László Krasznahorkai, world author (II.)

networks and institutions of world-literary circulation in the 21st century

This is the second of three posts about Krasznahorkai, written in anticipation of an exhibition that will celebrate his work. The exhibition is curated by Zsófia Júlia Szilágyi (who kindly helped us with some suggestions), and is scheduled to open at the Ferenczi Múzeumi Centrum in Szentendre, Hungary in June—so any Krasznahorkai fans traveling in that part of the world this summer should consider going on a day-trip to Szentendre, a pretty town on the Danube, easily reachable from Budapest by suburban rail. We were also motivated by seeing the display table at East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, CA sometime late in January. Opinions our own.

Check out the first post if you have not seen it yet, and here is the last installment.

What is a world author in the 21st century? How do a writer’s books circulate to make her world-literary? Or maybe: how does a writer need to circulate in order for his books to be world-literary? We chose the books of László Krasznahorkai to look into this question.

Our name is legion, for we are many. But right now… O Master! we are seven. Homer has been chased to the left corner of the picture. Photo courtesy of Leigh Atkins of East Bay Booksellers.

In our previous post, we used our data to glance at translation flows in the abstract: into what languages, in what order have Krasznahorkai’s books been translated. There, we illustrated their circulation by plotting how each book was translated into various languages. Below, a different chart, organized not by work but by language. Here, each little square represents a new translation, and the thickness of the blue line reflects the total number of book-length translations into that language at any given moment. The number to the right is the number of translations up until 2024. The unit we are counting is not without its ambiguities: some shorter works may appear in standalone volumes in one language, and in multi-work collections in another. This difference in packaging partly accounts for the difference between German and English totals.

The chart reveals the phases of how Krasznahorkai’s linguistic reach has expanded. For a good decade, there is the steady stream of German translations. Krasznahorkai then starts to appear in English and French, and shortly after the regular publication of his works in Spanish also begins, alongside Czech, Polish, as well as in a couple of languages where he doesn’t seem to take off. After multiple translations not only into German but also into French, English, and Spanish, in the 2010s there is an explosion of translations into 26 new languages—12 new languages between 2011-2015, and another 14 between 2016-2020.

In this post, we look at some of the specific institutional and other factors that may have helped propel the world-literary circulation of Krasznahorkai’s books.

The Frankfurt Book Fair, 1999

War and War appeared in Hungarian and German in the same year, in 1999. That year, Hungary was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt book fair, a major institution of the world literary market. In the 1990s, being the guest of honor could make a huge difference to the visibility of the writers of a smaller language—the 1993 Dutch/Flemish program for example has long been seen as transformative of the reception of that literature. The Hungarian government made a (sometimes controversial) effort to promote works with at least some perceived potential for critical and commercial success. Krasznahorkai’s first three books¹ having come out in German translation already, his forthcoming third novel was an obvious candidate for inclusion in the official list of titles. The novel was so new that an October 1998 article by the government commissioner György Dalos in the newspaper Népszabadság still lists it as “Novel”—the Hungarian title had not yet been finalized, although the book was forthcoming for the book fair that was to open in a year.

The Frankfurt fair continues to be of importance for making world-literary careers, and Krasznahorkai continues to be involved: he was the guest of honor of the Hungarian national pavilion at the 2007 fair, an arrangement clearly seen as beneficial to both parties.

Béla Tarr’s movies

Four new translations of Sátántangó between 2000-2004 (French, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish) may partly have been prompted by the 1999 Frankfurt fair, but the impact of the cinema of Béla Tarr cannot be overlooked, either: his truly hard core, 7.5-hour arthouse movie based on Sátántangó was released in 1994.

