LA Times on Sunflower

The LA Times has a review, which we overlooked these many weeks, of Gyula Krúdy’s Sunflowers, out now from the consistently incredible New York Review Books. It sounds fantastic.

Here, for example, is one of his translators, the usually sober-minded poet George Szirtes, describing Krúdy’s Sindbad stories (no relation to the Arab sailor): “The language comes to pieces . . . leaving a curiously sweet erotic vacuum, like an ache without a centre.” Besides whetting your appetite for some sweet erotic vacuuming, does that make Krúdy’s literary power clear to you? No? Well, perhaps this old jacket copy will help: “Krúdy’s verbal / shamanistic trance-and-dance translates historical reverie into a vision that transcends national and ethnic borderlines.” Not quite clear yet? Historian John Lukacs, probably Krúdy’s greatest promoter in English, finally nails it: Krúdy “is translatable only with the greatest of difficulty — in essence hardly translatable at all.”

Via Dispatches from Zembla, who shares our soft spot for the Hungarians.