he comments on is wordplay, an essential tool for many modernist author. Of course this is not a hat but a hat as a symbol of worldliness. It is the only hat in the shop and somewhat strange so, perhaps not surprisingly, his girlfriend is not interested in buying it but he is highly critical of her, for her lack of taste, so much so that he leaves her at once. The hat he sees in a window in Paris when out with his girlfriend. He goes off on tangents but one thing he does is link philosophical concepts to physical objects – in this case sunflowers and the building of a Venetian ship and a hat. We will soon find out that his approach is unconventional and, at times, not always easy to understand even though we know he is considering a theory of the novel. He has a periodical called Anti-Psyche and is writing an article on the novel and the creation of novels. We see this from the opening chapter when we meet the French philosopher Leville-Touqué. As with all of these writers, Szentkuthy is very much sui generis and is not a Hungarian Joyce, a Hungarian Proust and so on. Others, as the TLS article linked above shows, have added Musil and Kafka. Szentkuthy himself compared it to Proust, Joyce, and Huxley, though I am not sure I can agree with that, particularly the Huxley comparison. It will become one of the great documents of Hungarian culture that this book was written in Hungarian. It skips lightly, playfully, ironically and in incomparably individual fashion around the highest intellectual peaks of the European mind. Antal Szerb was one of the few to praise it: There has not yet been a Hungarian book as intelligent as Prae. However, when it first appeared in Hungarian, it did not get great reviews. This work, Szentkuthy’s first, has never been translated into any other language, apart from the first chapter appearing in French, which explains why it is so little known. Fortunately for us the very wonderful Contra Mundum has taken over and has now published several Szentkuthy works in English including Prae. However, Phébus, the French publisher stopped publishing them after the fourth one in the series. I first read these in French translation as they were not available in English translation. However, I would firmly endorse Griffiths’ suggestion that Miklós Szentkuthy should definitely be included and almost certainly has not because of a lack of translation and because he does not come from a West European country, Szentkuthy is best known for his Saint Orpheus’s Breviary series, a ten volume masterpiece of world literature. I could, of course, name several others though my colleague Andrei at The Untranslated has done a far better job than I could do. In this article in the TLS, Paul Griffiths states What if, besides Proust and Musil and Joyce and Kafka, there were some other writer who had reconsidered what prose could be about? He goes on to rightly suggest that Miklós Szentkuthy should be in this club. Home » Hungary » Miklós Szentkuthy » Prae (Prae Part 1) Miklós Szentkuthy: Prae (Prae Part 1)
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