Movie poster from somewhere on the internet

The collaboration of the two auteurs, which extended over 5 films, including 2 adaptations of novels by Krasznahorkai, appears to have been based on shared sensibilities. In our first post, we identified the post-1970s downturn as the context of origin of Krasznahorkai’s art. Tarr’s cinema responds to the same experience: his early work, the movies he made before he would have started working with Krasznahorkai, are harrowing representations of the bitter, destructive hopelessness of the late 1970s-1980s. (Criterion has his first feature, Family nest. Check it out, you will see what we mean.) The first collaboration with Krasznahorkai, Damnation (1988) decidedly shifts Tarr’s cinema away from the vestiges of documentary realism and towards a stylized and universalized vision of the same misery. The shooting of Sátántangó took years not least because they needed the weather to be miserable and they needed the trees to not have leaves on them. The result is mesmerizing.

J. Hoberman opened his admiring review of the movie in ArtForum saying “Given that it’s an undistributable 7 1/2 hours long, you can thank your local film festival (or not) for an opportunity to see Satantango, Bela Tarr's bleakly comic allegory of social disintegration on the muddy Hungarian puszta.” In the celluloid era, in addition ot the difficulty of creating 8-hour slots in the schedule, 50+ reels had to be shipped to a theater. Little surprise, therefore, that in the 1990s, the circulation of Sátántangó was limited to festivals and occasional screenings. A hard to get set of DVDs did not do much to improve the situation. In spite of its “legendary aura” and the unanimous critical praise, it could not do much to help promote the novel it was based on.

At 2 1/2 hours, the 2000 Werckmeister harmonies is of much more manageable length. Partly because of that, partly because of the critical success of Sátántangó, it was also better distributed (it was showing at Anthology and at MoMA in NYC in 2001, and was in theaters in France in 2003), and was also reviewed in major newspapers. At the time of its release, The Melancholy of Resistance, the novel on which the movie is based, was already available not only in German, but also in English. The movie sent audiences looking for the book, just as the book may have encouraged some readers to seek out the movie when it was released. (As it turns out, Julianne Werlin and Thomas Brown were among these people learning about Krasznahorkai from the 2000 movie. Anecdotal evidence confirms the conditions of possibility.)

After the novel Satantango appeared in English in 2012, and Krasznahorkai’s name became something of a fetish of literary high seriousness, the movie Satantango also had its second chance. It was released in a 4K restoration that arrived at art houses worldwide 2019.² The long takes and the long sentences once again served as advertisements for one another. Film at Lincoln Center in New York City does not usually sell movie-related merch, but bright red copies of Satantango were available at the entrance when the film was showing there in October and December 2019.

On the cover of the German pocketbook edition: a frame from the movie.

The connection with Béla Tarr is only the most important and best-known instance of Krasznahorkai’s powerful personal literary and artistic network. His collaborations with the artist Max Neumann as well as with the musicians Eli Keszler and Miklós Szilveszter are among the latest in his series of efforts to enmesh his writing in a web of high-cultural production. Such ties also helped catapult Krasznahorkai into the stratosphere of cultural celebrity. When he first came to New York, he could count on Allen Ginsberg’s friendship and also his apartment—itself a hub of literary life. A couple of years later, Susan Sontag blurbed his first English-language book. And he is still friends with Patti Smith—just google them.³

Residencies

Residency programs, fellowships, invitations to readings, prizes, and other honors and events are the institutional aspect of the economy of authorial prestige that personal networks also contribute to.

Krasznahorkai’s first translated book. His sartorial style has changed quite a bit since this 1988 cover photo…

In addition to helping them build their prestige and their literary network, residencies can also leave their mark on an author’s published output in more direct ways, and Krasznahorkai is a case in point. His first foreign-language publication in book form—the 1988 translation of Kegyelmi viszonyok by Hans Skirecki, one of the most prolific translators from Hungarian into German in the last third of the 20th century—was the outcome of an 1987-1988 DAAD (German Academic Exchange) residency in West-Berlin. It appeared in the book series linked to the residency program, a publication intended to introduce writers to the German market.

International residencies are locations where the writing of an original work (even before it would be translated), and also the author herself is caught up in world-literary circulation. Such institutional setting often also prompts translations. While German has been the first target language for Krasznahorkai’s novel-length publications since the very beginning, residencies in other countries made sure that some of his shorter, occasional works have first come out in English or Croatian, a couple of them even before the Hungarian original.

