Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)

Márai's secret

Szirtes and Tibor Fischer ín The Guardian deal primarily with problems relating to the translation: the work was translated not from Hungarian but from the German translation. The result was that the characteristic 'Marai' style was absent from the book. Fischer calls the novel the pinnacle of elegant style. According to Szirtes, the writer would never have given his consent to his prose being translated not directly from Hungarian but via the German: he gave his life for the Hungarian language, this was not the success he would have desired.

George Walden described the work and its author as a rediscovered lost classic. He found the book astonishingly original - this is the reason he gives for its success in England. Anna Shapiro regards it as a brilliant study of friendship, Carole Angier see it as an introduction to ideas of honour and duty in an old world. The latter adds that it is a masterpiece, and that she awaits the remaining nineteen of his works.

This is enough to show that a genuine cult developed around the novel and its author wherever it was published. And we might add something to this. Milos Forman planned a film version of Embers, though it now seems that this will not be realized.

The theatrical version of the novel was hugely successful in Vienna and Berlin. Klaus-Maria Brandauer's readings (of The Mutineers) were an unparalleled success in most European cities.

Government heads also read Márai's work. The Italian president took this book with him on holiday in 1998. Vaclav Klaus, the former Czech prime minister told the publisher Bertelsmann that "I read the Hungarians, like the whole of Europe."And the then Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán gave Tony Blair a copy of the book.

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