Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)
Márai's secret
One particularly interesting passage in the novel is where Márai returns to one of his perennial themes - the role of the writer. Did this happen after 1998 with his greatest success, Embers? "At least once, writers, worried adventurers of the spirit will make thirty countries into Europe, against the will of all officialdom, it will be hard!" The first of Máraí's works to be translated into English was A Memoir of Hungary, published in Albert Tezla's translation in 1996. The work discusses the period immediately before he emigrated. The book ends when the author finally leaves Hungary. It was not until 2002 that another of his books appeared in English, but some of his poems and short stories appeared very early on in English. In 1934 in london the book Modern Magyar Lyrics was published, in which Barna Balogh's translation of his poem Stars featured. Two years later a short story appeared in another anthology. The novella The Diver featured in a collection entitled Hungária: An Anthology of Short Stories by Cotemporary Hungarian Authors, The book had a foreword by Alexander Korda and was jointly published in London and Budapest by Nicholson-Watson and Athenaeum Kiadó. Strangely, Máraí could be seen on British television as well. The Blood of San Gennaro was adapted and shown on television as The Blood of St Januarius, which was reviewed in the Daily Telegraph. The most recently published work is Casanova in Bolzano, first written in 1940. The writer considered this work to occupy a crucial place in his oeuvre. In his essay The Writer and his Theme he answers several of our questions. "There are three books for which 1 have been preparing throughout my life - from my childhood, from when I first formed thoughts. The Mutineers, The Jealous, and Casanova in Bolzano. Everything else I wrote in between, to put off tasks for which I did not feel ready... And then the moment comes when it is no longer possible to delay. All great tasks of our life have something of forced labour about them. And I have to write the theme, which is about our lives. It is this imperative that gives the work its honesty. I am writing the final pages of the book which occupied eight months of my life, my days and nights. After so much time everyone hates what he is working on, anyone would have had quite enough. But at night, in a drawer, I find the first drafts of the work - a one-act play from nineteen years before. I wrote it in Berlin, knowing neither Hugarian nor German well. A few torn-out pages from a notebook, eight years before, written in London. Both fragments try to capture the same idea: the subject of my book, which I am finally finishing after nineteen and eight years of preparation and reluctance. I forgot these notes and experiments whilst doing my work. In the moment of execution, the theme seemed fresh and new: it seduced me. And now / see that I had examined just the same material, nineteen years ago, l collected notes for it eight years ago, and then I always escaped, because I wasn't sufficiently sure of myself. 63