Krasznahorkai is looking out the window of NYPL. Ornan Rotem’s photo on the cover of The Manhattan Project.

From an American perspective, the most obvious instance is Krasznahorkai’s time in New York in the mid-2010s. In 2014, he spent a semester as a writer in residence at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. Then in 2015-2016, he was a recipient of Cullmann Center fellowship at the New York Public Library, where he worked not only on Spadework for a Palace (a somewhat slapdash monolog by a librarian named “herman melvill” who works at NYPL until he doesn’t), but also on The Manhattan Project, a literary coffee table book lavishly illustrated with photos by Ornan Rotem of a black-and-white Krasznahorkai contemplating the more photogenic parts of New York under gloomy skies. The Manhattan Project directly reflects on the fellowship experience and on Krasznahorkai’s time in New York, the experiences that gave rise to Spadework, including the nuisance of having to actually be in residence during your residency at an institution... The Manhattan Project appeared in English in 2017, before the 2018 publication of the Hungarian original.

After wrapping up his stay in New York in May 2016, in the fall Krasznahorkai took off for Dubrovnik, Korčula, Mljet, and Split in Croatia, taking up a very mobile residency with MaMa / Multimedialnij Institut, a veritable Odyssey appropriate to working on a collaborative project with the painter Max Neumann called Chasing Homer. Chasing Homer is set in the locations Krasznahorkai visited during this time, and was published in the Croatian translation of Viktorija Šantić in 2019, before the publication of the Hungarian original later that year. A product of a residency, a collaborative work that is published as a print and digital hybrid—text and images in print, accompanying music via QR codes on line—and one whose American edition uses the design of the Hungarian original by József Pintér for Magvető Publishing House (including not only the typography and layout of the text but also the binding and the flyleaf patterned with the logo of the Hungarian publisher, the double accent from the last syllable of Magvető), this little book is a perfect emblem of how Krasznahorkai tends to engage in a thoroughly networked world-literary performance.

The publication of Spadework, Manhattan Project, and Chasing Homer register the global circulation not just of the works but also of the writer. These short texts appeared in subsidized editions whose main function is to embody the autonomous, non-commercial, patronage- and prestige-based dimension of literary production.

Krasznahorkai is obviously a master of circulation, a global intellectual living now in Berlin, now in Trieste, now in a village in Hungary. The ease and success with which he moves around is also registered by his more recent novels, in how they imagine the relationship between center and periphery, in how they imagine the characters who connect center and periphery through their writing or through their actual presence. The shifts of emphasis in this what our earlier post suggested was the matrix of his major novels would probably be best explored in the context of Krasznahorkai’s own rise to world authorship.

The (semi)peripheral worlds his best novels so powerfully represent as (semi)peripheries, that is, as provinces that are controlled by processes centered elsewhere, are parts and products of the neoliberal world order which so spectacularly and emblematically manifests itself in the phenomenon of world authorship. That the global mobility of world authors and their books is sustained by a stratified global economy is perhaps best illustrated by how books sold in metropolitan centers are frequently produced—edited, typeset, and printed—in low-wage locations. To the extent life in the periphery in Krasznahorkai’s novels is invested with meaning and dignity, it is through writing and authors that circulate or hope to do so.

Krasznahorkai’s novels, in other words, resolve the tensions of the world system through fantasies of world authorship.

In our third post, we are going to look at the canon of Krasznahorkai’s individual works, and what the data about their world-literary circulation may suggest about them.

1. The short story collection Gnadenverhältnisse (1988, Kegyelmi viszonyok), as well as Satanstango (1990) and Melancholie des Widerstands (1992).

2. This is pretty vague: we know it was in theatres in the US and France in 2019.

3. In interviews, he has the habit of casually mentioning other famous authors and artists he knows or is friends with, even if the personal connection ends up not being relevant to the point he is making about them—from this one, for example, we learn that he was “somewhat acquainted with” Thomas Bernhard, and that he “met” the composer György Ligeti.