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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

He turned up in various German towns, in Frankfurt, then in Berlin, He studied, but thought it less important than seeing, reading, gaining experience. He would write about his experiences in the dailies.

It was because he was so widely read by this time that he was the first to translate Franz Kafka's short stories into Hungarian in 1920, He remained in German territory until 1923, during which time he published several books, some of which are today only known as fragments or even as titles. His 1923 memoir A few years in Berlin conjures up these wild and disturbed years.

"Nobody loved me and I loved noone...During those four years in Berlin everyone around me tried to live off me...with a certain alienated satisfaction I note that for five months I alone supported a Baptist missionary who arrived from Tunis without any trousers."

Máraí continued to travel after Germany, settling in Germany. "We planned to spend three weeks in Paris. But then we stayed for six years... We lived in the most abject, disgusting poverty," he writes in his memoires. (Hans Castorp in Mann's The Magic Mountain plans to stay for three weeks - but remains for seven years...) On 17 April 1923 he married Lola at a registry office in Budapest, before heading back to Paris. "We were the first hippies, we didn't have a wedding," he writes in his last diary. (Their church wedding only took place in 1936, perhaps in order to protect his wife, who was of Jewish background, from the ever more visible dangers of fascism.)

Meanwhile, he was publishing increasingly often in the Budapest papers - more than two thousand five hundred of his articles appeared. He reported on criminal trials, sport matches. He visits thermal baths, and writes literary accounts of the most everyday happenings. He tries to convert his readers to his point of view. At a murder trial, for example, he describes not the speeches ringing out in the chamber, but concentrates on the murderer to the very end, describing his hands as if they were the tools of fate.

His first novel was published in Vienna in 1924. The Butcher, like all volumes published before this, was later omitted from his official list of works. Perhaps he wanted to emphasise his works from that period.

His Middle East visit in 1925 led to the book In the steps of God. published in 1927. Ostensibly a piece of travel writing, the book aims to discover the culture and thinking of several millennia in the depths of excavations. A passage he wrote in 1926 well describes the journeying he undertook in this first period.

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