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thinking, for a moment, about their differences. That alone is a mark of his greatness. The unclassifiable character of his style, of his vision, of his very Hungarianness is more than the mark of an eccentric talent: the talent exists not because it is eccentric, and the eccentricity is remarkable not because it is talented. Like a Shakespeare or a Dante or a Goethe in their very different ways, Krúdy is a genius.
    But then even a genius cannot be separated entirely from his place and time. Krúdy belongs to Hungary; and he belongs to the twentieth century. He is a modern writer—though there may be plenty of problems with that overused adjective. (The time may come when we, completely contrary to the still accepted idea, will recognize the works of French Impressionists not as breaking away from representational art but as its culmination.) The words “impressionism” or “symbolism” would have meant nothing to Gyula Krúdy. Nor was he a “subjectivist” writer. But within his capacity to see and to describe people (and places) beyond the constraints of mechanical time, to understand the confluences of dreaming and wakefulness, of consciousness and unconsciousness (
not
sub-consciousness!), of the ideal with the real (and
not
with the material!) we may detect elements of those recognitions that appear in the works of such different artists and thinkers and composers as Bergson, or Mallarmé, or Debussy and Ravel, or Proust (with whom he has been often compared, though the French prose writers closer to his style are Alain-Fournier and Valéry Larbaud), or even—perhaps—of Virginia Woolf (with whom otherwise he had nothing in common). Krúdy, in sum, is one of the greats of European literature of the twentieth century.
    This brings me, in conclusion, to the last problem, which is that of the Magyar language—and, consequently, to the enormous difficulties of Krúdy’s translatability. “Everything suffers from a translation, except a bishop,” wrote Trollope in dear old Victorian England. Yes, and this is especially true of works from the Hungarian—but not only because of the already-mentioned uniqueness of the Magyar language, and the unrelatedness of the small Hungarian nation to the great linguistic families of Europe. Nor is the main problem—though problem it is—inherent in Krúdy’s prosody and vocabulary which are earthy and ethereal at the same time, sometimes within the same sentence. Krúdy is a
deeply
Hungarian writer. That quality has nothing to do with nationalism (the mistaken belief of many a populist), though it has much to do with the older, more traditional virtues of patriotism. His prose is poetic, and profoundly national, soaked with history, with images, associations, including not only words but rhythms recognizable only to Hungarians, and among them only to those whose imaginative antennae naturally vibrate not only with such words and their sounds but with what those descriptions historically—yes, historically—represent.
    That is why his translations require unusual talents. “
How can a foreign reader understand
...?” From that passage by Cs. Szabó with which I ended “The Sound of a Cello” I left out his last two sentences:
Hopeless. Hopeless.
Still...go ahead and try, my friends.
    Well, Mr. John Bátki has tried. And largely succeeded.
    â€”JOHN LUKACS

Sunflower

1. The Touchable Eveline
    The young miss lay abed reading a novel by the light of the candelabra. She heard faint creaks from another part of the townhouse: was someone walking in a remote room? She lowered her book and listened. The hands of the clock were creeping up on midnight like some soul climbing a rock face.
    Miss Eveline at age twenty had already more or less got over mourning for her first love, except for the occasional recollection, whooshing by like a gull on the north wind, of a young man who had